Discipline Without Accountability: The Scandal Exposed at Mossbourne

Blog 54 focuses on the abusive behaviour regime at Mossbourne and the lack of accountability of academies. We also publish Fiona Millar's contribution to the Caroline Benn Memorial event.

Beyond One School: How the Mossbourne Case Exposes the Dangers of Unchecked Academy Power

John Bolt, ex SEA General Secretary and local authority education adviser, argues the Mossbourne Safeguarding Review has serous implications for the accountability of academies and the government needs to act urgently to give local authorities effective local oversight

The devastating safeguarding report on Mossbourne Victoria Park has the potential to be a transformative moment in the development of English schools. That it has serious implications is demonstrated by the hysterical responses from the “no excuses” brigade such as Tom Bennett and Katherine Birbalsingh. As the report concludes

“The “No Excuses” model, when implemented rigidly without adequate safeguards, can become one of ‘zero tolerance” that causes serious harm to vulnerable pupils”.

The review was commissioned by the local safeguarding body. This inevitably required the focus to be on the impact of school policies and practices on vulnerable pupils. It was not its brief to consider the implications of how the school operates on the broader educational experience of its pupils. The school does of course achieve very good academic results. But that begs the wider question of how well it is actually preparing pupils for their lives beyond school. The review offers clues when it observes that:

“Discipline through fear is not preparing young people for life as confident, independent adults”.

And that

“Education’s purpose is not simply achieving high examination results, but developing confident, resilient, compassionate young people prepared for life.”

The brief of the review meant that it could not go further into these issues, but it is asking questions that should be asked across our whole system as more schools adopt similar disciplinary approaches.

Perhaps a more important question however is why these issues went unaddressed for so long. It raises the fundamental issue of accountability in our education system. The review focussed on safeguarding because that is one of the few ways in which a local authority can engage with academies. Even in this area, it is clear from the report the school did its best to delay and obstruct the investigation.

It is clear too that the trustees of the Mossbourne Federation failed to identify any of the concerns and made no real effort to hold the school to account, in the words of the report, lulled by the high academic results. It should also be noted that this school is not an outlier within this trust. On the very day that Alan Wood’s report was published, the BBC reported on two schools in Essex recently taken over by the Mossbourne trust:

“Families who spoke to the BBC described what they said was an increasingly punitive environment at Mossbourne Port Side Academy and Mossbourne Fobbing Academy in Thurrock, alleging frequent detentions for minor issues, a lack of flexibility for pupils with additional needs and poor communication from staff.

About 150 pupils have been withdrawn by their parents since the takeover, the BBC understands. Others have kept them enrolled but said they were struggling to get their concerns addressed.”

This suggests that the approach in Mossbourne Victoria Park is a policy driven by the trust as a whole not by one school.

In theory the responsibility for identifying issues lies with Ofsted. However, the last report in 2023 saw no issues and delivered an unqualified outstanding verdict. It did this despite the pupil survey results which showed that 41% of respondents would not recommend the school to others, 30% said that bullying was an issue and 29% reported that they almost never enjoy learning at the school.

And of course, Ofsted completely failed to notice any of the disciplinary practices which are in clear breach of DfE guidance and Equality Act requirements.

Why the inspection report came out as it did is hard to estimate. In response to Alan Wood’s questions, Ofsted took refuge in the claim that it raised concerns in conversations with the school – something which left no documented record and had no impact on the inspection report.

One theory could be that the school successfully hid the abusive practices for the very brief duration of the inspection. Another could be that Ofsted was driven by the reputation of the trust – founded by a previous HMCI – and by its ability to call on political and media support. Sadly, it would not be the first time that Ofsted has ignored evidence in high profile inspections.

The reality is that the evidence was there all the time. All the SEN and mental health teams had data identifying the issues. Other schools that had to pick up the effects of off rolling knew. Everyone who received complaints from parents knew. But no one had the authority to ask the serious questions because academy trusts are effectively a law unto themselves. It is suggested that this trust, perhaps more than many, resented and obstructed external scrutiny. The academy movement has of course resisted over many years the suggestion that trusts should be inspected as an entity.

There are recommendations in Alan Wood’s report for the trust and for the local authority. What are missing are recommendations for the DfE. The department has to consider whether it’s toleration of the brutal no excuses approach to behaviour management – and the continued employment of Tom Bennett as a supposed expert – can continue. And it surely has to ask itself how it could be that these issues went undetected for so long and how a media savvy MAT can operate without any effective scrutiny.

The answer to the latter question is not rocket science. There is an urgent need to re-empower local oversight of all schools. Local intelligence needs to be mobilised and used to ensure that all schools work in the best interests of all their pupils and of their local community as a whole. Leaving school accountability to the far-off department in Whitehall, to the simplistic scrutiny of data, to the self- regulation of MATs or to the unreliable Ofsted process is just not good enough.

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Completed or Defeated? - The Comprehensive Revolution 25 years on

CAROLINE BENN MEMORIAL LECTURE 2025

This year’s 25th anniversary event took the form of three women involved in campaigning for comprehensive education, Fiona Millar, Diane Reay and India Rees setting out their answers to the question above. Education Politics is publishing them all. The second is from Fiona Millar education journalist and commentator.

I would like to start by paying tribute to Caroline and Melissa Benn. I didn’t know Caroline personally, but her work has always been a great inspiration. Melissa hasn’t only been a vital campaigning partner, but also a wonderful friend to me.

In preparation for this talk, I re-read A Tribute to Caroline Benn. Education and Democracy, the book Melissa edited after Caroline’s death. In doing so I realised that what I have learned from both these formidable women is the huge benefit of combining deep principles with determined campaigning and scholarly research. So much of politics these days is performative, and there is a place for that. But to achieve real progress, simple sound bites must be paired with evidence. Happily, we have already heard important facts and research as well first-hand evidence about the reality on the ground from our other speakers tonight.

In Melissa’s book, Caroline’s husband Tony Benn wrote of the perils of being someone with a high-profile political partner, and I can relate to that. He wrote about her still ability to hold an audience rapt and her ability to cut through verbiage and be clear about what you want to say

So rather than descend into verbiage, I would like to start by saying that the very clear message from previous speakers is that comprehensive education has been a huge success. Indeed, I would say it has been the most significant and successful education reform of the last 60 years. Certainly, far more successful than anything Michael Gove, that master of performative politics, ever dreamed up

Of course there were teething problems at the start. But this movement, to which Caroline contributed so much, successfully turned the page on a hateful system that condemned most children to failure at 11 and contributed to low education standards overall. We must never lose sight of that fact.

In recent years I have become mildly obsessed with the educational backgrounds of prominent public figures. You may remember that some years back, nearly every prominent actor or Olympic athlete seemed to come from a private school. This was regularly used as a stick with which to beat state schools (and for state education read comprehensive education).

Of course, the Sutton Trust research shows us that private school alumni are still disproportionately represented in British establishment institutions. But in public life generally something very special is happening. The comprehensive generation is coming through.

The entire Cabinet was educated in state schools, and nearly all in comprehensive schools. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary all went to comprehensive schools. In addition, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Director of Public Prosecutions, even the new Lady Mayoress of London went to comprehensive schools as did major figures in the arts and popular culture such as James Graham and Dua Lipa, who went to the same school as my daughter.

And no one is seriously talking about resurrecting the grammar school idea since Theresa May’s abortive efforts to do so. Even Reform, which in one of its earlier incarnations (the UKIP party) wanted a grammar school in every town, has quietly dropped that plan albeit in favour of other questionable ideas such as a “patriotic curriculum”. So, the principle of comprehensive education is here to stay. But if comprehensive education has been such a great success, why do we always act as though it has failed?

When I was preparing these remarks, I put two questions into Chat GPT. The first was: Has comprehensive education failed? The second was: Has comprehensive education succeeded? If you weigh up both sets of answers, the balance is clearly in favour of comprehensive education being a success overall. Why? Because it is an inclusive system, it can offer a broad curriculum and opportunities to all children without segregating them into different institutions and it doesn’t condemn children as failures aged 10 or 11.

But if you are looking for reasons to see it has failed, they are all there too. There is still inequality in outcomes and a long tail of underachievement. The myth persists that comprehensive schools can only offer a “one size fits all” curriculum, dumbed down to the lowest level.

Unfortunately, too often this question about comprehensive schools is framed in terms of failure. That is partly because state schools aren’t used by people in powerful positions and particularly by people who work in the media. They have a vested self interest in talking down a system they don’t use themselves and this sets the tone for much of the rest of the public debate. It means we spend too much time on the back foot, defending our position and not enough time celebrating the huge success that comprehensive education has been.

I can think of at least two of the people on the list I presented above who were proud advocates of comprehensive education before their stellar political careers but barely mention it now. The position we haven’t quite mastered is to continually celebrate the great success comprehensive education has been while also arguing, as we do so often in schools, how we could be even better if……

So here goes…..We would be even better if we could close the current yawning gap in attainment along social class lines, which would take five hundred years to close at the current rate. We would be even better if we could reform our outdated exam system, which condemns a third of children as failures at 16. We would be even better if around a fifth of children were not persistently absent from school (up from about 10% before the pandemic) and if a third of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds were not persistently absent.

We would be even better if one in five children were not suffering from a mental health condition and if we could recruit and retain enough teachers and adequately meet the needs of all SEND children. Finally, we would be even better if we could match the funding of those pupils in the private sector where average termly fees are the same as average annual funding per pupil in state schools.

The fact that our schools still face these issues is nothing to do with comprehensive education. They are as a result of the context in which we expect our comprehensive schools to operate and a lack of political hunger to make it better.

The last time I gave the Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture was with Melissa in 2005. I went back to read our joint talk in preparation for tonight. In it I quoted a Labour MP I had recently met who was frustrated about the lack of an alternative argument to what was then a major piece of New Labour reform – trust schools and academies. These were the reforms that Michael Gove took to another level.

Unfortunately, we allowed the academies programme to become the alternative argument. Academies became the solution to the “problem” of bog-standard comprehensive education. In fact, this hugely expensive time-consuming programme did nothing at all to address the fundamental problems in our school system. In fact, it almost certainly made them worse. It has left us with a lot of comprehensive schools with different names but still facing the same issues and the sense that no more radical reform is necessary. But more reform is necessary.

I daresay everyone has reforms they would like to see enacted. But I want to kick off the discussion with a few of my preferred options. As others have said our comprehensive system is not truly comprehensive because you can’t have a real comprehensive system if some schools are able to select. Too many schools still can engineer themselves more favourable intakes than others. This hobbles the other more inclusive schools in an accountability regime that pretends all schools are the same

In 2002 the former chief education officer at ILEA, Peter Newsam, later the Chief School’s Adjudicator responsible for overseeing the School Admissions Code, wrote that there were eight different categories of school in terms of intake. These ranged from “super selective” to “sub secondary modern”, the latter almost certainly full of the poorest children. In 2003 another great educationalist Tim Brighouse, also a previous CBML lecturer, talked of the “giddyingly steep pecking order of schools”.

Since then, very little has changed apart from the fact that many of those schools are now called academies. So, the campaign to end the 11 plus and to create fair local democratically accountable admissions system is more important than ever. Labour failed to use its last huge majority to end the 11 plus and the way things are going this parliament may be the last chance to put that right

More recently, Simon Burgess from Bristol University published an important piece of academic research looking at the inequalities built into our school admissions system and examining how different policies might improve the chances of the least well-off children. Researchers looked at banding, ballots and quotas of children eligible for Free School Meals. The most effective intervention was a quota that would oblige all schools to admit 15% of children eligible for FSM. By introducing this simple quota, it was possible to give nearly all FSM children the school of their choice while distributing them across the higher performing institutions with minimal disruption to the wider system.

I consider this an elegant and relatively simple reform which could be introduced in this Parliament in conjunction with removing the right of any school to have a positive Ofsted judgement unless they are meeting a local quota for children eligible for free school meals and with SEND.

Finally, I would like to make another suggestion; our comprehensive schools rely on an exam system which requires 30 % of 16-year-olds to fail an exam that was designed for an era when all children left school at 16. They are held captive by accountability measures that incentivise unethical behaviour such as off rolling and curriculum manipulation and contribute to poor teacher recruitment and retention, reduced pupil attendance and growing mental ill-health.

Overall, I believe the recent Francis curriculum review was a missed opportunity. But it did reveal an unfortunate truth which is that English students sit between 24 and 31 hours of exams at 16. Other high performing jurisdictions benefit from far more balanced exam requirements; in Ireland it is 16 hours, New Zealand 18 hours and in Canada’s high performing Alberta children only do 10 hours of external exams.

So, our young people are doing too many exams at 16 that aren’t necessary. They should be phased out in favour of a final diploma/baccalaureate qualification at 18. This would be a qualification that every pupil could achieve at some level, which could include exam results, vocational qualifications as well as personal achievements in the arts, sport, project work and civic activity. This would broaden what we mean by a “good education”. It could make school a more joyful place to study and minimise the status divide between academic and technical routes. It would also mean we could finally talk about young people’s achievement in more than just binary pass/fail terms.

Caroline Benn’s notable work included two books, Halfway There in the 1960s and Thirty Years On in the 1990s. It is now almost sixty years on from the comprehensive revolution. We must never stop celebrating its success while campaigning for more progressive reform towards a world in which all children want to come to school and teachers don’t need to leave the profession due to stress and workload, towards a world in which desperate heads are not taking their own lives because of the school accountability system.

It is uplifting to go back to the words of one of the original founders of the comprehensive movement, Robin Pedley, who talked about school embodying “a larger and more generous attitude of mind, a common culture and happy vigorous local communities”

We are living through a time of so much division and fear of difference. A comprehensive school system, in which children from all backgrounds can walk through the same door in the morning, can be taught together and build friendships across divides, is more important than ever. It needs to be treasured, celebrated and supported.