Education is not supposed to hurt

When the Mossbourne safeguarding review – the Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review into Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy landed, the first feeling in our office was relief.

Relief that the patterns so many young people, families and staff have been describing for years were finally being named in an official document. Relief that someone with Sir Alan Wood’s weight in the system, and the panel alongside him, had listened closely enough and written it down. We are genuinely grateful for that work.

One of our team put it perfectly after reading it:

“It made me feel like we’re not small and dumb.”

If you’re part of a small organisation or a lone voice in a school, you’ll know that feeling. You see the harm. You hear the stories. You try to speak up. And the system, with all its acronyms and authority, has a way of making you feel like you’re the one who’s not smart enough to understand, as if abuse and academic success are inseparable and you’re naïve for questioning it.

So yes, we feel strangely affirmed by this report. Much of what appears here echoes what we set out in An Argument for Possibility, our April 2025 report on Hackney’s “success story” and the ideology behind it.

But we also wish this review did not exist. Its pages are full of fear, humiliation and exclusion, justified in the name of “high standards”.

And while the first feeling was relief, the second was worry: that people would read the Mossbourne safeguarding review as a story about one school in Hackney. It is absolutely not just about Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy.

If other schools read this and think “thank goodness that’s not us”, they have already missed the point. As Nelson Mandela reminded us, we need to put the system on trial, not just the individuals.

This is not an “I told you so” moment. Young people, families and staff have been telling these truths for years. Our job is to do more than listen. It is our job to act.

If we’d call it abuse at home, we can’t call it “high expectations” at school

The review describes an “atmosphere of fear”: adults screaming at children, “abusive shouting” by senior staff, pupils and parents left “in shock”, and other children intimidated just by watching it happen.

Across the UK, major organisations from Barnardo’s and NSPCC to SafeLives and Women’s Aid are aligned: children who see, hear or live with domestic abuse are recognised as victims of abuse in their own right, not bystanders. Children who repeatedly witness shouting, threats and coercive control are understood as harmed, even if they are not the one being shouted at.

So the idea that this kind of behaviour only affects “a small group” of children cannot stand. Creating an atmosphere of fear, you are doing something to every child who walks through the door.

If we have corridors where children are scared of adults.
If we have sanctions that humiliate.
If children with trauma histories are routinely re-triggered by the people meant to protect them.

Then we are not just “being strict”. We are a safeguarding risk to all children.

Strictness is boundaries without care. Safeguarding is boundaries with care, dignity and context.

The house: how national policy gets weaponised in the classroom

In our training, we use a house to describe the four layers of inequity – and we saw all four play out in this review.

• Bathroom – personal: the private beliefs and biases about “kids like these”.
  
• Dining room – interpersonal: how those beliefs show up in interactions, praise and punishment.
  
• Kitchen – institutional: the behaviour policies, timetables, data cycles and routines that run the school.
  
• Utilities – structural: DfE guidance, Ofsted, funding, political narratives – the wiring under the floorboards.
  

The MVPA review is a tour of that house.

• The utilities: Ofsted’s growing emphasis on behaviour in its inspection framework “further incentivised schools to adopt stricter policies”. National narratives reward visible control, not relational safety.
  
• The kitchen: a Federation-level behaviour policy built on “no excuses”, extreme sanctions, internal units and alternative provision that quietly remove children from view – often the same groups, again and again.
  
• The dining room: everyday interactions where a child with an EHCP is told to be shouted at, where children are too scared to ask for the toilet, where Black pupils are far more likely than their White peers to experience the harshest punishments.
  

By the time you get to the individual adult–pupil encounter, the meal is already cooked.

It is no surprise that a senior leader could “totally see a place” where a child would be sanctioned for turning around to look at the clock, dropping something on the floor, or looking out of the window. Ofsted wrote the recipe. The trust turned up the heat. Senior leaders add just one more clove of garlic?  in the moment. And children live with the indigestion,  which, predictably, is not shared equally.

“Inner-city children” and the low bar hiding under “high standards”

The review talks about the school being “highly aspirational” and notes that many parents support the strict discipline to “keep children safe from external risks like crime and gangs”.

Read that again. It is the classic move:

These children are close to danger, so anything that looks ordered must be good for them.

Once “inner-city children” are framed as naturally nearer to violence and crime, almost any practice can be spun as protective:

• shouting becomes “healthy fear”
  
• humiliation becomes “what they need to survive”
  
• disproportionate punishment for Black and Global Majority young people becomes “regrettable but necessary”.
  

The bar has already been lowered by the stereotype. And again, that is not unique to one school in Hackney. It is baked into how we talk about “challenging cohorts” and “difficult intakes” across the system.

We are not ignoring the lived reality of risk in many young people’s lives. But we see affirmation, community and critical thinking as preventive principles for safety and justice for all young people, not as luxuries that come after control.

An invitation, not an “I told you so”

When we published An Argument for Possibility earlier this year, we were trying to name a pattern many people already felt in their bones: that something is deeply wrong with a model of schooling that needs fear, exclusion and control in order to function.

This new Mossbourne safeguarding review does not make us “right”. It makes the urgency harder to ignore.

If this report has left you unsettled, angry, or unsure what to do next, here is a starting point:

• Read An Argument for Possibility alongside the MVPA review.
  
• Use the house metaphor with your team to map bathroom, dining room, kitchen and utilities in your own setting.
  
• Treat children who are “collateral damage” not as outliers, but as the truth-tellers of your system.
  

Not because Class 13 has the blueprint. We are learning too. And we share your belief that education can be done without abuse.