Sir Alan Wood’s Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review into Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy issues a stark warning to our education system:
“Academic excellence that traumatises some pupils is not true excellence; discipline through fear is not preparing young people for life as confident, independent adults”.
Simply put, schools that don’t work to foster a strong sense of belonging and ambition in each and every pupil are setting up children to fail.
The review describes an environment where many children thrived and achieved excellent outcomes, but that this “success has been achieved at too high a cost for some pupils” through a “culture that prioritises compliance and control above all else.”
The Review’s findings will resonate painfully with too many parents across the country whose children have had similar experiences.
To make sure things are radically different in the future, the upcoming Schools White Paper must set out concrete proposals for how education will be rebalanced so that success for some does not come at the expense of others.
This needs to include new expectations about inclusion, with mechanisms of oversight, and a new partnership between schools and parents. It must also provide a clear message that the Secretary of State will intervene directly where there are systematic failures, including the ultimate sanction of removing a governing body's ability to run schools.
This will underpin a new model of inclusion by design where, as Sir Alan Wood puts it, “A school's true measure of success is how it treats its most vulnerable pupils - those with disabilities, struggling with mental health, who find conformity difficult, whose families lack social capital to advocate.”
This approach is key to delivering the government's mission to help every pupil to achieve and thrive at school, so every single child has the best start in life.