Andy Leary-May, a parent leading Educating Hackney, comments personally on his school’s response to the Observer article of 23rd November, highlighting the Educating Hackney campaign.
“The Observer article includes the experiences of several parents and ex-teachers from Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy and identifies me as a parent at that school, and as one of the people leading this campaign.
Yesterday, the principal of the school sent a letter to all parents informing them of a likely article. This also gave a range of assertions and opinions about me, and referenced my second son’s attendance at the school.
This should not be about my family – the Observer article avoids our experience. While I understand that I am a key part of it, the story is what others have been through. I do feel, however, that I ought to have some right to reply.
The letter from the school told parents that I had declined to engage with the academy’s complaints process or to meet with the academy. In the months before removing our son, my partner and I continuously asked the school to engage with us on the issues that were impacting him, including by way of several formal complaints.
The letter talks of an offer to meet with the school leadership, mediated by senior local authority figures. This was offered, via the council, four months after we removed our son; a point after which there was nothing we wished to pursue with the school.
It is true that I reached out, briefly and courteously, to some teachers and ex-teachers. This wasn’t an easy decision, but I felt that the ends may justify the means should the experiences I was becoming aware of be found to be widespread. Some teachers shared experiences with me, some didn’t.
The letter describes a ‘vexatious campaign against the academy’.
I am not campaigning against the school. I think in many ways it is an excellent school, with a great deal of brilliant teaching from kind and caring staff. The school is proud to be different, and the levels of strictness, along with the exam results, are legendary. My first son, along with, I think, the majority of children, was generally happy there (as, I hope, my second son will be). It was only after a chronic, debilitating illness, when he needed some flexibility in order to return in his final year, that things went wrong.
Our experience left us bewildered at the unwillingness to make the simple adjustments needed, and genuinely shocked at the callous attitude from the leadership to the increasing distress this caused. We were extremely fortunate to have been in a position to put home tuition in place in the run-up to exams.
We were glad to move on, but I quickly became aware of other families whose experiences appeared to have common themes – of inflexibility and harshness in the school’s approach to a child who was struggling, of the impact this had on them, and of the powerlessness and despair parents felt when attempting to advocate for their child.
My role has simply been to try to give voice to these families, and to ask that somebody, somewhere, looks into whether this is a more widespread issue that ought to be addressed. I am doing this because I believe the answer is ‘yes’ – at a national level. I may be proved wrong.
My interest in this began only a year ago – I don’t have a strong ideology on strictness in schools, nor expertise in education. But I do believe that a basic level of empathy and humanity must come first, and that our son’s experiences, and those of many other children I have heard about, are not OK.
23rd November 2024
Educating Hackney 