School shaming is unfair. Part 1

Too many people will attack schools on the basis of flimsy evidence. Those who defend schools are usually the next target.

What is school shaming?

I’ve written a lot about school shaming.¹ This is when accusations about a school made on social media, or in the traditional media, lead to many people publicly denouncing that school. To some extent, school shaming is in the eye of the beholder. However, once thousands of people are vituperatively attacking a school online, or once school staff are receiving abusive messages and phone calls, it is fair to say that school shaming has occurred. I don’t use the term school shaming to describe all criticism of schools. I don’t apply it to criticism of schools that comes through official channels.² Of course, I may be wrong about a particular case. A local paper’s silly allegations might only generate amusement, or sympathy for the school being accused.³ However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t clear-cut cases of school shaming where schools are subjected to unbelievable levels of abuse. See these old blog posts for details:

Blog Series: What’s it like for a school to be shamed? Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

School shaming is defended by attacking the motives of those who question it

Those who take part in school shaming may claim that they are “making legitimate criticisms” or that school shaming is a form of public accountability. However, these arguments seem very unconvincing when most of what is happening is abuse and denunciation. Public shaming is a mass-participation event on social media, and those who partake in this particular sport will attack anyone who gets in their way. This is what happens when you dare question the righteousness of a social media witch hunt:

1. You will be accused of “defending”, or siding with, people who have done something terrible, even though the whole point of your criticism is that nobody knows for certain they have done that terrible thing. In the case of schools, this means that any teacher who questions claims that a school did something wrong, will probably find it implied or stated that they too committed the same misdeed.

2. You will be accused of saying that no one ever commits the alleged wrongdoing. You may be accused of saying that people like those being targeted never do anything wrong, or should never be criticised. If you suggest school shaming is bad, you may even find people sharing stories about terrible abuse in schools and implying, or claiming, that you would be on the side of the abusers.

3. You will be accused of being prejudiced against a broad class of people who intersect with those making the allegations. So, if there are accusations about schools, you will be accused of hating children, parents, or some subset of children or parents.⁴

The reputational risks of defending a shamed school

I cannot overstate the willingness of school shamers to attack those who oppose them. One activist (a Canadian working in a private school in Europe who, nevertheless, loved denouncing state schools in England) wrote a blog post defending school shaming⁵ in which he named me as the originator of the term. He claimed:

Recently, the phrase ‘school shaming’ has gained increasing currency among neotraditionalist reactionaries on Twitter in an attempt to restrict the public dialog about education.

He went on to link opponents of school shaming to the “alt-right” (a term that, at the time, was used to refer to the online far right in the US) and claimed that we:

…have invented the concept of ‘school shaming’ to make … reactionary politics seem, well, less reactionary.

This blog post was then promoted in a column in Schools Week (a national education publication in the UK). This, in turn, was then shared and defended by Mary Boustead, who was then the leader of England’s largest education union, and has now been appointed as a Labour peer.⁶

The biggest deterrent to defending shamed schools is the possibility that a school may have done something wrong. In this situation, a well-intentioned call for schools to be treated fairly, and for people not to publicise unsubstantiated complaints, might be interpreted later as a call to let the guilty off the hook. All of this makes it potentially fraught for people to speak up about school shaming, particularly when the mob seeking to destroy a school is large and extremely vengeful.

In Part 2, I will speak up about school shaming.

1. The easiest way to find my past writing about school shaming is to use this search on my old blog site.

2. I wouldn’t use the term school shaming to describe a school criticised by Ofsted or investigated by the police.

3. Here are a some stories that seemed like school shaming at the time, but may have been so silly that they were ultimately harmless:

1. “East Hull mum pulls son out of school after row with head teacher over a tuna sandwich”. This story was later revealed to be false. Other outlets referred to this as the “tuna sandwich long poo row”, making it considerably more memorable.

2. “Cottenham headteacher Stuart Lock announced his resignation... and some parents aren't sad about it”. This one was much nastier, but it’s hard to take seriously criticism that includes the complaint that “schools are always very heteronormative”.

3. “The wokest schools in Britain: Critical race theory for nine-year-olds, bans on the 'sexist' phrase 'boys and girls' and lessons closed by spiders are among classroom controversies targeted in ban on 'left-wing brainwashing'“. Somehow this Daily Mail article managed to condemn a school for “wokeness” because it closed in response to a spider infestation.

4. These subsets are often identified by particular characteristics. So, for example, you might be accused of hating children with SEND, or parents who are black.

5. The two schools named in his post as deserving to be shamed are now the two highest-performing state schools in England.

6. Some of this exchange has since been deleted, but I think the gist is still clear.