School shaming is unfair. Part 4
How bad journalism makes everything worse.
The story so far
I have been looking at school shaming. This is when allegations made about a school on social media, or in traditional media, result in many people publicly denouncing that school.
In Part 1, I talked about how those who question school shaming are attacked online.
In Part 2, I described the unfair nature of school shaming. I also described how common it is for teachers to experience false or unfair accusations.
In part 3, I discussed how journalists cause harm to schools by 1) failing to corroborate claims about schools and 2) harvesting complaints.
In this post, I will look at two other ways in which journalists cause, or encourage, school shaming. I will give more detailed examples than in the previous post, as I don’t think I’ve written about these particular types of bad journalism before.
3) Sanewashing
According to Wikipedia:1
Sanewashing is the act of minimizing the perceived radical aspects of a person or idea in order to make them appear more acceptable to a wider audience.
Many school shaming campaigns on social media are completely unhinged. However, some journalists will report on these claims by carefully editing out the most ridiculous claims to make a school’s critics seem reasonable. The example that brought this to my attention was the campaign against Holland Park School in 2021. Allegations against the school from former students were collected on social media, and, alongside more serious complaints, they included grievances such as:
A cultural bias shaped by a penchant for quintessential post-war Britishness.
Several former students recall pupils being sent home over minor uniform infractions such as white socks.
Microaggressions that amass to form a stifling and toxic learning environment
Several former students recall a discrepancy between the canteen capacity and the student population, as well as an absence of water fountains.
An open letter criticising the school included these trivial or nonsensical allegations, suggesting that the authors were happy with any complaint as long as it was hostile to the school’s leaders. However, when a journalist (who was also an anti-academy activist) reported on the letter in the Guardian, all the silliest complaints were absent. Anyone reading the story would think the open letter was highly credible whistleblowing on a genuine scandal. Anyone reading the source material would realise that those writing the open letter were harvesting complaints from social media, and repeating them regardless of credibility or common sense. I don’t mean to suggest that there were no credible complaints about the school. The Holland Park story is complicated and is one that I would hope to blog about at some point in the future.2 However, this kind of reporting seems unfair because it makes complaints against a school seem more credible than they would be if reported in context.
4) Acting as a mouthpiece for activists
One of the reasons for “sanewashing” a campaign against a school, is that the journalists involved are sympathetic to those campaigning against the school. It is unlikely that the Guardian would have reported on Holland Park in the way it did, if the author of the report hadn’t wholeheartedly supported the campaigners.
Another recent example of a journalist supporting a campaign against a school can be found in the Observer. A school-shaming story about Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy attributed complaints about the school to “parents”, “a number of parents” and a “group of parents and former teachers”. It implies that this is who is responsible for “a dossier of complaints” about the school.3 Not only does the story side entirely with this group, but there are remarkably few details about their agenda. A more balanced account of the controversy, in a BBC report, identifies the group that compiled the dossier of complaints as “Educating Hackney”.4
The website of this group shows clearly they have a political agenda. This would have been even clearer if they had stuck to the original name of the website: “noneedtoexclude.co.uk”.5 They are not just concerned parents at the one school, they are a group campaigning against school discipline across Hackney. When it first appeared, the website told us:
Hackney could lead the way in addressing harsh, inflexible practice that can prevent schools being inclusive.
There is a new push from government for schools to be more welcoming and inclusive, particularly for children with SEND or neurodiversity.
Some schools are actively driving these children away, and there is evidence of this in Hackney. A narrow focus on exam results can be used to justify draconian discipline that seriously impacts the wellbeing of the very children that need more help.
A link between this and the rise in exclusions, absenteeism, home-schooling and teen mental-health issues seems likely. Many children who suffer remain in school or are removed by parents as a last resort, and this needs to be better understood.
Discipline policies should be reviewed, but more important is to address the lack of accountability, and the silencing of children and families, that can allow harmful practice to continue in any school.
We are calling on the council to work, with others, to address the issues above, informed by a safeguarding review as a starting point.
Educating Hackney collected complaints about school discipline for all Hackney schools with the explicit intention of passing it on to the media.
Add your support
“I support the call for Hackney Council to address harsh, inflexible practice that can impact children’s wellbeing”
I am a: (tick all that apply)(required)
Parent / carer of a student / ex-student at a Hackney school
Student / ex-student at a Hackney school
Teacher / ex-teacher at a Hackney school
Other / rather not say
Would you have adverse experience to share as part of an official review? (required)
Yes, there are adverse experiences I may want to share and would be happy to be given more information.
No
Optionally, outline your experience
Could you help raise public awareness of the issues? (required)
I may be willing to speak to the press or broadcast media in confidence. I am happy for Educating Hackney to contact me to explore this.
No
It’s unusual for any campaign group to be looking for complaints about all schools in a Local Authority in this way. An insight into their motives comes in a tweet from Hackney’s Independent Socialist Group. The tweet claimed that “we launched the Educating Hackney campaign”.6 Hackney’s Independent Socialist Group is a group of former Labour councillors. It appears they resigned from the Labour Party to use their position on Hackney council to campaign against Israel and in support of Hackney’s leftwing MP Diane Abbott, who was suspended from the Labour Party over antisemitic remarks.7 Somehow, school discipline has become a focus for the campaigning of this far-left group.
It appears the Observer is reporting complaints collected or made by political activists for a specific campaigning purpose, without mentioning the nature of the political group involved or asking any questions about the reliability of their information. Soon, it became clear that there was no shortage of parents who completely rejected the activists’ claims. Not for the first time8, I find myself disappointed with the Observer’s education coverage.
To be continued…
In part 5, I will look at other ways in which shoddy journalism can undermine schools.
Wikipedia only seems to have recognised this term since it was applied to defenders of Donald Trump. I have been aware of the term since I saw it used to describe the commentary of those who explained away calls to “defund the police”.
The school’s leaders were forced out, and the trust that took over treated the complaints about the old regime as credible. They wrote a very one-sided report that repeated many of the criticisms in the Guardian’s article. However, the last I heard was that this had led to legal action by one of the old leadership team, who claimed the trust had libelled him in their report.
Further reports in the Observer refer to “a dossier of allegations”, and identify “parents, students and teachers” as those making the complaints:
The Observer’s story goes so far in presenting the activists’ complaints as coming from concerned parents that I did wonder if there could be two groups: one of parents and ex-teachers and another group called Educating Hackney. However, the Observer claims Andy Leary-May “is leading the group of parents and former teachers” and the BBC claims “Andy Leary-May is a leading parent behind the Educating Hackney group”. It seems that either there is only one group, or that one group is a subset of the other.
The URL redirects to Educating Hackney.
To be fair, they may not have all their facts straight. They claimed to have launched Educating Hackney a week earlier (which would be 22nd November) although the website has existed since 9th November.
The claim about Hackney’s Independent Socialist Group founding Educating Hackney was retweeted by Andy Leary-May. (See footnote 4.)
I won’t list other examples of less-than-ideal education reporting in the Observer, because this post is already over 1600 words long. They can easily be found by searching my Substack posts.