This year represents a significant anniversary for England’s education system. On September 1, 2004, New Labour’s first ‘city academy’ opened its doors. Mossbourne Community Academy, in the London borough of Hackney, was built on the site of the former Hackney Downs Grammar, which boasted Harold Pinter among its alumni but, by the 1990s, made national headlines as “Britain’s worst comprehensive”. It closed in 1995.
I declare a personal interest. I lived in Hackney in the 1990s. Hackney Downs school was near my flat. When it closed, I regularly walked past the sad-looking building and thought how fantastic it would be if somebody were to build an amazing school here. A few years later, this became a reality.
First, some context. The city academy ‘model’ was the Blair government’s radical attempt at structural reform of non-selective, comprehensive education. The political debate was, in a nutshell, whether a high deprivation/low attainment correlation was inevitable. Should this orthodoxy be challenged by putting educators in the driving seat?
Education in Hackney had already been removed from local authority control. By 2002, the not-for-profit Learning Trust was awarded a ten-year contract to manage the borough’s education, a UK first. Hackney was the place to try something new.
Mossbourne Community Academy had a lot riding on it as “the first”. The school was sponsored by the late Sir Clive Bourne, a local businessman turned philanthropist who believed passionately in the potential of Hackney’s children. The award-winning building was designed by Sir Richard Rogers; the educational philosophy and vision was very much that of the first Principal, Sir Michael Wilshaw.
Unlike the 1990s, the first cohort at Mossbourne made headlines for achieving some of the best GCSE results in England at that, or any, time. Two years later, this was repeated with A-level results. Pupils from Hackney had offers from Oxbridge and other Russell Group universities. It’s hard to comprehend the impact this had.
Some cynics put the success story down to Sir Michael’s brilliance and the money invested. Here’s the thing, though. Almost 20 years after it opened its doors, and long after he stepped down, Mossbourne continues its story of outstanding success, with the subsequent principals custodians of an incredible legacy.
I visited the school recently to see for myself, having followed the Mossbourne, and Hackney, stories with interest over the years. Over 40 per cent of Mossbourne pupils are in receipt of free school meals, yet the Progress 8 ‘value added’ score for the school is 1.23, meaning pupils will achieve at least one grade higher in each qualification at GCSE than others with similar academic starting points. Its Attainment 8 score is 63.5 per cent, the English average, 46.2 per cent. Essentially, by every performance measure, disadvantaged pupils at Mossbourne significantly outperform non-disadvantaged pupils in the rest of England (astonishingly, disadvantaged children across Hackney outperform non-disadvantaged children in the rest of England too).
