Pupils at an Outwood Grange school could be “screamed at” for “minor” incidents ranging from whispering out of turn to even just coughing, Tes has been told.

Tes has been given detailed accounts of a controversial behavioural policy which executives at Outwood Grange Academies Trust call “flattening the grass”.

Former employees of Outwood Academy Danum in Doncaster have described how the multi-academy trust applied the policy when it took over the school, seemingly to “terrify” children into compliance.

Danum was formally taken over by Outwood Grange in September 2016, but the MAT was in de facto control of the school from June 2016.

A senior leader who worked at the school - and who asked not to be named - told Tes: “Each year group has an assembly, that is the first ‘flattening of the grass’. It actually starts outside the assemblies - the kids have to line up in silence ready to go in.”

“There’s people from the trust outside the assembly hall, as well as people in the assembly and if any child steps out of line they are picked on and I would say humiliated.”

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A source at another Outwood school - Outwood Academy City Fields in Wakefield - told Tes about how the hall was “mob handed with directors, subject directors, executive heads” from the MAT when rolling assemblies took place after Outwood took over last year.

The senior leader at Danum said the executives did not select children in advance to target, but rather “just indiscriminately picked on children either in the line or in the assembly”.

Children could be shouted at for a “momentary stepping out of line”. “If they whispered to the person next to them - I mean minor infringements of standing quietly in the line. It wasn’t even ‘we’re going to remind you and then bellow at you’. They were looking for it, they were looking for things to pick on.”

Humiliating

“It would have been bad enough…if children had done something naughty. But they hadn’t. It was just the slightest thing that was used. It was humiliating, you wouldn’t talk to another human being like that.”

A number of children who were shouted at were then “excluded for the rest of the day”, they said.

A second source who worked at Danum told Tes: “It was a process that I was very uncomfortable with…if a kid looked sideward they would exclude them out of the assembly.”

“They came in by force. They got in people from other schools. They lined them up just screaming at them, ‘Silence! Stand there!’ As an adult I found it an intimidating process, never mind as a child.

“Sometimes it wasn’t even a misdemeanour. I witnessed a child getting screamed at for coughing.”

“It wasn’t a put on cough, I’m quite experienced at being in school, I can tell when someone’s hamming it up. 

The sources from Danum said Outwood staff did not appear to make any attempt to alter their hardline approach to take into account that there are some vulnerable children at the school.

Vulnerable children

The senior leader said: “You’ve got a lot of vulnerable youngsters, who’ve got a lot of human attachment issues, so that behaviour towards them is even worse because some of those children in that school are coming from families associated with all different forms of neglect…you just don’t shout at children like that.”

The “flattening the grass” process continued for weeks, with members of Outwood staff patrolling the corridors in pairs. “There will be people in from other schools in the trust who will be walking round all day going into lessons,” the senior leader said.

The source from City Fields said that at their school the corridors were “like Piccadilly Circus” there were so many Outwood managers patrolling around.

At Danum, the senior manager said that if a child was listed on the consequences board - Outwood’s behaviour management system - then they would be “brought out in the corridor, and they’ll really shout at them. And they see that as a positive, because they’re trying to terrify them into not misbehaving.”

Screaming

The second Danum source recalled hearing “screaming on the corridor at pupils”. “It was actually causing me anxiety listening to it.”

When approached by Tes, Outwood Grange said: “In response to your questions we ask why are disgruntled individuals so keen to claim our pupils are unhappy when in inspection after inspection Ofsted is lavishing praise on our schools for their happy atmosphere and outstanding academic progress?

“And why would record numbers of parents be sending their children to our schools if there was this negative culture our critics pretend exists?”

The MAT pointed to a Danum inspection report from November 2018, which referred to the school’s “supportive and caring ethos that leaders are cultivating”.

It said that at City Fields “we have had parents stopping us on the gate to thank us for the additional care and support their children now have”.