Britain’s ‘strictest school’ is a Sheffield success story. But Mercia isn’t for everyone

In the early 1970s, a psychology professor at Stanford University conducted an experiment that, despite its miniscule sample size, established a “universal truth” about human behaviour. I am, of course, talking about the Stanford marshmallow experiment.

Unlike the more notorious experiment associated with Stanford, Professor Walter Mischel’s study was a relatively painless experience. Children from a local nursery were left alone with a marshmallow for 15 minutes and promised that, if they restrained themselves from eating it until the researcher returned, they could have another. The experiment was designed to pinpoint the age at which children developed the ability to delay gratification. However, follow-up studies suggested the researchers had actually stumbled on something far more interesting.

Eighteen years later, the children who took part had become young adults and those who best resisted temptation had received far better results in their end-of-school exams than their weak-willed peers. In fact, it seemed they were doing better at life in a wide variety of ways — they were healthier, better able to deal with frustration and more socially adept. Professor Mischel had, it appeared, found a sure-fire way to predict which children would go on to succeed in life, and which of them wouldn’t.

To many, the logic behind this result seemed blindingly obvious. Teenagers with enough self control to spend hours doing tedious revision, for example, would surely get better exam results than those who goofed off. Hard work, healthy habits, selfless behaviour — arguably the building blocks of a good life — all involve taking the harder path in the short-term for the sake of a long-term result. Perhaps then, it didn’t matter if a child started out with innate advantages or natural talents. Maybe all that stood between life’s winners and losers was how much they could control themselves. 

This is a vastly simplified account of Professor Mischel’s experiment — and neglects to mention valid criticisms of its methodology — but it is the version that stuck in the minds of many parents. In order to set their child up for a happy life, it suggested, they needed to instil discipline. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

That is, of course, if you believe that waiting 15 minutes for a marshmallow demonstrates that a child has superior willpower. Are marshmallows that nice? Is two a markedly better gastronomic experience than one? Surely no one in their right mind would queue for a quarter of an hour to receive a single sweet. Perhaps the children who caved just realised it wasn’t worth their time.

Viewed through this lens, the Stanford marshmallow experiment wasn’t measuring how good these children were at weighing up effort and potential reward — time is precious, after all, and marshmallows are easy to come by. What it actually measured was how keen they were to pass an arbitrary test set for them by an adult stranger. Maybe they didn’t go on to study hard for their exams because they appreciated the value of hard work, maybe they just wanted to pass the biggest marshmallow test of their life so far.  

Whichever way you interpret the findings of Professor Mischel’s experiment, Mercia School in Ecclesall is definitely a “second marshmallow” kind of institution. Labelled the “UK’s strictest school” by the Sun, it prides itself on “demanding excellent behaviour” at all times. Students are expected to walk between lessons in silence and have to hand over their mobile phones for five days if caught using it on the grounds. Even smuggling in forbidden food or drink (namely anything that isn’t fruit or water) means being withdrawn from lessons for at least a day. As a job advert that made national headlines last year shows, it has equally high expectations of its staff — applicants were warned that, if successful, the job “may dominate your life on occasions”.

Mercia School is one of seven academies in the Mercia Learning Trust, although, despite what its name may suggest, it was not the original institution. The trust was founded in 2012 by King Ecgbert School in Dore and went on to absorb Totley Primary, Nether Edge Primary, Woodlands Primary and Newfield Secondary School. Mercia was simply the first opportunity to create something entirely new. Its headteacher, Dean Webster, had tried to put some of his ideas into practice at Newfield previously but, as he would go on to tell the parents he was trying to pitch on his new venture, found it was too difficult to change a school’s culture once it had already been established.

When it comes to this new institution, Webster has certainly made his mark. After just six years, Mercia School already has an outsized reputation among parents. Almost everyone I speak to describes it as a “Marmite” school; loved or despised, nothing in between. Take the fact that, every Friday morning, the children stand outside the school in a vaguely military formation and chant the poem Invictus by William Henley in unison. This is not a joke, and for evidence you can consult a marketing video for the school on Youtube. 

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

To outsiders, this custom can look bizarre, even disturbing, as if Webster is trying to train up some kind of child militia. One Mercia mum tells me several people who don’t know her son goes there have started talking unprompted about “that prison school” in the past. 

Rob Bridgewater, a church minister who sends his youngest daughter to Mercia, insists that the school’s more unusual customs only seem shocking because they are being taken out of context. The point of chanting Invictus, for example, is to instil the school’s ethos that students can achieve anything if they are, like the poem’s narrator, the “captain of [their] soul”. Having to stay ascetically silent while walking in the corridors was introduced because the school’s leadership felt this is “one of the places where bullying goes on” — the boy’s toilets have no urinals, only cubicles, for the same reason.