Is Mercia School’s ultra-strict ethos contagious?

Good afternoon, members — and welcome to today’s edition of The Tribune.

At the start of this year, we published a piece on Sheffield’s “Marmite school” and the debate raging among local parents over whether its ultra-strict ethos helps or harms kids. It kicked off a big debate in the comments about what, exactly, a child’s education should look like. On the one hand, many parents insist Mercia has done wonders for their children — and their exam results. On the other, critics argue its highly regimented environment is poor preparation for the real world. As even one mum that the school had won over mused in that previous piece, is her son truly being taught how to motivate himself, “or is it all just Mercia motivation”?

Mercia’s first ever Year 7 class has only just finished sixth form and embarked on the rest of their lives; it remains to be seen whether they will sink or swim. But some parents claim that Mercia’s aggressively traditional approach is already proving contagious. This term, Newfield School in Norton Lees — which is in the same academy trust — reportedly introduced a number of new rules, leaving some fretting the school is “bringing the Mercia way in by stealth”. The school insists everything is business as usual. Either way, local parents are once again divided over the best way to educate a child.

Editor’s note: As Autumn 2024 looks set to be a great year for fungi, we’ve launched our latest event — a guided forage exclusively for Tribune members. Fungi expert Colin Unsworth will be leading an educational foray into the woods at Lady Canning’s plantation, and depending on numbers, there may be a chance to cook and eat what we find at the end. Tickets are already being snapped up — get yours here. 

If you’re seeking mycological mastery it’s the perfect time to join as a member. But you’ll also get to read some of our most intriguing and important pieces and — perhaps most crucially — support quality journalism in Sheffield.

Your Tribune briefing

🍲 Last week, we linked to an article in The Star alleging the only local restaurant to ever receive a Michelin star had closed its doors forever — a report that turned out to be incorrect. As owner Tessa Bramley explains, the voluntary liquidation of the company behind the restaurant was a “conventional administrative process” to make way for a new hotel project and the restaurant, which closed for an extensive refurbishment, is reopening this weekend. When contacted by The Tribune, Bramley said the confusion “could all have been cleared up very easily in one simple exchange” but added that she has no criticisms of The Star. “It never does any good and I don't seek controversy — or any publicity for that matter. I would have been quite happy just getting on with my job.”

📉 The University of Sheffield is facing a £50m shortfall this academic year, after a dramatic dip in the number of new students enrolling. The university has 2,200 fewer people attending this year, representing a reduction of around 7%, and all departments have been instructed to make savings, although no plans to axe staff have been announced so far. A spokesperson for the university blamed a decline in the number of international students specifically — a trend that has proven even more pronounced at the city’s other university, Sheffield Hallam. 

⛔ In other university news, students protesting the University of Sheffield’s links to arms companies — and thus indirect involvement in supplying Israel with weapons — have once again clashed with campus security. On Monday, members of Sheffield Campus Coalition for Palestine (SCCP) formed a barricade outside the university’s careers fair, attended by a number of arms companies, and footage seen by The Sheffield Tab shows security attempting to physically move them out of the way. Last academic year, SCCP spent more than 80 days camping outside the Student Union, only leaving after the university was granted a court order to evict them. 

Is Mercia School’s ultra-strict ethos contagious?

According to Neil Miley — new CEO at Mercia Learning Trust, the academy trust to which Mercia School and Newfield School both belong — there is a perfectly innocent explanation for the sign. Newfield students who forget to bring any compulsory equipment to a lesson are sent to collect a replacement from reception, “ensuring they are able to access learning for the rest of the day,” Miley explains. The sign they have to carry is so they are not “challenged for being out of class unaccompanied”. 

That doesn’t, though, fully explain the message on the sign: “NOT READY TO LEARN.”

To some horrified parents, this sounds like a modern-day dunce’s cap. In fact, a lot of rules at Newfield, both those that existed last year and some that seem to have sprung up this term, strike them as incredibly old-fashioned. For example, children are disciplined for walking on the wrong side of the corridor and must begin each lesson standing behind their chair in silence with their equipment arranged on the desk — which the school’s behaviour policy dictates should take approximately ten seconds. 

“I went to school in the 80s and it wasn’t like this,” one parent tells me. They note that the school has for years been stricter than they would like, but what worries them is that their children report it has become even stricter this term. They say their son refused to go into school recently, because he’d lost his planner and was scared of being punished. “The great fear, for me, is that it’s incredibly authoritarian and it’s just going to get worse.” 

By “worse,” what this parent means is “more like Mercia,” the famously strict institution that Newfield’s former headteacher Dean Webster founded in 2018. While many parents swear by its radically old-fashioned approach, others are unnerved by its unusual customs, such as making students line up every Friday morning and chant the poem Invictus by William Henley in unison. Miranda Allen, a 52-year-old whose son has just joined Newfield, is in the latter camp. 

“Good god, no,” she says, when I ask if she would have ever sent her son to Mercia, “neither of us would get on with that.” She knows a family with a daughter at Mercia who reportedly got 67 detentions last year. “To me, if that’s happening, you either need to look at what’s wrong with the child or the school.” While Allen has a lot of good things to say about Newfield so far, even the idea it might become like Mercia has worried her enough to start researching homeschooling, just in case. “It would be difficult — but I won’t make him go somewhere he is miserable for the next five years.”

And changes have been happening at the top. In July, the school’s headteacher for the last nine years, who has worked within the trust for almost three decades, abruptly left. Several parents claim there was no indication last year that this would happen, while Allen remembers she was present at the open evening and that her imminent departure was not mentioned. Her replacement has just been hired. Fortunately, Miley says the trust is confident the new head, Ruth Hollingsworth, “will strengthen the school further,” once she begins in January. 

Her current job? Co-headteacher at Mercia.

“No irrelevant questions”

Despite this, according to the trust’s CEO Miley, parents like Allen have nothing to worry about. (While Newfield School was also contacted for comment, it did not respond.) “Our expectations on uniform and equipment, which are available on our website, have not changed this year,” he says. A parent sympathetic to the school also makes this argument — his children “have seen no change,” he insists, “bar occasional tweaking of minor rules”. 

Though he concedes there has been “a marked increase” in complaints from parents since the start of term, he believes a vocal minority are blowing things out of proportion. Parent groups “have a tendency to veer towards groupthink,” he argues, adding that Newfield “used to have a bad reputation in this area, and did well to turn itself around”. Though he doesn’t offer specific examples, he insists a lot of other parents’ concerns are “ill-informed and misleading”. 

But several parents report that there are some bizarre new rules about behaviour this year, ones not mentioned in the extensive 23-page document detailing the school’s “consistent discipline model”. One of these, according to parents The Tribune has spoken to, has been in place at Mercia for a while: “No irrelevant questions”.