The Department for Education has confirmed it drew up answers to a Hackney scrutiny commission’s questions about Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy, but has refused to make them public — a decision that, for a government department, can only be taken on a minister’s authority.
The department declined in June to answer 11 written questions put to it by Hackney’s children and young people scrutiny commission about its oversight of the academy, which was the subject of a safeguarding review last December that found a “climate of fear” and behavious sanctions falling hardest on children with special educational needs and on Black Caribbean and Black African pupils.
Requested by the Hackney Citizen to release the answers it had prepared, under the Freedom of Information Act, the department confirmed on 7 October 2026 that it holds both the “draft or final written responses” to the questions and the recorded reasons it decided not to send them. It is withholding both.
‘Withheld on a minister’s authority’
The department relied on section 36 of the Act, which allows information to be withheld where disclosure would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs — an exemption that, for a government department, requires the opinion of a minister. Releasing the material, it argued, would inhibit the “free and frank” advice of its officials and risk “disrupting ongoing intervention, accountability and review activity” in the case.
‘Questions already public’
The questions the department declined to answer are themselves public, having been printed in the agenda for the commission’s 8 July meeting. They ask what sanctions the department will use to compel academy trusts to co-operate with safeguarding reviews, whether the Mossbourne Federation’s £400,487 legal spend was an appropriate use of public money, and how a school from which more than one in five pupils left before the end of Year 11 could continue to be rated outstanding.
‘Hugely disappointing’
The department did not attend the July meeting. Its absence drew criticism from the commission’s chair, Cllr Pascale Frazer-Carroll, who said in a statement that the department, “not local councils”, is responsible for overseeing academies, “so their failure to attend the committee’s meeting or respond to its questions is hugely disappointing.”
