Introduction

In the wake of the abduction and subsequent murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in London in March 2021, the issue of physical and reputational violence against women has become a focus of intense and sustained public debate. People came forward to give testimony, and included within this are accounts about how and why educational organisations can be unsafe. This is not new, where name calling and double standards are regarded as: ‘ordinary, expected and public’ (Bell 2008: 3). However, McBain (2021) reports that the failure to engage seriously means that the Everard and other cases has now produced ‘the reckoning’ illustrated by the public response to ‘Everyone’s Invited’, an Instagram account set up in June 2020 by Soma Sara, a 22-year-old UCL graduate, to gather anonymous accounts of sexism and sexual abuse at UK schools, and she goes on to say:

The segregation of the provision of and access to educational services means that the habitual rank ordering of the self and others is based on individual and corporate fabrications that demean and damage everyone. This physical and mental violence is evident in schools, and policy violence creates, sustains, and routinises it. Successive UK governments have a stake in segregated provision: in the name of modernisation the unmodern that sexualises female bodies is perpetuated as legitimate; governing by knowledge production authorises the acceptance of sexual savagery; and intelligent knowledgeabilities are deployed under the banner of aspiration but are used to keep bodies in their predetermined and correct place.