I've thought about what real accountability would have looked like. Not a procedural statement, not a vague acknowledgment buried in institutional language — an actual, direct apology for the specific things that happened. It hasn't come and I don't expect it to. Here's what it would have needed to include.
What it would have said
I'm sorry we didn't call your mum when you asked us to. I'm sorry we kept you in that room for three hours without lunch and took everything you use to cope. I'm sorry your head of year stopped you from reaching Suzanne when you needed her most. I'm sorry we turned your honest reporting of a data breach into an allegation against you. I'm sorry a teacher commented on your mutism in front of your whole class. I'm sorry we told you an assessment plan existed when it didn't, and let you sit unsupported because of it.
Why it matters that it's specific
A vague apology lets the person giving it avoid actually confronting what they did. Naming the specific things — the interrogation, the missed call, the blocked corridor — requires actually sitting with the reality of what happened rather than gesturing at it from a distance. That's harder to give, which is probably part of why it doesn't happen.
Why I don't expect it
Institutions protect themselves. Admitting specific wrongdoing has consequences — legal, reputational, practical — that a school is generally not motivated to accept voluntarily. I don't think the individual people involved are all malicious. I think the system around them makes a genuine apology costly in a way that silence isn't, and silence is what gets chosen.
What I do instead
I write it down here. Not as a substitute for the apology — nothing replaces that — but as a way of stating clearly, for myself, what actually happened and that it was wrong, since nobody else is going to state it for me. The apology I'll never get doesn't erase what happened, and neither does writing about it. But at least the record exists somewhere, even if the people who owe it never say the words.