Hardacre Hall is a school like no other in the world: it combines the best features of every girls' school in England to offer a regime of formal learning, character building, and suffering under strict discipline. We are a Reformatory School and we will save the souls of all our schoolgirls and drive out all traces of Sin and Lust, with a continual diet of severe corporal punishment accompanied by devout prayer.

We have a vision for Education. In our vision, the pupils of Hardacre Hall will leave us, educated in Mind, Body, and Spirit, ready to be the wives and mothers of tomorrow. And if they are not fortunate enough to attain the calling of marriage and motherhood, we will educate them for careers in a suitable form of service.

I shall myself take on the mantle of Headmistress of the new school to ensure that our vision is made real. Education will be the way we remember it and as it still ought to be, now and in the future....

It was a warm day in the classroom, and the windows were open. The schoolgirl sat upright in the required posture on her hard wooden chair, her hands resting demurely on the top of the wooden desk. The heavy black leather lace-up shoes on her feet were firmly together, but under the desk her knees were apart, her thighs forced open by the large sanitary pad that Matron had prescribed that morning. She fidgeted on her seat, the crinkled material around the immensely strong leg elastics of her navy-blue woollen school knickers joining the elastic garters of her liberty bodice in digging harshly at her tender thighs, and the white cotton knicker linings providing no protection.

Her nose began to itch from the chalk dust in the classroom air. She wished she could reach down below the desk for the little white cotton hankie in her knicker leg-pocket, but the Headmistress had told them all on their first day that it was a mortal sin to have your hands out of sight, and she knew that the Headmistress had a very special way of dealing with Sin in all its forms, both great and small.

The weak sunlight filtered in through the high classroom window and fought its way through the motes of chalk dust. The teacher's voice droned on, the lesson interminable, and the schoolgirl's eyes drooped. She could hear the droning of the bees outside and the cawing of the crows nesting in the distant forest of birch trees. She tried to remember the world outside the school, a world beyond the forest, but the memory was so distant it seemed like a dream. She heard but did not register the rapping of the cane end on the blackboard as the teacher punctuated her lesson, she didn't hear the clacking of heel-taps on the wooden floor as the mistress strode between the desks, but she did feel an unbelievable fire as the teacher's ruler cracked across the back of her knuckles. Her eyes jerked open and began to fill with tears, and her hand went instinctively to her mouth for succour.

And now, all too late, she heard very clearly, the sound of her name, followed by "Front of the class, NOW!!"

Her stomach turned to water as she rose, and proceeded on unsteady legs towards the front, between rows of navy gymslipped girls, all expressionless, and all seeming to be sitting as straight and upright and as attentively as it was humanly possible to be, every pair of eyes fixed exactly on the center of the blackboard.

Her own eyes flickered left and right as she walked, trying not to see the black leather tawse that hung menacingly alongside the blackboard, as if not seeing it would make it not exist.

Then she was stepping up onto the classroom dais at the front, followed by the teacher who appeared to possess the world's entire quota of schoolmarmish righteous indignation. And that lady, with a grim expression, put her ruler on her desk, then walked over and lifted the tawse from its hook. She turned back to the girl and held up the tawse, so stiff and heavy that it hardly bent from where it passed the edge of her hand.

The woman waited until the girl lifted her left hand, and held it out, palm upwards, the wrist supported by her other hand. The teacher indicated with a slight wave of the tawse that the hand was to be held higher, and the girl tremblingly complied.

And then the teacher raised the tawse back over her shoulder, there was a pause, a blur of movement, and then the thing arrived with a meaty crack of the two tails across the palm of her hand. The girl shrieked and stooped, her hand going between her thighs, then under her arm, then in her mouth, clenching and unclenching, anywhere and anything to try and dim the unbelievable fire. The teacher clucked in annoyance and impatience, and reaching out, she shook the girl by the shoulder. Twice more the tawse did its grim work on the girl's left palm, and then, tears flowing, and after a short and almost unheard lecture about inattention being an insult to the mistress, the girl stumbled back to her desk, while the teacher made her entry in the Punishment Book, before returning the strap to its hook.

And amid the pain and the fire and the tears and the promises to herself to stay awake forever, she registered other sounds. They came through the classroom window, from any one of the other classrooms. There was the distinct crack of rattan meeting tightly-stretched, bent-over, naked bottom flesh, followed by a muffled shriek, and the girl remembered that this was her second hand-tawsing from this particular mistress, and another occasion of transgression would mean staying after class to get what they called a "taste" of the cane, and that would make her late for her next class, which was also punishable....

If, like us, you believe that education starts at the bottom, then share our vision and enrol your daughter now before it is too late. We shall not fail her. Nor you, nor England.

Dame Agatha Trunchbull, Directress of Education, The Church Trust for the Moral Reform of Wayward Girls, York Minster, England

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