As readers of this column will know, I’ve spent the last year leading the efforts of a 250-strong group of local parents to start a new state secondary school in west London. One of the toughest things about this crusade is constantly having to bite my tongue. As a journalist, I used to delight in being able to say whatever I pleased and to hell with the consequences. Now I have to be more circumspect. One ill-judged phrase and the whole enterprise could be derailed.
I’m often asked what sort of school we’re trying to set up and the answer I want to give — but am reluctant to because it could harm our cause — is the Eton of the state sector. That plays into the hands of our critics, who often accuse us of trying to secure a private education for our children at the taxpayers’ expense. It doesn’t help that Latin is going to be compulsory at our school for the first three years or that the purpose of the curriculum will be to provide children with a classic liberal education.
But Eton is the model. By that I don’t mean we want our school to be exclusive. There will be no entrance exam and we’ll be bound by the National Admissions Code which means first dibs to applicants who are ‘looked after’, second dibs to children with special educational needs, etc. We’ll probably end up with a few more middle-class students than the neighbouring comprehensives, but only because their parents are more adept at gaming the system and our school will appeal to them. The vast majority of the students will be ‘non-middle-class’ and many of them will be ‘African-Caribbean’. (You can’t use phrases like ‘working class’ or ‘Afro-Caribbean’ any more — they’re politically incorrect.)
So what do I mean when I say we want the school to be like Eton? It’s pretty simple, really. I want our school to instil the kind of confidence and ambition that are the hallmarks of the Old Etonian. A friend recently gave me a copy of Danny Danziger’s collection of interviews with the school’s alumni and one comment jumped out. The speaker is David Thomas, then the 27-year-old features editor of the Mail on Sunday: ‘I’ve applied for jobs which I really have no right applying for, and it wasn’t because I was a particularly cocky little bastard, it was just because it never ever occurred to me that I shouldn’t apply for them — your horizons have never been limited.’
Limitless horizons — that’s the key. Most people say it can’t be done because the school’s intake will be so socially and ethnically mixed. For the middle-class child, no problem, but how do you take an 11-year-old boy from the local housing estate — a boy with no permanent male authority figure in his life, a boy steeped in the culture of welfare dependency — and transform him into David Thomas? Will a rigorous setting, strong discipline, high expectations and old-fashioned pastoral care be enough? One sceptic pointed to a Brazilian study of why children fail in school. It showed that the type of school the child goes to is relatively insignificant — the important factor is the child’s socioeconomic background.
Luckily, we have an instant rebuttal to that argument in the form of Mossbourne Academy. This is the school that replaced Hackney Downs in 2004 and had its first batch of GCSE results this August. Thanks to the inspirational leadership of Sir Michael Wilshaw and its grammar school ethos, 84 per cent of Mossbourne’s students got five GCSEs at grade C or above including maths and English. That compares to a national average of 47.6 per cent — and bear in mind that Hackney is one of the country’s most deprived boroughs. It can be done.
I sat next to an ex-Conservative Cabinet minister at a dinner party recently and he told me that his daughter, who teaches at an inner-city comprehensive, had helped get one of her students into Oxford. ‘She said it meant more to her than getting in herself,’ he said. People ask me why I’m doing this and that’s the reason. I want the satisfaction of taking kids from the local housing estates, giving them a stripped-down version of an Eton education and getting them into good universities. Who knows, in 45 years’ time, one of them may be leading the Conservative party.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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