Spectator Life

There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking around a primary school for our four-year-old-son. Mindlessly staring at wall displays of woodland animals, you’re racking your brains as to how you will finish work at 3pm for pick up come September and scramble enough childcare for a six-week summer holiday. Goodbye 52-week-a year nursery.  But book yourself enough tours at enough schools, and you swiftly find yourself in the swing of things. There are those that can only be described as a bad Tinder date: a headmaster with a limp handshake, peeling wallpaper and sweaty lunches under plastic lids that leave you wanting to bolt after the first drink (or classroom), but you know you have three courses (a whole other wing and the forest school) to endure.

In 1966 we were 17 and about to do A-levels and leave our convent school for ever at the end of that summer term. Two girls were having a lesbian affair, another had been tempted to sleep with a boy, dramatically confessing this to our head nun, Mother Benedicta, in Mother B’s terrifying private room halfway up the staircase. Our head girl, Vanessa, had an older sister who would roar down to the school on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike along with his friends, known as ‘leather boys’. Vanessa was worried about her sister living in sin. ‘The sins of the flesh are not the worst sins my child,’ Mother B wisely told her. (The sister was still married to her leather boy 50 years later while Vanessa married at least twice, and lived in sin.

For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a moment of great pride. We gathered in the assembly hall, surrounded by the politicians and officials who’d helped us, to celebrate the school’s tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’d achieved. Not only has the school thrived — it is now part of a growing academy chain — but where we led, others followed. As the first school of its type to be approved by Michael Gove, WLFS showed what a determined group of volunteers could achieve, and there are now more than 600 free schools. Contrary to the predictions of the critics — too many to mention — this is one education policy that seems to have worked. The Department for Education hasn’t published school level GCSE and A-level results for 2020 and 2021, but the 2019 exam data casts free schools in a good light.

I was working in my study at Brighton College one summer term afternoon when my PA banged on the door: someone at The Spectator wanted to speak to me urgently. An animated editor burst on the line, audibly back from a very good lunch, barking: ‘What’s all this you’re saying about exams and tests squeezing scholarship and rounded learning out of schools?’ ‘Sitting exams in rows in sports halls has little bearing on what school pupils will ever do later in life,’ I spluttered, my fumbled response sufficient for him to commission an article ‘by tomorrow’. Teaching for tests, I wrote in that piece, was damaging schooling because teachers, robbed of their professionalism, were teaching physics GCSE, rather than physics, and Spanish A-level, rather than Spanish.