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Will Angela Rayner really water down the right-to-buy scheme?
Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is said to be planning on watering down the right-to-buy scheme which enables council tenants to purchase their homes from local authorities at a significantly reduced price. The policy, famously introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, has helped many thousands of families become home-owners, giving them greater security and a stake in their local communities. But councils are keen to cut the cost of Thatcher’s flagship policy. As a result, Rayner – who once blasted her opponents as Tory ‘scum’ – is considering axing the scheme for newly built council houses and cutting the discount offered to existing tenants. While Downing Street has insisted the policy won’t be scrapped altogether, the government is considering tightening up the rules dramatically in the coming weeks.
The whiff of hypocrisy is strong enough to knock you over
The whiff of hypocrisy is strong enough to knock you over. Back in 2007, Rayner took advantage of this very scheme to buy her former council house in Stockport, Greater Manchester at a 25 per cent discount. She paid £79,000, before selling the property on later at a profit of £48,500. But do feel free to pull the ladder up after yourself, minister. If Rayner follows through on the plans, she will be taking a similar approach to fellow Labour MP Diane Abbott who condemned Tony Blair for not sending his children to traditional state schools, before opting to send her own son to a private school.
If Thatcher’s scheme is indeed trashed by someone who benefited from it, don’t be surprised. Indeed, Rayner won’t be alone: I’ve seen a similar story play out in the life of one of my acquaintances. Let’s call her Denise. Now aged 73, Denise was a teacher in a state primary school; her husband had worked in social services. Back in the late 1970s, they moved into an area of north London which at the time was a bit dodgy. They were able to rent a good-sized council house in which to raise their two children. Then, sometime in the 1980s, right-to-buy meant they could acquire the house at a highly favourable price; it was their only means of entering the property market.
Fast forward a few decades and their neighbourhood – as is the way with so much of London – has since become well and truly gentrified. It’s even got a Gail’s. The four-bedroom terraced house which they snapped up for a song four decades ago is now worth just shy of two million smackers. When Denise and her hubby sold up last year, it meant they could afford to buy a down-sized house for themselves further afield, along with a London flat apiece for their two children (now in their forties), who had hitherto been unable to get on the property ladder. In a nutshell, Thatcher’s policy had provided the entire family with financial security.
Although a lifelong left-winger whose views have been shaped by the Guardian (let’s face it, like most teachers in our state system), you’d think Denise might at least acknowledge this debt owed to the Iron Lady. But not a bit of it. As far as she is concerned, Maggie was and remains a hate figure par excellence. She was the politician who destroyed the otherwise wonderful social fabric of this country. She made the City institutions nasty and competitive. She destroyed the old coal mining communities (as if they’d still be happily mining coal today). And so on…
I got to know Denise’s daughter quite well, a good-natured woman with a wry take on her upbringing. ‘Mum wouldn’t let me have a Barbie doll,’ she once told me, ‘as it represented to her the evils of American capitalism. And if you wanted a quiet life you’d do well not to mention the name of Margaret Thatcher. It would just set her off on a rant, with steam coming out of her ears!’
But if she deplored everything that Thatcher represented, perhaps she should have been principled enough to spurn the opportunity the Iron Lady gave her to buy her council house. I guess when it comes right down to it, self-interest trumps even the most strongly-held convictions.
As regards right-to-buy, it may well need reforming, as the scheme is presently open to abuse and councils have indeed failed to replenish their housing stocks after selling many off. But the answer isn’t to dump the scheme, along with pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. It’s to build more houses.
Labour should work with schools, not tax them out of existence
Keir Starmer insists his plan to place VAT on independent school fees is not ideological. It’s a ‘difficult decision’, he says, but necessary to raise revenue which will be used to hire 6,500 teachers for state schools. He wants the independent sector to ‘thrive’. Few would deny that state schools need better funding, but it is important to question whether the policy will be successful at raising money and also to examine what a thriving independent sector looks like, how it can contribute to education more broadly – and how the VAT plan threatens all that.
Labour has claimed for some time that the policy would raise £1.7 billion. This initial figure was based on a 2011 Fabian Review article that simply calculated 20 per cent of the sector’s fee income.
A structural flaw in basing calculations on a blanket 20 per cent figure is that all schools will be able to reclaim VAT input, so schools that have made greater capital investments will struggle less. Taxing education may be philosophically regressive, but doing so through current VAT structures makes it economically regressive too. Less well-off schools will potentially pay more tax than the wealthy ones. If, as some claim, this proposal is a thinly veiled attack on a small number of famous schools – Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby – then it might not work out that way.
The simple truth is that education is an ecosystem. It thrives on diversity and interdependence
Still, even if the figure is closer to 15 per cent after recoveries, that cost is a significant challenge for any independent school – and this is before factoring in Labour’s other proposal, to remove business rates relief from those schools operated by charitable trusts. The key question is how much of this burden needs to be passed on to parents through fee increases.
Some schools may seek to absorb the additional cost, leaving fees unchanged. However, there is only a handful of schools that could realistically afford to do this. Some parents might also wonder how bloated their fees have become if this is an option in the first place. Either way, while protecting parents may seem a prudent, even noble, plan in the short term, it does not constitute a sustainable long-term strategy. In the end, most schools recognise the inevitable: as a consumption tax, VAT will end up being shouldered by the fee-paying parents.
Labour’s statement that schools need only control costs and not pass anything to parents is naive at best and misleading at worst. Where are schools meant to cut costs? Most schools spend the bulk of their budget on staff and already operate extremely efficiently elsewhere. As with any organisation, they would not be able to cut up to a fifth of their budget overnight. The extent of any cost-cutting – and ultimately the risk to jobs – will depend on the reaction of parents to fee increases.
Labour seems confident that parents will not pull their children out of private schools in droves. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, says parents have had ‘ample time’ to prepare for the changes. Cheerleaders for the policy argue that parents are used to fee rises and independent school pupil numbers have grown over the last generation regardless.
However, incremental increases are very different to a whacking one-off hit. Estimates of fallout from the sector – i.e. parents who will withdraw children from independent education, not to be replaced – run from nothing right up to 25 per cent. Many proponents of the policy quote the lowest figure of 3 per cent, taken from a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. However, student numbers – according to the latest figures from the Independent Schools Council – are already down 2.7 per cent just on the threat of VAT.
The government is therefore taking a huge gamble budgeting for state schools under the assumption that just 3 per cent of pupils from independent schools will shift to the state sector. There are also 17 caveats in the report. If the lowest figure is shaky, in the spirit of equality we might extend our scepticism to include the higher fallout estimate. Split the difference, then, and we are still left with almost 90,000 children leaving independent education. But only with the revenue target in mind, this is also a lot of families that cannot be taxed.
The impact on the state sector could be profound, but what of the effect on the independent sector? There will be regional variations, but it will hold true that fewer pupils means less income, and this means tough decisions on staffing. If the sector ‘cuts its cloth’ to avoid passing costs on to parents, as encouraged by the government, the result could be up to several tens of thousands of staff redundancies. Schools may seek to control the magnitude of staffing losses by, for example, increasing income from commercial activity (letting premises in the holidays is a favourite). But schools have been doing this for years so, for many, the pips have already squeaked in that lemon.
VAT will certainly affect the independent sector’s involvement in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. This defined benefit scheme, widely considered worthy of the commitments and expertise of teachers, has become too expensive. Employer contributions stand at 28.68 per cent, having risen in two chunky increments from 16.48 per cent in March 2019. These contributions are met directly by independent schools; in the state system, they are met by public funds. As the number of independent schools leaving the scheme rises, so too does pressure on the scheme’s cash flow.
Ultimately, some independent schools may well go out of business. Darwinism in education can be especially cruel – many small independent schools that are breaking even do a fantastic job for their pupils and communities. It is hard to see a greater good in hastening the demise of such schools through excessive taxation. Fewer schools also means less tax, not just from VAT but the staff costs and other purchases attracting tax that add to the public purse. It would seem highly probable therefore, that the tax will fail. There are too many obstacles stopping it from raising the targeted amount, or indeed raising anything at all when associated costs are considered.
But, beyond any tax measure, the simple truth is that education is an ecosystem. It thrives on diversity and interdependence. Too often independent schools are positioned as a problem or a detriment to education and society as a whole. Nothing could be further from the truth. State and independent schools should be allowed to co-exist, working together to best meet the needs of every child. Our new government has rightly recognised the important role of the private and voluntary sectors in healthcare, and a similar approach, ‘unburdened by doctrine’, as Starmer put it in his first speech as Prime Minister, would be welcome in education.
The government should be working to improve accessibility to independent schools, not restricting it through taxation. Firstly, it should expand the demonstrably outstanding work of the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation, which places in boarding schools children who most need educational opportunities. Secondly, it should establish a carefully targeted voucher scheme for lower-income families which would allow them to spend all or part of the public funding set aside for their children’s schooling on independent school fees.
Bursary support in the independent sector this year is at an all-time high of £1.4 billion. Both these initiatives would enable independent schools to further increase the number of means-tested bursaries.
It is in these kinds of partnerships and collaborations between the independent and state sectors that we find the true purpose of modern independent education. In an Olympic year, it is appropriate also to acknowledge the partnerships our schools have with national sporting bodies, to ensure talent is identified and nurtured. The Good Schools Guide has recently reported that a third of Team GB members were educated at independent schools, many funded through bursaries and scholarships.
Instead, Labour has produced a policy which is not good for social mobility, special educational needs, single-sex education, specialist activity, heritage, rural communities or Britain’s competitiveness in the global education market. The Treasury will probably not have much to show for it either. Our children deserve better than this gamble.
The real threat to schools? Falling birth rates
Labour’s proposal to impose VAT on private school fees will, we are often warned, lead to state schools becoming overloaded as parents withdraw their children from the independent sector and try to find alternative arrangements. That may turn out to be true in some areas in the short term, but in the longer term there is a different problem facing the state and independent sectors alike: a falling population of school-age children. It isn’t excessive class sizes which threaten to be an issue so much as shrinking classes, leading to school closures and amalgamations with other institutions.
London classrooms appear to be emptying – in 2022, 15.5 per cent of primary school places were unfilled
For nursery and primary schools in England, pupil numbers peaked in 2019. By 2028, according to the government’s projections, pupil numbers will fall a further 207,000 to 4.36 million. That is equivalent to 100 Grange Hills’ worth of pupils simply evaporating over the next four years.
In some areas the fall will be especially precipitous: Lambeth, Hillingdon and Ealing are all expected to lose 15 per cent of their pupils over the next three years. For secondary schools, the demographic trends inevitably follow a few years later. Numbers are expected to be at their lowest in 2026/27.
Much has been written about the deleterious economic effects of an ageing population, as fewer working-age people have to support a still-growing population of retired people – whose state pensions are paid out of current tax revenues.
But for schools, the problem of a shrinking population is arriving much sooner. The background to this is falling birth rates throughout the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries too. Of around 40 countries deemed by the World Bank to be ‘developed’, only one has a Total Fertility Rate – the average number of children born to women during their child-bearing years – above the replacement rate of 2.1. That is Israel, on 2.82. In Britain it is 1.87.
That overall figure masks the more detailed picture: that the fertility rate is only holding up thanks to a far higher fertility rate among the migrant population. In 2022, 30.3 per cent of births were to mothers who themselves were born outside the UK.
What does this mean for schools? State schools have already seen some closures: the number in London fell by a net 11 between 2020 and 2022, from 2,561 to 2,550. Among those lost are Archbishop Tenison’s School and St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls, both ancient foundations which were run as state academies in their last years. In Lambeth, where both schools were based, there is an additional factor impacting on school rolls: the redevelopment of council estates which had significant numbers of family-sized homes; many of the higher-density replacement flats have one or two bedrooms.
London classrooms appear to be emptying – in 2022, 15.5 per cent of primary school places were unfilled. There are grants available to keep schools with falling rolls open, but that money is only going to go so far. Not every school will be spared like Milburn School in Cumbria, which had 32 pupils on its roll in 2001 but when inspected again in 2020 had just seven, taught by a single teacher. It was then reported to be the smallest school in England, but has evaded closure thanks to its remote location. No urban school is going to be allowed to shrink to that size before the fabled men from the ministry flog off its site to developers.
Nor, indeed, do all remote schools survive the axe. The Skerries School, which served a small group of islands off the Shetlands, made Milburn School look crowded, with a roll down to just three pupils before the Shetland Islands Council called time this summer. From the autumn term pupils will be transferred to a school in Lerwick, the metropolis of the Shetlands. The school has twice been mothballed before, once when it had precisely zero pupils.
Interestingly, the independent sector has avoided the demographic crunch. Apart from a small dip around the ages of seven and eight (the number of seven-year-olds has fallen from 27,424 in 2019 to 26,861 this year), primary, prep and pre-prep schools affiliated to the Independent Schools Council (ISC) have managed to retain stable rolls over the past five years. From age 11 upwards there have been substantial gains in rolls: the number of 15-year-olds at ISC schools grew from 47,740 in 2019 to 53,541 last year. Even so, not all have survived. Falling rolls led to the announcement by Alton School, Hampshire, that it is to close after 86 years.
Given that they only educate 6 per cent of children, the fortunes of independent schools are not exposed so directly to the birth rate as are those of state schools. An independent school can find itself in trouble in spite of a baby boom if it fails to persuade enough parents it is worth spending money on private education over the free-at-the-point-of-delivery state option. Conversely, independent schools can still flourish against a backdrop of falling births if they can grab a larger share of the overall education market.
If all else fails, they have the option of giving themselves up to the state sector. It worked for Liverpool College, according to headmaster Hans van Mourik Broekman, who helped convert the school into a state academy 11 years ago. The increase in pupil numbers, he says, enabled it to start teaching Latin – which it hadn’t done before – and to set up an orchestra.
Falling birth rates are certainly going to claim some casualties among Britain’s schools, state and independent sectors alike. But the victims will not necessarily be the ones you might expect. So long as there is still someone breeding in the neighbourhood, there may yet be ways to keep your school’s doors open.
Why state schools need old boys’ clubs too
Ask a certain type of class warrior about the old boys’ network and they’ll tell you of ruddy-faced men in club ties, offering each other’s offspring summer internships. Or perhaps they’ll talk of thrusting bankers, who as children shared showers and a chilly dormitory, plotting to hire old school friends over more deserving candidates. Wink wink, nudge nudge, chortle chortle.
What websites like ToucanTech and Gravyty have developed is essentially social media in a school tie
There is probably still a little bit of truth in that. But in the past few years, it’s become much easier for any school to run an alumni network. Many independent schools, and an increasing number of state schools, have built dedicated websites where former students can find one another.
Kate Jillings is one of the founders of ToucanTech, which runs alumni network websites for major private schools such as Winchester and Rugby, but also top state schools like the London Oratory, Aylesbury Grammar and Reading School. She tells me that ten years ago, ‘there was pretty much nothing beyond a physical annual newsletter or a reunion event – there wasn’t a formalised online home for alumni. It’s really only been in the last decade that there have been these all-in-one software options specifically tailored for schools.’
What ToucanTech, and a few other companies such as Gravyty, have developed is social media in a school tie. These websites contain an alumni directory, events pages and message boards. You can log in via Google, LinkedIn or Facebook and find old friends or people in the wider network, like parents, teachers or governors. These networks are of course social – there’s a group on my old school’s website for those who like sailing and another for old boys in Hong Kong – but it’s mostly about careers.
Adrian Ballard, who runs Tonbridge’s alumni network, takes a refreshingly pragmatic approach to careers. ‘What I say to Old Tonbridgians who want to help our pupils is: can you advise them, but don’t give them an opportunity… don’t try to give them a leg up because that won’t help. If you give them a leg up and it’s the wrong leg or the wrong job, then you’ve screwed their lives up. Just advise them.’
He was adamant that the network wasn’t there to dole out cushy jobs for childhood friends. Instead, it’s about helping the boys decide what they want to do and finding former students who can help guide them in that direction. ‘A lot of people say, “It’s the old boys’ club, you’re just trying to help each other out.” Well, yes? Why don’t you do it at your school? I would have loved my state school to have done it.’
The technology to run an alumni network costs around £16,000 a year, but that isn’t the main barrier to setting one up. What schools really need is someone dedicated to organising reunions and careers advice. Every school is already required to offer careers advice under the Education Act 2011. But while schools have this statutory duty, many struggle to provide a decent offering. Last year, the education select committee found that the average pupil receives just £2 worth of careers advice. So how about a radical solution, one that isn’t going to cost the taxpayer a huge amount of money?
Rather than asking a random geography teacher to offer careers advice, or, as some schools do, hire questionable consultants for the day to tick off that statutory requirement, why not copy the independents? Why not use the natural community of a school – the parents, teachers, and most importantly the alumni – to offer advice? Part of that is just about putting the building blocks in place. As Kate Jillings says: ‘If you have an alumni software, you’re probably going to have a more engaged alumni.’
ToucanTech has found that old boys and girls who engage with their software are 12 times more likely to donate money to their former schools. With these websites, it’s far easier to stay in touch with your old school community and feel a sense of belonging.
The wonder of software is that it’s infinitely scalable. There’s nothing to stop the Department for Education developing its own version of these digital old boys’ networks or, for a few million, buying the rights to ToucanTech for every one of the 4,172 secondary schools in the country. Given the hundreds of students who leave a school each year, it’s likely that there’ll be someone within the network who can give proper first-hand advice about whatever a current student is interested in doing.
It’s worth remembering that seven in ten self-made millionaires went to a state school. Why not ask those people to talk to pupils of their former schools? Perhaps they might even want to offer one or two of them an internship.
Religious schools will be hit hardest by Labour’s VAT tax raid
Imagine the government pledged to introduce a 20 per cent tax rise on ‘bankers’. Then imagine that, when the details were announced, the new tax made no distinction between HSBC executives and lowly bank tellers on £19,000 a year. Furthermore, imagine that the public debate failed to mention the people who were going to suffer most from the policy; that commentators argued over whether the tax rise was technically workable, while ministers self-righteously declared that they were sure the richest people in the country could cope with paying a little more.
Far-fetched? Yes, but not a million miles from Labour’s proposed imposition of VAT and business rates on independent schools. Everyone is talking about the wealthiest institutions, the places which educated David Cameron and James Blunt, the ones with state-of-the-art facilities and acres of playing fields. They are not talking about the other end of the spectrum – the smallest, poorest, most threadbare schools in the country, that face a catastrophic financial threat.
Take Emmanuel Christian School (ECS) in Leicester. It started in 2003 with seven pupils, and has grown to a mighty 54, who attend lessons in a building rented from the local church – or in a couple of Portakabins round the back. The ‘grounds’ of the school are the residential street on which it is located; the whole street is invited to the school’s annual summer celebration. (It helps to be on good terms with the neighbours when the street fills with traffic at pick-up and drop-off time.) The fees at this centre of privilege? They’re means-tested, but the average is £220 a month.
Andy Harris, ECS’s headteacher, previously taught in the state sector and took a pay cut to join ECS. ‘It’s a big sacrifice,’ he says. The school has never made a profit and has to be ‘very frugal’. At one stage last year, they had a shortfall of a few thousand pounds and didn’t know how they were going to pay staff. So everyone prayed, and lo, a generous donor turned up and saved the day. Schools such as this are used to living on the financial edge. A sudden 20 per cent fee hike could push them over it.
‘This could make these schools unviable. You could have 20,000 kids who don’t have a place to go to’
The Christian Schools’ Trust, to which ECS belongs, numbers about 30 – and almost as many are in the works, with idealistic local groups coming together to start new schools. Of the nearly 700 independent Christian schools, 30 per cent have 200 or fewer pupils. Factor in the 50 independent Muslim schools – median fees £3,000 to £3,500 per year – and 60 to 70 Jewish schools, where the average is around £5,000, and you are talking about the education of many thousands of children.
But for the purposes of public debate they might as well be wearing invisibility cloaks. ‘It’s no good independent schools pleading poverty,’ Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said, while the education expert Sam Freedman generalised to the BBC that ‘the vast majority of people who use private schools are in the top 10 per cent of most wealthy households’. Critics of the policy, basically accepting this frame, complain about ‘the politics of envy’ or quibble over the logistics.
Yet as the blogger and school governor Diarmid Mackenzie has observed, the figures tell another story. Although half of families (not quite ‘the vast majority’) are indeed in the top decile, he writes: ‘Fifteen per cent of families who use independent schools, around 90,000 of them, have below average household incomes. I have not seen any commentator on this topic acknowledge this fact.’
So set aside the images of chapel spires and cricket fields, and picture instead a few rented buildings in a poor part of town. Often a school shares premises with a place of worship: Ashfaque Chowdhury, of the Association of Muslim Schools, points out this makes financial sense. ‘Imagine if 50 Muslim schools close, is that going to improve Labour’s relationship with Muslims? And as a result, maybe another 50 mosques close because they can’t pay the bills?’
Francis Green, an academic who has long advocated policies like Labour’s, believes the impact will be minimal. Small religious schools won’t bring much VAT revenue to the Treasury, he admits, but ‘I expect, however, that the tax will not make a big difference to the numbers of pupils attending these religious schools, even if it causes them to raise their fees by, perhaps, 10 or 15 per cent. I somehow doubt, therefore, that the government would be keen to make an exception for these schools.’
Chowdhury is more alarmed: he believes the impact will be ‘absolutely devastating’, and that dozens of Muslim schools could be at risk. ‘At the moment they’re just about breaking even. As soon as you throw in another 20 per cent, where are they going to get it from? Can they get it from the parents? They’re poor as it is. They’re taxi drivers and bus drivers, they’re not doctors and lawyers.’
It’s a similar story with independent Jewish schools, which typically serve low-income homes – often with six or more children – in Charedi communities. Raisel Freedman, from the Partnership for Jewish Schools, says: ‘The reality is this could make these schools financially unviable. You could have up to 20,000 kids who don’t have a place to go to.’
That poses urgent practical questions. ‘There is still a lot of low-level anti-Semitism, of the can-throwing, abuse-shouting kind, and the police support is not always where it needs to be,’ she says. ‘If these schools close, and the solution is to put hundreds of Charedi children into local schools, it could be a recipe for disaster.’
Steve Beegoo, of the Christian Schools’ Trust, says it’s impossible to predict the damage: ‘A lot of the schools are praying to God for miraculous intervention.’ Specifically, they hope that the government could exempt smaller schools from the tax increases. It could kick in if fees are above, say, the current level of state education spending per pupil: £8,000, or close to £10,000 if capital costs are included. Even a £5,000 floor could save many schools.
Religious education is already taking a hit: among others, Scotland’s only Catholic boarding school has announced it is closing, citing VAT as a factor. Its fees were £39,000, so Labour might regard it as an acceptable sacrifice in the cause of equality. It is less clear how that applies to the tiniest grassroots schools.
The Treasury has offered a concession: schools can reclaim VAT on goods and services, which it ‘expects’ will bring the real cost down from 20 per cent to ‘around 15 per cent’. But once again, this seems designed for the kind of school which occasionally splashes out on a shiny new performing arts centre. Whereas small Muslim schools, for instance, aren’t regularly investing in infrastructure and IT. As Chowdhury observes: ‘They don’t buy a huge amount of stationery because they’ve only got 70 or 80 kids. The majority don’t provide external lunches – it’s kids bringing packed lunches. They can’t claim on uniforms because they’re buying £20, £30 uniforms for the year.’
Harris, similarly, says he would only be able to reduce VAT to a minimum of 19 per cent: ‘One of our families is a single mum, a teaching assistant on universal credit. An extra 19 per cent on her child’s fees is just not going to be possible.’
In theory, Labour should love small faith schools, which exemplify the virtues of ‘service’ and ‘partnership’ that Keir Starmer so often invokes. They depend on the public-spiritedness not only of the staff, but of parents who step up and volunteer. ‘When I was a headteacher,’ says Beegoo, ‘that was why we were able to keep the fees so low. Everybody was DBS checked, all the right processes were gone through. But we would have needed to employ many more playground supervisors, teaching assistants, people to take the sports or the clubs.’
Moreover, Beegoo says, few institutions are so diverse. ‘You’ve got people of every ethnic background, every socioeconomic stratum of British life. They very much work on the model that those who can pay a bit more, pay a bit more, and for those who can’t, bursaries are created to support them.’
And not everyone at a Christian school is a believer: at ECS, only 70 per cent of the children are from Christian families. One child, says Harris, ‘was at a state school primary and couldn’t cope with the vast amount of pupils. The parents had heard about our school through a family friend. I spoke to a teacher from one of his previous schools, and this child has now completely changed.’ For the parents, the occasional Bible class is a small price for this kind of pastoral support.
There are many stories like this. Beegoo says that as a headteacher of a small school, he would hear from ‘scores and scores’ of ‘frantic’ parents at bigger schools whose children were being bullied – or who struggled to cope with ‘the Victorian-factory model that we’ve inherited of cramming thousands of teenagers together, in a group of buildings where they move 30 at a time from one teacher to the next’. Some children simply sink in these institutions; they can thrive in the family-like setting of a small school.
As one governor of a small Christian school observes, the need is even greater since the pandemic: ‘There are a lot more children with emotional and mental needs. They’re not making it up. I am a huge fan of state education, but there is a strength in having smaller schools.’ When the governor’s school was inspected, the inspector was visibly moved by the children’s emotional wellbeing and spontaneously declared: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Could the government exempt schools below a certain fee threshold? Harris, whose school is in a Labour constituency, says his local caseworker ‘has been great, to be honest. She said: “This policy isn’t intended for schools like yours.”’ But so far, the government has made no indication that it has even noticed schools like Harris’s. When I asked the Treasury about the smallest faith schools, it said in a statement: ‘We want to ensure that all children have the best chance in life to succeed. Ending tax breaks on private schools will help to raise the revenue needed to fund our education priorities for next year, such as recruiting 6,500 new teachers.’
These schools may be a small part of the picture, but their fate will tell us a lot about Starmer’s government. Does it believe in a flourishing, diverse civil society of little platoons kept going by heroic self-sacrifice? Or is it a choice between elite institutions if you can afford them, and a single state-run model if you can’t?
Listen to Dan Hitchens discuss his article further on the latest episode of Holy Smoke, with Damian Thompson and Raisel Freedman from the Partnership for Jewish Schools:
The rise of the state-private pupil
When is a state school pupil not a state school pupil? When he has a private tutor. That’s when he becomes a state-private hybrid. So, when parents pore over the university admissions and the A-level grades of state secondary schools, they should ask themselves whether all those results are attributable to the school or whether there may have been outside help. Not that anyone’s going to tell you. In a fee-paying school you don’t normally need to go outside; that’s why you pay those whopping fees.
Granted, exams are overrated but the world being what it is – obsessed with top universities – lots of parents will do whatever it takes to get their child into one. And so they hire a private tutor. It doesn’t guarantee success – if you’re thick, you’re thick – but it almost certainly helps.
The young genius at interview may well have been tutored at vast expense to get to that point
You know what that means? All those Russell Group universities which go out of their way to give preference to state school pupils are often getting a different candidate than they think. Rather than being the product of a state school, the young genius at interview may well have been tutored at vast expense to get to that point.
I got a tutor myself not long ago. My son needed three As to study the subject he wanted, and when he left his very good state school, he had two; he still needed one in history. He had done pretty well in the exam but failed with the essay done in his own time. That is to say, he had stubbornly written the essay the way he wanted, not in the way the examiners dictated. The essay was fine; it just didn’t tick the boxes.
So you know, you can’t just write a coherent essay with a clear argument either for A-level coursework or for the written exam. You have to jump through hoops. Anyway, the upshot was that he was retaking his A-levels by himself and needed the A.
By good luck, a friend of mine was married to the nice head of a department in a nearby private school. She said she’d see if any of her colleagues would help, and she found a historian, whom we’ll call Kevin. He was astonishingly good. He was also very nice. And not at all cheap; £110 an hour, or was it £120? Lots anyway.
It was like having a friend coming round – indeed, he was a friend – only one who was focused on the all-important question of how to give the examiners what they were looking for, and tick every box on their marking sheet. So, you have to use evaluative language, such as ‘Queen Mary failed in her aim of…’; ‘Henry VII was successful in accomplishing…’; and make statements that sound like judgments, ‘I consider that…’ or ‘in my view…’. You have to make interim judgments as you go as well as at the end, and remind the examiners of the question in every section so they know you’re not going off-piste.
Kevin had spent time himself marking papers so he knew what the system was like on the other side. He brought printouts of the model essays provided by the exam boards, which were reassuringly mediocre. He had studied the marking schemes and could talk students through the things that would make an examiner say: ‘Aha! Evaluative language!’ He freely admitted that this wasn’t an ideal system – that previously exams were set and marked by intelligent people who knew the subject and could recognise a good argument. But his business was to give exam boards what they wanted and he did, because he knew the system inside-out.
It worked for his pupils; it worked for my son. He got the A.
Few tutors are as good as Kevin. But dealing with him made me recognise the divide between the very best state schools and the very best fee-paying schools. It’s big.
The solution, I think, is not to outlaw tutoring but to make sure as many pupils as possible have it. When I needed help with maths at school in Ireland, my cousin and I went every week to a ‘grind’, a man at the bottom of the town, and we paid him a fiver each and no one was bothered.
There’s a lot of it going on. The Sutton Trust last year reported that 30 per cent of young people aged 11 to 16 had received private tutoring. At A-level it will be more. In 2016 the Trust estimated that 40 per cent of London students had had coaching.
A prudent parent, set on a top university, would be well advised to send his child to a state school, ideally in a challenging area, and then spend a small fortune on tutors. The school gets a good university to put on its records; the pupil gets the significant advantage in applying that accrues to state school candidates, the university gets to fill its state school quota. Win-win-win.
The toddlers being prepared for the seven-plus exam
The feverishness of the private prep-school market in London has reached such a pitch that children in the nursery class at Eaton House Belgravia are being prepared for the seven-plus from the age of two.
‘Some of them are still in nappies, and some of them still need a nap,’ the headmaster Ross Montague tells me. ‘We have folding camp beds, and our lovely nursery team of six teachers deal with that.’
While seeming to be kind to each other, these parents are in fierce competition
Montague, an ex-professional footballer who used to play for Brentford before he was injured and then retrained to become an educationalist and school superhead, accepts that the highly demanding assessment processes for Westminster Under School, St Paul’s Juniors and King’s College School Wimbledon are both fair and here to stay, so it’s the school’s job to prepare children for them from as early an age as possible, ‘in a responsible manner’.
His aim is to train them not just academically, but in the all-important ‘executive functioning skills’ they’ll need in order to have a chance of succeeding in the second round at those schools, if they’re lucky enough to be called back for a morning of being judged on how they perform in group activities.
‘School from two’ is Montague’s solution to giving the children the long run-up they’ll need. The sooner they start, the better they’ll be prepared to ‘access learning’ when the time comes. So, say your son’s birthday is on 2 September, and Eaton House Belgravia’s term begins on 5 September. Your toddler, just turned two, will be in the bottom class, called ‘the Cubs’, and he will very definitely be ‘at school’, rather than just ‘at nursery’: in a proper classroom with an interactive whiteboard. Each morning, the boys and girls will have a ‘short academic input’, including phonics and number recognition. ‘Some of our children aged three are already competent with subtraction,’ Montague tells me. ‘Children’s brains are like sponges at that age.’
Because of the weird British anomaly whereby privately educated girls tend to change schools at different ages from boys, many of the girls will then sit the four-plus and sail into schools like Francis Holland, while the boys will stay on and sit the tough seven-plus aged six to seven. Eaton House prides itself on getting an impressive number of its boys into London’s top three highly sought-after and heavily oversubscribed boys’ prep schools each year. To get a sense of just how oversubscribed and longed-for (by parents) they are, have a look at the Mums-net ‘seven-plus’ thread from last year. It’s a hotbed of maternal anxiety. Of the 350 to 400 who apply to St Paul’s Juniors each year, 100 are called back for the second round, and just 54 are offered places. At Westminster Under, 60 get called back for second round, for just 22 places. Mothers who call themselves things like ‘Pokemomm’ and ‘SWlondonmum123’ are consumed by worry and stress. ‘How did everyone get on with WUS?’ asks ‘Pokemomm’. ‘We did not get through to the second round.’ ‘It’s a no for us. SPJ said in the email that DS [‘darling son’] was placed in the upper-middle quarter and just missed out on interview.’ ‘None of the boys at our school have got through to the second round of any of the three,’ writes ‘Pokemomm’. ‘Rejection after second stage at KCS,’ writes another. One mother is furious because ‘no one has shared a single tutor contact yet’. While seeming to be kind to each other, these parents are in fierce competition, and clearly don’t want to share their treasure of a tutor.
Often, the mothers write as if they themselves were the candidates doing all the swotting: ‘I am going for King’s and St Paul’s Junior and doing Bond assessment books, regular reading, Exam Papers Plus and Prep Plus classes. Have done a few mock exams too… All the best to all of us on the journey… it’s been tough to say the least.’
The consolatory words given to sons if they were rejected used to be: ‘Don’t worry! If you don’t pass the seven-plus, you can have a go at the eight-plus.’ But this is becoming less and less of a consolation. Schools now take far fewer pupils at eight-plus than at seven-plus: just 18 at eight-plus at St Paul’s Juniors, for example – a tiny number when you consider many of the cleverest boys across London are trying.
And ratcheting up the anxiety for parents, Westminster Under School is going to scrap its eight-plus entry entirely from 2027, at which point they will also start taking girls (those annoyingly sorted, meticulous, focused, mature beings), making entry even more competitive for boys.
School heads try to dissuade parents from entering their sons for these assessments if they feel the boys are not ready or suited to it. The prep schools ask the heads, ‘Is this child sitting the assessment with your support?’ Sometimes they’re not; but the application is directly from the parents to the school, and parents have the right to enter their child for wherever they like.
Montague’s way of dealing with this massive over-demand is to accept the situation, be frank with parents, and simply prepare the pupils as well as he possibly can. It’s not just about starting them aged two on the academic subjects; he assures me ‘we don’t over-teach maths and English’, ‘we’re not hothousing’, and ‘we will not cram anything’, although he doesn’t like to see a child held back by a limiting curriculum, and he believes ‘a happy child is a learning child’. As an ex-professional footballer, he’s un-ashamedly ‘a big believer in high performance and perseverance’.
What he aims to instil in the children from the age of two are the ‘executive functioning skills’ that will help them navigate life and give them a hope of getting into those seemingly impregnable schools. In order to succeed, he explains, they’ll need all three elements of the ‘hierarchy of needs’: first, wellbeing; then the executive functioning skills (which include task initiation, focus, perseverance, time management, meta-cognition and working memory); and then the academics.
To facilitate this, he’s installed a new ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurial Centre’ on the top floor of the school building, where the headmaster’s flat used to be. The children will come into this centre regularly, to improve their executive functioning skills, using all kinds of apparatus, from Lego to VR headsets, and they’ll be doing the kinds of problem-solving group activities they’ll be required to do if they get through to the second round of the seven-plus.
This seven-plus hurdle seems to be chiefly a London nightmare. At more rural bastions of the Aertex shirt, such as Ludgrove, boys still start at the traditional prep-school age of eight, and there’s no entry exam, just a friendly ‘open day’ two years before admission. But more and more, prep schools are choosing to start a new junior year for seven-year-olds, or to open a nursery and a pre-prep school, in order to stay financially afloat as the birth rate plummets and fees soar. Looking at those enormous numbers being entered for the prestigious London prep schools, though, you think: VAT might trim the numbers down a bit, but there will still be easily enough desperate parents who will pay any price to get their sons in.
I spoke to Mark Snell, UK education director for Inspired Education, the profitable company which owns 111 schools across 24 countries, including all the Wetherby schools in London. He was head of maths at KCS Wimbledon when the seven-plus started in the early 2000s, and he helped to design the syllabus. He tells me that the whole thing has become ‘a bit of a game’, played by the three protagonists: the prep schools, who set the exams and try to devise a system which differentiates between over-tutored candidates and the genuinely clever and suitable ones; the pre-preps such as Wetherby pre-prep, who do their best to prepare the boys as best they can, while keeping their well-being a priority; and the tutors, whose career success depends on burnishing their reputations for getting boys in. (Schools can and do advise parents not to tutor their children, but nothing will stop them.)
In the middle of this ‘game’ are the boys, who simply want to live their lives, but find themselves bombarded with non-verbal reasoning papers by their parents. Mark Snell tells me he’ll be sad to see the eight-plus being phased out, if it is: ‘If you don’t have it, it’s harder for the late bloomers – schools will miss out on them if they just offer the seven-plus.’ It’s especially tough for boys born in the summer, who are up to a year younger than those they’re competing against.
As ‘Moonface67’ puts it on Mumsnet, summing up the grim situation: ‘There seems [sic] to be more and more candidates and higher and higher expectations every year. We have done all the usual Bond books.’ Never a restful moment for ambitious mothers, or their hard-worked sons.
Keir Starmer is blind to the brilliance of private schools
Despite protestations from every quarter, Sir Keir Starmer will press on with his malicious plan to slap VAT on private school fees. I can only assume he’s doing this because he believes an excellent education, stemming from hundreds of years of tradition, is entirely undesirable.
Look, there’s no question about it. Our private schools are the cat’s pyjamas. They attract discerning parents from all over the planet, even from New York, that bastion of elitism, where bankers and lawyers duke it out to hire Juilliard grads to teach their four- year-olds the violin.
Recently, I met a financier from that city. So enamoured was he of London schools that he upped sticks and transferred his entire family. The spectre of an extra tax is as nothing to him. Ironically, many British families are now moving out of the UK so that they can send their offspring to private schools in other countries. Changing places, indeed.
Perhaps it is time to shelve that spanking new science block and use the wonga to keep fees affordable
The rest of the world marvels at the brilliance of our best schools: so why are our own leaders blind to it? Why does Starmer want to make it harder to choose a decent education? Aside from anything else, he’s way out of whack with public opinion.
A report this year by Civitas shows that 72 per cent of respondents believed that parents are right to use their own money to give their children the best possible start in life. That’s a much larger percentage of the population than those who voted for Starmer. The same report demonstrates that most people think private schools should do more in terms of bursaries for the poor, rather than be charged VAT. Entirely sensible! But hey, what does that matter, when you’ve got tradition to bash and a left-wing base to please?
What this means is that only the global super-rich will be able to afford the fees. Our finest educational resources will be splurged on the world’s future elite, while many of our own will miss out. This is desperately sad.
Most independent schools, from the tiny one down the road that charges £9,000 a year to the grand old alma maters, have close links to their communities, educating those who live near, providing employment, and sharing their facilities with local schools and organisations. What’s more, where the big schools will be able to make money from this VAT raid, claiming back capital expenses, the little ones, which can’t cut back on staff or bursaries, will lose out. These institutions are not hotels or Airbnbs for a deracinated plutocracy. Those gilded parental units will not emerge from their Rolls-Royces to be found sweating behind the tombola stall at the summer fair.
Aside from the fact that Starmer’s education tax will only raise enough money for slightly less than one extra teacher per state school, this destructive attitude towards private schooling will render him an outlier across the world, where 18 per cent of students in OECD countries attend a fee–paying school of some sort. Over in La Belle France, that fortress of socialism, you may be surprised to discover that 20 per cent of secondary students are educated at private schools of varying sorts, many of them affordable institutions which have an arrangement with the state. Long live egalité! You even get an (admittedly small) tax reduction. And quite right too: if anything, private school fees, as well as childcare, should be tax-deductible over here in Blighty. In neighbouring Germany, 9 per cent of all children (more than our much vaunted 7 per cent) attend private schools, which function with affordable fees thanks to parental associations and state subsidies. Yes, you read that right – the state subsidises private schools.
What about those rugged, democratic lands of the free, Australia and the United States of America? In the former, 36 per cent of children can be found adjusting their boaters every morning, and this number has been rising for decades. In the Grand Old US of A, it’s 12 per cent, and, dependent on the state you’re in, there are various financial vehicles available to help you pay for it: for example, you can store money in a trust, withdrawing it tax free to cover the cost of education.
Sweden, beloved of progressives, has a voucher system which enables a wider range of students to make use of private schools. Imagine, giving people a real choice! This voucher system has resulted in an uptake in pupils attending independent schools across Sweden, opening access to many children who otherwise would not have been able to go. Crucially, this happens without making it harder for anyone else.
Mention private schools in progressive circles, and someone’s bound to wag a finger in your face: ‘Actually, Finland banned private schools, and they have a really good education system.’ To this, I say two things: 2 per cent of schools in that country remain private (though they cannot make a profit); and can you name a famous Finn?
It must be said, though, that independent schools should do some soul-searching about their purpose. For the past two decades, the larger ones have entered into an arms race to attract the big bucks. Technology centres, nail-bitingly expensive facilities and so forth are now de rigueur. Long gone are the slightly shabby buildings of my youth. And since there seems to be no getting around this forthcoming raid on education – for let us call it what it is – perhaps it’s time to shelve that spanking new science block, and instead use the wonga to help keep fees affordable.
If independent schools want to survive, they must become available to families of all incomes. This will mean making some difficult choices. But even more so, it’s time that we looked around the world, before we lose what can’t be replaced.
Can school rugby survive safety concerns?
The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain.
Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a micro-fracture to the elbow, one of the nurses from reception caught up with us. She was so concerned that she’d gone on to the RFU website, which confirmed that contact is indeed legal from Year 4. (Although the spear tackle that Gus’s friend had executed definitely isn’t.)
‘Striking a child outside of sport is abuse, but striking a child in sport is socially acceptable’
Our sons’ prep school, like many others, switches from tag to contact rugby at the start of Year 4. It wasn’t something we’d had a problem with: both boys love it (largely for the sanctioned violence and match teas) and aren’t shy about getting involved. My husband, who was a decent junior player, is also evangelical about the benefits.
But since nursing an eight-year-old with a complex fracture and his elder brother (then nine) through a concussion which was missed at the time and I only spotted the following day when he started staggering, unable to keep his eyes open, I’m rather less gung-ho. I’m no snowflake, having been blue-lighted to A&E several times after falls from horses at speed, but surely two serious injuries before the age of ten is a bit much?
Concern about rugby in schools is nothing new. During the golden age of public school rugby in the late 19th century, schools frequently changed the form of football they played, while the minutes of school governors’ meetings from the 1900s list concerns about safety.
More recently, a steadily growing body of peer-reviewed scientific research has highlighted the long-term risks of head injury on developing brains – notably Professor Allyson Pollock’s book, Tackling Rugby: What Every Parent Should Know About Injuries, which she began researching after her teenage son sustained three serious injuries on the pitch. This year however, the rhetoric has ratcheted up considerably. Playing rugby in schools was branded ‘a form of child abuse’ in an academic report published in February. Highlighting the cognitive harm caused by collisions, Eric Anderson, professor of sport at Winchester University, who led the study, declared: ‘Cultural perception is that striking a child outside of sport is abuse, but striking a child in sport is somehow socially acceptable.’
Then there’s the class action lawsuit over brain damage being brought against three of the sport’s governing bodies (the RFU, World Rugby and the Welsh Rugby Union) by more than 200 former professional and amateur players. The claimants include Phil Vickery, Gavin Henson and the World Cup winner Steve Thompson, who has early-onset dementia and says he cannot remember England’s 2003 World Cup win over Australia.
If the PR is bad, then the school statistics are even more dire for those who love the game. The number of children who play rugby in schools has reduced by 20 per cent in the past six years, according to Neil Rollings, a former director of sport at Sedbergh and Cheltenham College, who works with schools to develop sports programmes.
Rugby in schools ‘faces an existential threat’, he believes, with rising ‘parental concern’, while the game is struggling with ‘structural and reputational challenges’.
One head of governors at a prep school tells me: ‘There is tremendous parental concern. Whenever there’s a meeting and we get to the any other business bit at the end, it’s all people want to talk about. I don’t think rugby has more than ten years left in schools.’
It’s not only parents’ concerns about head injuries that have put school rugby in jeopardy. At senior school level, standards are increasingly polarised – the better players often train with elite academies, which leads to a greater imbalance of power on the pitch.
‘And of course, they’re all in the gym trying to get as big as possible,’ says one mother, whose son, George, had to give up rugby after three devastating concussions. ‘Certainly professional rugby players are much bigger than they used to be – and schools seem to be following that course,’ says Professor Mike Loosemore, a consultant in sports medicine with a special interest in adolescent concussion. ‘The collision forces are so much higher now because people are genuinely bigger. It’s possibly why there are more concussions. But we’re also a lot better at spotting it now.’
Most of the patients Loosemore sees in his private clinic are under 18 and suffering from rugby injuries. He admits to having a ‘jaundiced’ view of the sport from seeing some of the worst cases: teenagers who haven’t recovered from their concussions and are suffering tremendous headaches and fatigue, while their school performance has ‘fallen off a cliff’. He stresses that ‘you really don’t want to be getting concussion in your teens – you want to avoid it’, yet as a former enthusiastic player himself, Loosemore believes it would be ‘a great shame’ if rugby was to disappear from schools. ‘I think it’s a fantastic sport for young people.’
As we talk, a glaring conflict becomes evident between the inherent risks of rugby and the fun, adrenaline and camaraderie of the sport that he loved playing. My main take-home from our conversation is that ‘there is no such thing as a mild concussion – you’re either concussed or you’re not’ – and it takes ‘a month’, he emphasises, ‘to get over a concussion completely and get the biochemistry back to how it should be. If I were a parent, I’d have them off for a month.’
The RFU rule for returning to competition is about three weeks – that, according to Loosemore, ‘is about a week too short’. It’s important for the brain to recover properly – otherwise, with another knock, ‘you then start accumulating issues that you’ll take a lot longer to recover from’.
Rollings stresses that the game ‘has got to find ways of reducing contact and concussion’ and he wonders if it would be better to delay playing contact to the age of 11. He also cites the benefits of a third version, a sort of ‘rugby-lite’ between non-contact and what he calls ‘open warfare’, pioneered by London schools led by St Paul’s. The day it was trialled there were no injuries, he reports. It’s similar to the under-ten rules: uncontested scrums, one person in the clear-out, players can’t run hard directly at someone – and will be played at every age group.
Yet although fewer boys are playing rugby in schools, with fewer fixtures taking place than at any time in recent history, cheerleaders like Rollings believe the situation can be salvaged. ‘I was gloomy but I’m less gloomy now,’ he says. ‘People are working to make the game safer. The irony is that it’s probably never been a safer time to play. The toxic masculinity of “get up and get on with it” – that’s largely historic now.’
Contact rugby isn’t compulsory: England Rugby’s schools ‘playing offer’ lists non-contact, reduced contact – and full contact as the third option. Yet I was aggrieved to learn, when my son’s cast came off and I told the school he wasn’t to play rugby until he’d taken his music exams, that non-contact was still an option. (In reality, this meant that he just sat out games lessons for the rest of term.) Would we have taken that option, had it been presented to us at the start of Year 4? I doubt it. But after having spent six days in various hospitals with my primary-school-age sons, I do wonder about the wisdom of starting contact so young.
George, the teenager who suffered post-concussive syndrome, missing months of school and his GCSE mocks, talks wistfully about having to give up the game. ‘Even after three concussions, making the decision to quit was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘I loved every single minute of it. It’s a team sport that is so adrenaline-fuelled and addictive, there’s such camaraderie that your team is almost a family.’
Rollings takes heart from a survey of 160 prep schools he conducted last year, in which 60 per cent of rugby masters ‘agreed or strongly agreed that most boys are as enthusiastic about the game as ever’. Rugby’s great shortcoming, he believes, is failing to promote the benefits of the sport. ‘While credible scientists are gathering data as to why the game is dangerous, the game isn’t articulating what the game can do.’
I did put this point to the RFU, which eventually directed me to a lengthy stock response I’ve seen regurgitated elsewhere, about the health benefits ‘outweighing the risk of injury’ and ‘prioritising player welfare’ with initiatives such as smart mouth guards and lowering tackling height in the community game. Frankly, 16-year-old George expressed the virtues of the sport he can no longer play far more eloquently.
Yet there’s another piece of evidence in Rollings’s survey that suggests rugby won’t become another arcane affectation of public schools, destined to go the way of fagging and flogging. The one area where participation of all formats of rugby is up is in the girls’ game. Benenden, Sydenham High and Sherborne Girls’ are among those fielding female teams. Like football’s Lionesses, the Red Roses – England’s women’s team – enjoy rather more success on the international stage than their male counterparts. Perhaps we should be looking to them to stop rugby’s decline.
The pitfalls of the Accelerated Reader programme
To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a hint of exasperation.
Stretch her we did. That summer, we read T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats aloud, laughing at the names Bombalurina and Macavity. We read Eleanor Farjeon’s Kings and Queens and wondered at how we were all Elizabethans. We read The Diary of Anne Frank and thought about annexes. We read Judith Kerr’s magisterial When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and she packed her own evacuee suitcase.
Reading became a chore, each sentence sullenly tripping off my daughter’s tongue before she ran off
Back at school, the books given to her to read were, inevitably, dull. Dull for me to listen to and, it appeared, dull for her to read; Surprise Pancakes for Mum, anyone? Reading became a chore, each sentence sullenly tripping off her tongue before she ran off and I resumed unloading the dishwasher. There’s a reason for this: children need to practise repetitive phonetics and see sentence structure in its infancy to progress.
But still. In the spring term, it was decided that she should become ‘accelerated’, an unusual accolade for a child in Year One. Her delight at this new epithet was beyond measure. ‘I’m accelerating,’ she declared to anyone who would listen. My mother, bemused, wondered if she was taking early driving lessons.
Learner plates aside, Accelerated Reader (AR) is a software programme used by nearly1.2 million children in the UK across primary and secondary schools. Its concept is simple: encourage children to read by letting them choose their own book and then testing them on it via a series of questions given to them to complete on a screen. Rather than simply letting them choose books that then languish unread on their bedroom floors, the quiz holds them accountable to their choice. If you haven’t read the book, you can’t get the star.
For children of an impressionable age, this level of independence is heady, not to say dangerous. To start with, my daughter brought home a series of books on volcanoes, sea animals and climate change. We duly read each, cover to cover, to get top marks in the quiz. When a book on marsupials appeared on the kitchen table, I cracked. ‘Can you please choose a book with a story?’ I asked impatiently. ‘I think you mean fiction,’ she corrected me. So far, so accelerated.
That evening, Helen of Troy by Susan Gates appeared in her book bag. A re-telling of the Trojan war from the perspective of Karis, a serving maid to Helen of Troy, the book encourages children to understand the Trojan war from unbidden perspectives.
As I happened to be reading Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy at the same time, I thought we might compare notes. Not a bit of it. ‘I can’t talk to you about the Troy [sic] because I need to revise for the quiz,’ she said, her brow furrowed. Given that Renaissance Learning, the organisation behind Accelerated Reader, spends a great deal of time in its annual report slicing and dicing statistics on ‘reading enjoyment’ by age, gender and free school meals, it seemed rather sad to me that she felt too stressed to discuss Karis and her view from a fortress in burning Troy. I thought back to our pre-accelerated literary discussions of the summer with sadness.
The quiz, once completed, turned out to be a huge disappointment. Ready to discuss how Helen might have felt and whether she missed Menelaus, she was asked for only the rudimentary details of the story – who kidnapped who etc – and this all on a screen without a teacher or librarian present. ‘I’m still an accelerator though,’ she said, heaving a large tome about elephants into the car.
Ask any teacher about Accelerated Reader and they, too, may start to look like Helen of Troy trapped in a burning fortress against their will. As a programme, it promises to boost ‘engaged reading time’ using the Average Book Difficulty Level (ATOS) to determine the ‘readability’ of a text. By its own admission, Renaissance Learning concedes that ATOS ‘does not analyse content, age appropriateness or literary merit’.
One friend, a teacher in an Oxfordshire prep school, laughed uproariously at the mention of literary merit in relation to AR: ‘The AR bot just directs children to Diary of A Wimpy Kid and Gangsta Granny because it’s notionally in what they term the “zone of proximal development”, and then they wonder why the reading level isn’t high enough.’ Parents, too, have their gripes. One mother, whose son has always been a keen reader, tells how he was ‘aghast to be made to read books he had read three years prior’, which she says led him to ‘lose his love of reading’. ‘I think it helps the teachers more than the kids,’ she concluded with frustration.
Based on data harvested by AR, schools have traded time spent with teachers explaining a text in all its complexity for a blunt algorithm that can’t match the idiosyncrasies of children’s reading choices, the brilliantly crackers reasons why any of us choose to read what we do.
The power of group discussion is also lost. Some of the texts I remember best from my prep-school days – Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm etc – are the ones we debated in the classroom, each opposing view spurring me to think more critically. Asking children to read a book and then answer questions silently on a screen seems a terrible loss.
So where does this leave my daughter and me this summer? Freed from her data-driven daily reading grind, she has decided to take a dog-eared Ladybird life of Sir Walter Raleigh, found in a charity shop, on holiday with us. We have already spoken about armadas, capes and puddles so big someone must help you over them.
‘Would you read this at school?’ I asked tentatively. ‘No, because those books are far too baby,’ she said with great derision before skipping off to find something that might resemble an Elizabethan ruff. I conclude this: accelerate if you must, but when it comes to the imagination, take your foot off the brake entirely.
What the Cass Review means for schools
When the Cass Review was published in April, many of us working in schools heaved a sigh of relief. For many teachers the muddle surrounding the position of transgender children and those working with them caused serious concern. A maths teacher in Swindon was sacked for addressing a student as ‘she’ and writing her ‘dead name’ on the board, even though she/he was asking to be entered into a girls’ maths challenge.
Most teachers are in the job to impart knowledge, to encourage thinking and to play a part in guiding a child towards adulthood. We are not there to judge, mock or belittle. But we found ourselves increasingly confused. How much should – or could – we tell the parents? How should we deal with basic practicalities, such as which lavatories such students should use? And, for English teachers like me, how could we spend our days dinning subject/verb agreement into our students, only to have to use a plural pronoun about a single student? We were in a mess.
No one can punish us for forgetting a transgender child’s chosen pronouns or name
Many of the findings of the Cass Review chimed directly with our experiences of the world, as opposed to the rabid political thinking that was overtaking the debate. Teachers, along with GPs and others not working for gender identity services, felt, as the report wrote, ‘under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach’. This was even though we could see a measurable increase in gender dysphoric children for no discernible reason, and in particular a huge swing in the number of girls who were feeling male. I think in all my years of teaching I know of one boy who (after he left us) began the sex-change journey. And yet every year there are more girls who identify as ‘he’ or, more often, ‘they’. Why?
This is not an answer Hilary Cass can provide, but what she does note is that many of these children have other issues alongside their gender dysphoria; one of her key recommendations is that any child referred to NHS gender services must also be screened for other conditions, including neurodevelopmental issues and autistic spectrum disorder, and have a full mental health assessment. The Cass Review shows the importance of psychosocial elements in a teenager’s perception of self, and this is backed by the German researchers Alexander Korte and Gisela Gille, who find strong links between gender dysphoria and anorexia.
Without looking at the science, can we not agree that this makes strong anecdotal sense? Many young girls and women in the past, in confusion or disgust at their changing bodies, starved themselves as a rejection of their newly obvious femininity. Where are those girls now? Again, I have known very few in my teaching practice; these may be the very girls who are now turning their feminine faces to the wall and embracing a new masculinity. It is also, in my experience, rare that these children who present with gender dysphoria do not also have other issues that keep them out of the classroom. Cass’s recommendations are for a much more holistic approach to gender dysphoria than has been seen to date. The psychosocial element is key, an oversight that might in part have led to the demise of the Tavistock Clinic.
The attitudes of the children who surround the minority is interesting. They are much quicker to adopt the changing pronouns and names than we oldies, and appear to be much less questioning of the whole ideology. They are born into a generation which accepts transgenderism as a new norm.
There has been some puzzlement, too. ‘I’m not being mean, Miss, but will X stand as head boy or head girl?’ is a frequent question. As well as, when a transgender child came into my class to wish me goodbye on leaving the school: ‘Not being funny, miss, but is X a boy or a girl nowadays?’ The X in question had come in with pink hair, jewellery and even some make-up, seeming to be re-engaging with her birth femininity while still clinging to the new name and pronouns. Another child I know came in with a new name and pronouns and when I mis-called her name on the register (which still had the ‘dead name’) and immediately apologised, she smiled and said: ‘Don’t worry, Miss, I don’t really care.’ She had not even bothered to change the name on the exercise book and now has quietly slid away from all expressions of transgenderism. She does, however, have other issues of anxiety and non-attendance to which she is holding firm.
Under Cass’s recommendations, no child under 18 will be able to access puberty blockers. Victoria Atkins, the former health secretary, immediately placed an emergency ban on providing them outside the NHS, a ban that has since been ratified by Wes Streeting. Children in primary schools are to be ignored if they begin to express gender dysphoric sentiments, and school staff must alert the parents (unless they believe doing so would put the child in danger) of a child’s feelings about gender. Furthermore, no one can punish us for forgetting a child’s chosen pronouns or name. All of this is pure common sense. It just seems a little odd that it took so long before the government and the world in general felt able to accept it.
There is no doubt these children need help, but neither is there any doubt there should be a more wide-ranging approach to the help they receive. They need a holistic, unrushed approach, and they need it from all the adults surrounding them. As the poet John Cooper Clarke said: ‘If a man says he is Napoleon, we don’t immediately rush out and buy him a horse and point the way to Moscow.’
What to do with school photos
They lurk at the back of cupboards. Some are hidden under beds; others are tucked between books. I have been collecting them from a young age, but I still don’t know what I’m meant to do with them. What do you do with school photos?
I suppose I could take pictures of my own school photos and bin the originals. But I just can’t do it
Whenever I come across one, I enjoy the moment of reminiscence. I cast my mind back to my time in the netball team and choir. Then there are the series of house photos. My friends and I have braces in the early years and orange perma-tans by the end. I’m fond of the May Ball ‘survivors’ photos’ taken as the sun rose. Everyone looks half-cut and happy. I’m less attached to the ironic ones from university days. In one, we all seem to have forgotten our clothes.
But they are a record, nonetheless, and I know I would never allow myself to get rid of them during some Marie Kondo-esque frenzy. They do spark joy. I just don’t want to look at them every day.
Some people must, though, because it has become a well-worn trope in English society that these photos tend to be displayed in the downstairs lavatory or elsewhere around the house. One friend refers to this as the ‘wall of chin’. It’s not to say I don’t appreciate this approach. It’s fun spotting people in them, Where’s Wally-style. Who isn’t a little nosy when given the chance? More to the point, your host would like you to know they (or their children) went to Eton.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham agrees. ‘Those photos are definitely the Great Quiet English Boast,’ she says. ‘But I absolutely love going to the downstairs loo in people’s houses and gazing at the school photographs, especially the old sporty ones where all the 1950s boys have their arms crossed and their white knees pointing forward. I love squinting at the calligraphy in search of the name of the husband of the house. And I am always impressed that they were in the First XI or whatever.’ This sort of display is easier to carry off with panache in a large country pile or at least a substantial townhouse lavatory, rather than a pokey under-the-stairs situation like ours. Ysenda faces the same problem. She explains that she keeps her family photos ‘rolled up in the oblong cardboard boxes they came in when you ticked “boxed” rather than “mounted” or “framed”. When we open them up, they’re coiled up so tightly around each other that you must weigh each end down with a dictionary or recipe book.’
The school photo conundrum is only going to become more complicated as the photos keep rolling in, which they are bound to once my two children start school. I’ll encourage them to order them (‘Let’s go for “boxed”, darling’), but where on earth will we keep them?
My husband’s own collection is not insignificant. We have already had a chat about how many should be on display. I made the case for none, but I suspect we will eventually put a few more up. There is a sweet one from his school days which features lots of his good pals.
The children’s photos should probably take priority. ‘I know people with enormous downstairs loos who are able to accommodate every college, prep school and sporting photo they have,’ says the writer Arabella Byrne. ‘I look at them with envy and wish we could do the same. In the end, our children’s photos will overtake the downstairs loo entirely and my husband and I, and our once independent existences, will be consigned entirely to the cupboard where we keep the broken hoover.’
My children are photographed far more than I ever was. They groan whenever a phone emerges. ‘Put it away Mummy,’ they bleat. Out of the mouths of babes. But I wonder if they may end up treasuring their school photos because of their permanence and distinctly analogue, un-airbrushed nature.
I will keep them safe, either on the wall or hidden in the bookshelves. They can eventually grapple with the same conundrum. To make space for their photos, I suppose I could take pictures of my own school photos and bin the originals. But I just can’t do it.
What this boils down to is how much of an archive of our life we wish to keep and who it might be for. I doubt anyone would be interested in my collection of school photos, aside from perhaps my own children. That said, my cousin in New Zealand recently discovered a sports team photograph of my paternal grandfather. His arms are folded, and he stares earnestly at the camera, as was the fashion. His fellow teammates all have the same expression. I am grateful that this photo was kept for posterity. Whether I’d want my ancestors to discover those university pictures is another matter.
School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools
Elstree, Berkshire
Elstree – which educates boys and girls from three to 13 – is nestled in 150 acres of stunning countryside near Newbury in Berkshire. The school, which celebrated its 175th anniversary last year, says that its aim is two-fold: ‘to find out how a child is intelligent rather than how intelligent a child is’ and to teach pupils that ‘effort is king’. From Year 4 onwards, children can choose to flexi or weekly board and from Year 5 pupils are taught by individual specialists in all subjects from Year 5, compared with the usual Year 7. Although Elstree is non-selective, school-leavers have received scholarships to – among others – Eton, Harrow, Radley, Marlborough and Winchester. Notable alumni include the singer-songwriter James Blunt, novelist Sebastian Faulks, politician Richard Tice and writer and activist George Monbiot.
Cranleigh, Surrey
Cranleigh School – which offers both boarding and day education to boys and girls aged 13 to 18 – is Surrey’s leading co-educational independent school. A new head, Samantha Price, is joining the school this month, succeeding Martin Reader, who was at the helm for a decade. Cranleigh has been co-ed for 25 years, and opened in 1865 ‘to provide a sound and plain education, on the principles of the Church of England, and on the public school system, for the sons of farmers and others engaged in commercial pursuits’. It now educates 620 pupils across eight houses and has an impressive sporting pedigree, being rated as the third-best sporting school in Britain. Former pupils include the ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, the playwright Patrick Marber, the England cricketer Ollie Pope and the historian Andrew Roberts.
Monkton Combe School, Somerset
Monkton Combe is a co-educational boarding and day school for pupils aged two to 18, in the beautiful Midford valley on the edge of Bath. The school is proud of its Christian ethos, although says that Monkton is ‘very much about faith rather than religion’. Monkton has extensive sporting facilities – including cricket pitches that Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the ‘bible of cricket’, has selected for its ‘loveliest grounds of England’ lists – and two boathouses on the River Avon. Former pupils include the author Bernard Cornwell, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove and the Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar.
St Robert of Newminster Catholic School, Sunderland
It’s been a big year for former students of St Robert of Newminster Catholic School, a co-educational state secondary and sixth-form college in Washington in Sunderland. Labour’s new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson attended the school, as did Jordan Pickford, who played in goal for the England football team throughout their run to the final of Euro 2024. St Robert’s was previously a voluntary aided school, but five years ago it converted to academy status. There are more than 1,600 students on roll, and just over a decade ago the school completed a £13 million build-and-refurbishment programme. The headteacher is Mr Dean Juric, who said about Phillipson’s appointment: ‘It is always wonderful to hear success stories from our former students.’
[Alamy]
Tried and tested by the Common Entrance Exam
This is about something that did not happen to me at school, an exam I dreaded, but never had to take. It was the only examination that ever really worried me, and it was called Common Entrance.
Do not confuse it with modern imitations bearing the same name. In those days, preparing for it involved (for me, anyway) translating English into Latin and French (a proper knowledge of irregular verbs and a wide vocabulary in both those languages was required). It also demanded thorny and tricky types of mathematics, an astounding grasp of largely Imperial geography – and a full knowledge of English history since the Conquest. I actually understood the jokes in 1066 and All That, for which modern children would need a decoder.
But after about six years of dreading it, I was spared from it. This is perhaps why, since the age of 13, I have been oddly untroubled by O-levels and A-levels or by the degree I was mysteriously awarded at the end of my university years. The only exam that gave me nightmares was the 120 words-per-minute shorthand test which I did in fact pass during my newspaper apprenticeship.
My teachers unceasingly warned us all of the wretched fates which would befall us if we did badly at Common Entrance. We weren’t, as George Orwell was, threatened with becoming ‘a little office boy at 40 pounds a year’. But we knew we would be doomed. I am not sure you could actually fail, but they let us know that there were terrible establishments to which you would go, creeping in shame, if your performance was not up to much.
Preparing for the Common Entrance exam involved a full knowledge of English history since the Conquest
I am sure these places cannot have been as bad as we were told. But cruel schoolmasters would dwell upon the despair and disappointment of our unhappy parents, who had spent so much on giving us a chance in life and would now face the ruin of their hopes. The very best of my teachers, a fearsome, witty man with stern grey hair and merciless spectacles, even used Holy Scripture to terrify us into serious learning, laying especial emphasis on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, if we were not properly prepared on the fatal day.
Even now, when I see portrayals of those virgins in stained glass windows and sculptures (the cathedral at Berne makes a great thing of them), I think of Latin conjugations. Today’s so-called equivalent of Common Entrance resembles the real thing much as the cosy softly furnished bedrooms of modern boarding schools resemble the hard mattresses and bracing night air of the dormitories in which new boys whimpered for home and the rest of us sniggered cruelly.
What was it all for? I imagined my educational future in a sort of Edwardian fantasy world, part Trollope, part Billy Bunter, in which I seem to have dwelt for much of the time. I pictured the great schools for which I was supposedly destined as ancient palaces of mellowed brick and worn stone, with friendly boys, welcoming tuck shops and clever masters in flapping gowns, the whole thing perfumed with hot buttered toast and glowing in plangent autumn sunshine. Somehow the warnings of bullying, fagging and the cane had not reached – or had not penetrated – my enchanted mind. I knew absolutely nothing of sex. I had read Tom Brown’s School Days but assumed that its publication had brought an end, forever and everywhere, to the savageries it portrayed.
I was very lucky with my own prep-school, which was small and mainly enlightened. Somehow, I suffered few of the abusive horrors which seem to have scarred most of my privately educated generation for life. So my image of the great moment of transformation from prep-school caterpillar to public school butterfly was hopelessly idealised, as I now see but did not then grasp.
I imagined the moment of being informed I had ‘got in’, summoned to the headmaster’s study where he would read out the longed-for telegram and perhaps hand me a golden sovereign. But I knew almost nothing of the schools involved. And in the end, I won a scholarship to an establishment I had never even heard of, and so never had to take the Common Entrance at all. From amid a sort of dream, I saw the approaching experience as something like the ridiculous image of English public schools, parodied by Orwell in his superb essay on boys’ weekly magazines: ‘There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel… Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.’ Reader, even in 1965, it was not so. I should, as I now realise, have gone to a grammar school.
Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad
Even before the 872-day long siege ended, both survivors and onlookers had already begun to refer to Leningrad – formerly and currently known as St Petersburg – as a city of heroes. Tales of bravery and self-sacrifice were enshrined in memorials, histories and memoirs, which between 1945 and 1991 were published in the Soviet Union at an average rate of one per day. But heroism is, of course, only a partial description of life within the starving city where theft, murder, betrayal and a million smaller acts of self-interest were just as prevalent as acts of valour. The idea that Leningrad was a city of heroes was in part a ploy to enable the living to carry on alongside their survivors’ guilt, sometimes inside apartments they had taken from the newly dead.
Yet, as Prit Buttar, a former British Army doctor, draws out in a dense, ambitious and military-focused book, Leningrad endured, despite its institutional abandonment by Moscow, a dispirited and often outclassed Red Army and the near total breakdown of supply chains. The city prevailed, despite Hitler’s desperation to surround this major centre of intellectual and artistic endeavour, and, as he once put it to Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, ‘starve it into submission’.
The first winter of the siege, which has been covered by Buttar in an earlier companion work, was its most dramatic and tragic. German shells, food shortages and freezing temperatures – as if the weather had joined the Nazis in their assault on the city – precipitated mass death. Many of those who survived did so by engaging in previously unthinkable acts, such as eating their pets or, in rare cases, their neighbours. There was heroism, or perhaps just shivering stoicism, but also depravity and venality, while on the borders of the city Red Army defenders fled or died in inconceivable numbers.
Hero City focuses on the latter stages of the siege, when, under new leadership, Leningrad’s defenders rallied and reorganised. After Leonid Govorov was promoted to the role of colonel general in early 1943, his priority, Buttar writes, was ‘not so much to prevent the fall of Leningrad but to break the siege ring’. Once the Russians had prised a gap open, food, fuel and munitions could flow into the city, establishing footholds on which new victories could then be built. In intricate detail Buttar explains the machinations behind the unexpected achievements that followed, particularly the gains in the first two months of 1944, even as the bodies of young men continued to accumulate at a foreboding rate.
Taken in concert, Buttar’s two books provide one of the most comprehensive English-language accounts of the siege. This is history-writing at its most traditionally ambitious, eschewing the characterisation and intimate scene-setting detail that might help a less determined reader through the forbidding vastness of the subject, in favour of providing a meticulous survey that includes every available date and namecheck. Narrative compulsion is traded for detail and military analysis, and Buttar establishes a convincing case that the people of Leningrad prevailed despite the uselessness (usually fear-induced) of many Soviet officials, not because of them:
At every level, the Soviet state stifled any sense of showing initiative in all aspects of society. The higher the position… the greater the personal risk of acting in an individualistic manner that might attract criticism and potential punishment.
For all its girth, the book focuses on the soldiers, leaving little space for the city’s women, who mainly ran Leningrad after their fathers and husbands left for the front and, most often, never returned. In recent years there have been corrective efforts to acknowledge women’s dominant role in the siege, and Buttar acknowledges the criticism St Petersburg’s post-war memorials have received for ‘showing so few female figures, and even then mainly in supporting roles such as medics’. But there are vanishingly few women featured in his own book, aside from the Red Army’s female snipers, who remain as famous now as they were then.
Fair enough, perhaps: this is a military history of the siege, not a social or cultural one. But there are numerous definitions of heroism, many of which sit apart from the battlefield and operation rooms. This is a magisterial history, indeed, but one that is, at times, as cold as its subjects’ winters, and with a clear bias of focus.
At the city’s memorial to those who died in the siege, situated at the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands are buried, these words of the siege poet Olga Bergholz are etched in granite: ‘Know this, you who regard these stones: No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten.’ It is an admirable claim, but one that is obviously untrue. All memory is selective, and so too are the histories. There can be no definitive account, despite the claims of the publishing industry’s marketeers. Undeniably, however, this book offers an impressive patch in the tapestry of written history that points toward the truth.
The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce
‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (1899-1991) was a legend in his own lifetime within MI6. Born in Odessa to an Austrian countess and a British trader representing Vickers, his cosmopolitan upbringing endowed him with English, Russian, German, Turkish, French and Polish. His real first name was Wilfred, Biffy being acquired through youthful handiness with his fists.
Biffy played an important role in smuggling the Polish copy of the Enigma cipher machine to London
Education and family connections made him intimate with prominent Levantine trading families such as the Whittalls, Keuns and La Fontaines. Members of each served with him in MI6 and two into modern times. Early in the first world war he was studying naval architecture and engineering in St Petersburg when his father sent him to oversee the assembling of submarines sold in kit form to the Russians. The 16-year-old Biffy manned one of the boats with a dockyard crew, took it out for sea trials, spotted German ships and sank four. On returning to port they became entangled in anti-submarine nets and were stuck on the bottom for 18 hours. Biffy was granted the equivalent of a knighthood by the Tsar.
In 1918, back in Odessa, he was taken on by the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, which worked closely with MI6, to support Russian counter-revolutionary forces. Commissioned the following year, he was promoted and awarded the MBE for preventing a Bolshevik mutiny on another submarine. Although he may already have been working for MI6, he was formally inducted in 1921 and posted to what was then Constantinople, where one of his early tasks was to arrange the clandestine exfiltration of the Sultan, who feared for his fate in the new republic. This done, he then had the delicate task of evacuating the European ladies of the Sultan’s harem to their various destinations. A pocketful of gold sovereigns helped ensure that the British ladies were safely embarked on the Orient Express.
The year 1926 marked the beginning of the next stage of Biffy’s life – his 14-year career as head of the principal MI6 station in Paris. He was married by this time to a glamorous and wealthy American, and the role suited both him and his wife perfectly. He kept his office separate from the British Embassy – he always hated headquarters – and rapidly established himself among the Parisian political and social elite. He ensured that visitors from London had a good time – especially ‘Pay’ Sykes, the MI6 accountant – but an independent income helped with the endless entertaining: long lunches, late partying in nightclubs, trips on his river boat and excursions in his Rolls-Royce.
Although a gifted recruiter of agents, his principal task was liaison with the French intelligence services, especially the Deuxième Bureau, which was about six times the size of the peacetime MI6. The friendship and trust he established with leading figures would prove fruitful in the war to come, but even by 1928 there were significant results, including the joint debrief of the first major Soviet defector, Stalin’s former secretary.
Better known was Biffy’s subsequent role in smuggling the Polish copy of the German Enigma cipher machine out of Warsaw, via Paris, to London, just before the Germans invaded Poland. This, along with later contributions by Polish cryptanalysts, was of great help in penetrating Enigma (although we already had our own version, called Typex); but Biffy played down his role, describing himself as merely a facilitator. In fact, without the relations and trust he had established with the French and the Poles, it would probably never have happened.
As the second world war approached, he ditched some of his more tedious duties – such as keeping watch on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – and made contact arrangements for agents who were to remain in Occupied France. Back in London, following France’s surrender, he again managed to work away from MI6’s head office, being tasked with infiltrating agents into France and running those already there. He also ensured that the exiled Polish intelligence services were able to operate independently and very usefully.
Little known then was the fact that several of his French intelligence contacts who were forced to work for the Vichy regime were secretly reporting to MI6 through three networks set up by Biffy. In 1941, he ignored government instructions not to collect intelligence on Russia and spent his post-war career working mainly against the Soviet Union, retiring in 1959.
In the absence of released MI6 files, Tim Spicer has researched widely among private papers, French records and the National Archive to produce a very readable, colourful and surprisingly comprehensive account of a likeable man whose career was central to two of the shaping events of the past century. The author is also engagingly discursive, noting, for example, Rebecca West’s response to discovering that she and her friend Noël Coward were among prominent Britons listed by the Gestapo for elimination: ‘My dear,’ she telegraphed Coward, ‘the people we should have been seen dead with!’
A necklace for the Empress Josephine: The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier, reviewed
The latest book from Tracy Chevalier, author of 11 novels, including the bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, tells the captivating story of Orsola Rosso, whom we first encounter in 1486 as a young girl on Murano, the glassmakers’ island in the Venetian lagoon. Within a few pages, her father, the maestro at the family’s workshop, is dramatically killed by a shard of glass flying ‘like a hot dart straight into his neck’. Orsola’s lazy, impetuous brother Marco, less skilful than their father, must take over, but orders soon begin to dwindle. How will Orsola help her family recover and prosper?
Glassmaking is traditionally a male concern, but the girl finds her way into it thanks to Maria Barovier, the real-life inventor of Rosetta beads, who, in the novel, advises Orsola to diversify into glass beads: ‘They are inconsequential, and women can make them because of that. No man will be threatened by you making beads.’ Dismissed by Marco as escrementi di coniglio (rabbit droppings), Orsola’s beads foster creativity, agency and money. They become a lifeline. As Orsola struggles to master her craft, we watch her navigate the shifting dynamics of family life, pursue professional connections, enjoy burgeoning friendships and fall in love. She becomes entangled with colourful characters, such as the handsome fisherman Antonio, Domenego, an enslaved gondolier, and the German merchant Klingenberg, whose daughter, Klara, will keep an important secret for Orsola.
The Glassmaker begins at the height of the Renaissance and ends in the present day, all the while remaining with Orsola, who has merely reached her late sixties at its close. Chevalier playfully asks her readers to imagine that ‘time alla Veneziana’ moves much more slowly than on the mainland; in each of the novel’s eight parts we jump forward a few years in Orsola’s life (and the lives of her companions) while skipping through a century or so in the wider world.
This device allows Chevalier to take us from the Renaissance to the coming of trains and motorboats and to show us the acqua granda flood of 1966 and – briefly – Covid. She includes cameos from Napoleon’s wife, Josephine – for whom Orsola is commissioned to create a necklace; Casanova – whose charms nearly bankrupt the family; and the Marchesa Luisa Casati, whose drugged pet cheetahs inspire a new range of goblets.
There is no danger of getting lost in the whirl of years, because Chevalier skilfully marries this sweeping vista to close attention to detail – informed by taking lessons in rowing a gondola and working with glass. As the storms of history surge about us, we stay rooted in Murano, sitting beside Orsola at her lamplit table, suffering the stench of the tallow flame, the frustration of using rods to roll molten glass into perfect spheres, and the challenge of finding inspiration for new designs. The Glassmaker is a spectacular feat, crafted by a maestra at the top of her game.
We’ll never know what treasures the Tudor Reformation robbed us of
In 1693, quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales. The scales themselves held a girl’s face and a globe of the Earth. The sculpture was donated to the Ashmolean, but experts there were baffled by it. Could it represent the goddess Astrea, one of them wondered.
In fact, it represented the Archangel Michael, one of the most significant figures in the medieval church. Among other things, it will be Michael who wields the scales on Judgment Day. How could so significant a figure have been forgotten – the cultural memory of more than 1,000 years erased – in such a short space of time? More importantly, what else did the Tudor Reformation rob us of?
Amy Jeffs’s Saints is intended to help answer that question. It comprises brief, tightly shaped, almost fragmentary, fictionalised narratives about 40 saints, organised by month according to their respective feast days. In a nod to medieval calendars, each month is also accompanied by notes about the labours traditionally undertaken at that time of year, together with the relevant sign of the zodiac, thought to influence human health and well-being.
The book therefore hints at the holistic, all-encompassing, God-steeped world – the universe-wide web of spiritual signs and meanings – of which saints were a potent part. Each story is paired with a thoughtful essay reflecting on its historical context. Cumulatively, these pieces offer a wider, if still skeletal narrative of faith and scepticism which charts the rise and fall of the cult of the saints and the culture of pilgrimage and relics, ending with the destructive madness of the Reformation.
It is a format that worked well for Jeffs in her previous books, Storyland and Wild, which explored the myths and histories of pagan and early medieval Britain. But are we, in our queasily post-Christian culture, comfortable embracing the divinely inspired miracle workers of medieval Catholicism in the same way?
It is interesting in this context to note the word ‘magic’ in the book’s subtitle – a more secular-friendly term, perhaps, than ‘miracles’. There is certainly enough unruly fantasy here for everyone: ships sail through the turf; birds are resurrected; trees bow to offer their fruits. There is the bawdy: an ill-tempered husband and wife find every inch of their bodies covered with, respectively, penises and vaginas. And there is horror: a man is tricked by the devil into castrating himself; the death of a boy spawns an anti-Semitic backlash.
But there are necessarily martyrdoms, too, and these point more clearly to the challenge Jeffs has set herself in trying to make medieval Christian mythologies attractive to a modern audience. After all, the question of what constituted a miracle was something theologians wrestled with at the time. Jeffs cites Albertus Magnus in the 13th century, who defined it as an event ‘raised above the order of nature’. Things conjured with magic – never mind the merely extraordinary – were explicitly excluded.
Saints challenges us to think about the distinction between the supernatural and the miraculous. Jeffs’s accounts are mostly drawn from the early church and all but one is pre-1200, when Vatican bureaucracy took control of the canonisation process. Her selection therefore prioritises exactly the sort of fantastic, folkloric and ahistorical accounts that the papacy wanted to sideline, if not suppress. But although her retellings are shaped by a modern sense of wonder, and in ways that would have been nonsensical to the medieval mind – her elliptical St Germanus narrative, for instance, ends before anything miraculous has occurred – they are sourced from traditional hagiographies. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it is skilfully done.
The agent of the miraculous was a person blessed with virtus, what Jeffs calls ‘the ineffable power of the saint’, the ability to channel the divine and charge everything about them with its grace, even after death. It is this that drew people in their tens of thousands to holy relics. A body’s sanctity was not diminished by dismemberment; each piece held the spiritual force of the whole. You might say the same about the shattered world of medieval Christianity. It is broken and dispersed, but its fragments carry the same indissoluble charge. ‘What should we do about the collective, royally imposed amnesia we have in relation to the survivals that are our birthright?’ Jeffs asks. One answer might be: read this book.
More about my mother: Elaine, by Will Self, reviewed
Inspired by his late mother’s diaries, Will Self’s fictionalised Elaine covers just over a year in the life of its titular character. Elaine Hancock is a trailing wife living in upstate New York, where her husband, John, teaches English at Cornell.
It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life. But Will Self is no stranger to outrageousness
Zigzagging chronologically, the novel takes place in the mid-1950s – more than a decade before Self lived in Ithaca with his parents, who then separated. He portrays it as a loose time at the faculty: the Hancocks display a ‘masochistic intimacy’ by swapping notes about the people they’ve drunkenly ‘necked’ during evenings out. Disdainful of her husband (‘a milquetoast man who doesn’t know how to make love properly’), Elaine flirts with extramarital affairs but mostly indulges in a rich fantasy life. She tends to fall for ‘difficult, screwy guys’, and when rebuffed ‘[dogs] these men’s footsteps as they try to escape her clutches’.
Elaine assists John, who is gunning for promotion and a Fulbright, by typing and editing his manuscripts on Milton. Having studied under Ted Roethke at Penn State, she also aspires to write, but considers her work ‘nonviable… as some obstetrician might say of an embryo’. She asks for advice from Vladimir Nabokov, who makes a cameo appearance on campus. The ‘balding old coot’, as Elaine refers to him, suggests she ‘paint the bars of [her] own cage’. Instead, she burns her journals and finds herself hemmed in by housework. ‘Is this it?’ she howls aloud.
Elaine suffers from migraines and ‘postpartum neurosis’, which manifests as panic attacks that psychoanalysis has failed to cure. Her erratic moods sometimes culminate in violence towards her son, filling her with shame. ‘On the verge of girl-hating puberty,’ Billy – an only child in the book – is precocious. The nickname variant at least precludes ‘Little Willy’, as Self’s mother called him growing up. But Billy’s personality tracks with the author’s Eeyorish persona:
He returned from his first day in first grade to solemnly announce that the sign on the classroom door read COME ON IN EVERYONE AND LET’S HAVE FUN. The disgust with which Fun had been uttered was complete.
We have previously met versions of Self’s mother, a New York transplant née Elaine Rosenbloom, on the page: first in the short story ‘The North London Book of the Dead’, written soon after her death in 1988. Self also mined her diaries for his novel How the Dead Live, which featured a Jewish mother replaying memories, including her sexual escapades, posthumously. In addition to the marital plotline, Elaine touches upon the anti-Semitism and racism of the era. Elaine, who considers being Jewish ‘altogether a cosmic embarrassment’, ‘passes’, while her darker-skinned brother Robert ‘closely resembles a cigar-store Indian’, she notes. John, meanwhile, was born Johann Schitz, but changed his name when he joined the army, as ‘having a Kraut name wasn’t going to look good once brave boys began dying’. Elaine had ‘supported him – after all, she, too, was keen on hiding in plain view’.
It is not for the faint-hearted to write about one’s mother’s sex life, real or imagined. But Self is no stranger to outrageousness. Previous fictional flights of fancy include a woman sprouting a penis and a man a vagina behind his knee (Cock & Bull); a Kafkaesque London populated by exhibitionist apes (Great Apes); and a future dystopia ruled by the dispatches of a disgruntled cabbie (The Book of Dave). Billed as ‘perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction’, Elaine pushes provocation a step further. For readers who find themselves queasy when an author refers to his mother’s vulva being ‘grabbed at’ or a lover’s ‘fingers on her mons, his thumb in her vagina’, here’s hoping it’s also the last.
The book’s greatest offences, however, are not sexual but stylistic. Self’s maximalism has not aged well. While he’s reined in recurrent tics (I spotted only one ‘again-annagain’ and not a single ‘annaround’ this time around), his unwavering adoration of the thesaurus fails to elevate his prose. Like his 2019 addiction memoir Will, this book is littered with italics and arbitrary ellipses. Elaine wonders: ‘Can it be… that the acme of success… for me… is being able… to do my job as a housekeeper?’ They appear in his modernist novels – Umbrella, Shark and Phone – as well, but italics and ellipses were better suited to the trilogy’s cultural references and stream-of-consciousness, respectively.
Self’s fiction occasionally arrives at characterisation by way of accretion, but Elaine’s interiority never quite coalesces. Whereas Will was (annoyingly) told in the third person, Elaine (even more annoyingly) mixes third- and first-person, sometimes switching mid-sentence: ‘Elaine has cast pen and exercise book aside on several occasions and… pleasured myself.’ Even the sex scenes fail to titillate – despite an adulterous plot twist, the novel is more an arm’s-length portrait of a woman on the verge than a good old-fashioned Updikean frolic.
‘I don’t really write for readers,’ Self once admitted to the Guardian. In Elaine, he makes that abundantly clear.
Never pour scorn on Croydon
‘So f-ing Croydon,’ was the worst insult David Bowie could think of to describe a person or thing that revolted him. ‘Less of a place, more of a punchline,’ was a recent swipe by Sue Perkins, the Croydon-born comedian who grew up at the tail end of the town’s golden era of rampant employment, ambitious cultural venues and well-endowed private schools.
London’s outermost, southernmost, most populous borough is an easy target for condescension: too brash, yet too poor; too try-hard, yet too lethargic; too ambitious, yet not ambitious enough. As the Croydonian author John Grindrod has written, locals are accustomed to Croydon’s ‘very existence – our existence – provoking outrage’. Croydon, neither London nor suburb, can’t win.
If you pour scorn on Croydon,Will Noble argues, you pour scorn on yourself
In this gutsy, charming book, Will Noble asks us to think again. He suggests that the national contempt for Croydon as a ‘philistine, materialistic wasteland – a godless place’ is deflected self-loathing, bound up in anxiety about social class. In truth, Noble argues, Croydon is Britain in microcosm, with ‘its diversity of denizens, its mixture of urban grittiness and rural beauty, its antipodal wealth and poverty, its amassing cultural fecundity’. If you pour scorn on Croydon, you pour scorn on yourself.
Noble, who edits the cheerful Londonist website, looks beyond Croydon’s sprawl, grit and traffic and seeks to reframe the borough as a national marvel, the embodiment of brio. That is a lot to ask of readers whose only encounter with it has been as a foil, rattling over the dusty A232 flyover towards Gatwick and on to somewhere – anywhere – else. But Noble is undeterred.
He starts from the town’s earliest history, with various archbishops of Canterbury who settled there from the ninth century (six are buried in Croydon Minster), and ends in the present era of Brit School stardust and municipal bankruptcy. He makes a case for Croydon as a place of firsts. The aerodrome, which opened in 1920, was eight years later the biggest, busiest airport in the world, serving leisure passengers at the end of the colonial era. It’s intact; you can still visit today and I recommend you do – it’s an art-deco wonder. The birth of the international air travel industry was crude (pilots worked out where they were by dipping down over railway stations to read the name boards), but Croydon was its cradle. The UK’s first black international superstar (the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor), the earliest supermarkets, affordable cars, punk records: they all came from Croydon.
It amounts to a town hungry for new ideas, sometimes to its own detriment. Special attention is paid to Sir James Marshall, Croydon’s post-war mayor with a mania for demolition and rebuilding in the brutalist style, and ‘such a redoubtable figure it’s a wonder he wasn’t made from reinforced concrete’. In 2020, Croydon was the first of a wave of councils to declare bankruptcy, largely due to poor leadership decisions and a flawed house-building scheme.
History and lost glory are fascinating, but lots of places are unloved and most could point to innovations. Why is Noble writing about Croydon – and why now? I think the answer lies partly in the housing crisis. In 2020, the Financial Times commissioned research from Zoopla, the property website, to find out where Londoners were searching for property in the first ten weeks of lockdown. Remarkably, Croydon was top – a reflection, perhaps, of a pandemic-era longing for space at reasonable prices within reach of the centre of London. Average property prices in Croydon are just over £400,000, compared with £721,000 in Hackney; the fast train takes 16 minutes to reach Victoria.
Noble writes that he moved to Croydon in 2022. Younger Londoners such as him rely on the borough as an affordable way to live in the capital. As ever with Croydon, the evidence is material. Chic new high-rise apartments have appeared, with abstract names such as Ten Degrees, and rooftop bars with views over the South Downs. Perhaps the town’s new, upwardly mobile residents crave pride, a sense of history and different ways of thinking about their home to cement its extraordinariness.
Despite its charm, Noble’s prose can sometimes register as a little too eager to convince. He scampers through Croydon’s recent problems as if they interest him less: political upheavals after the council declared itself bankrupt; poverty, the roots of the 2011 riots.
Croydon is home to Lunar House, the front line of the Home Office’s immigration services, where new arrivals to the UK have reported for processing since 1970. Noble writes about the building, but the extraordinary range of people who stayed where they landed and their descendants who make up modern Croydon’s population are scarcely mentioned. There is no escaping the borough’s sclerotic public services and its failures of vulnerable people, nor the rundown look and feel of much of it.
Still, Noble exposes Bowie’s instinctive contempt as misplaced and deeply ironic. For all its debt, deprivation and concrete, at its best Croydon was a dynamic, heroic place. In many ways it remains so. It is more interesting than boring old Beckenham, where the master of reinvention and the avant-garde chose to live until he left for the US in 1974. We need Croydon’s brio, its spirit of futurism, more than ever.