Schools

Thursday

Camilla Swift

School portraits | 10 March 2016

  Sir William Borlase   Parents fight tooth and claw to make sure that their house is in the right catchment area to get into Buckinghamshire’s excellent state schools. Many of the former grammar schools — including this one, RGS High Wycombe and Wycombe High School — are now Academies, but they are no less popular or successful. This co-educational grammar is based in the leafy town of Marlow only yards from the Thames. It has its own boat club and school rowing teams regularly win national championships and compete at Henley Regatta. The academic results are superb, too: 82 per cent of last year’s A-level results were B or

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Ladies be good

I wonder if Cheltenham Ladies’ College is still like that,’ I thought, as I interviewed a succession of 1950s old girls recently. Their memories left me reeling, and I felt relieved not to have been a sensitive girl sent to Cheltenham from an outpost of the empire, condemned to spend seven years being hissed at in Gothic classrooms by sarcastic unmarried women. I still can’t decide whether I would have preferred to have had a terrifying time at Cheltenham in the Fifties but be -brilliantly taught, or have gone somewhere relaxed like Southover (which closed in 1988) and have a lovely time but learn nothing. Probably Cheltenham — but only

Daisy Dunn

It’s not child’s play

Aldous Huxley observed that ‘Where music is concerned, infant prodigies are almost the rule. In the world of literature, on the other hand, they remain the rarest exceptions.’ This, he believed, was because good literature could not be written without experience of the outside world, while music was the art least connected with reality. ‘Like mathematics,’ he said, ‘it is an almost unadulterated product of the inner world.’ Musicians may dispute the last point, but the fact remains that musical and artistic ability can emerge with dizzying speed. When it does, the question is how best — and how far — to nurture it? Several schools offer a specialised education in

Ed Cumming

School drinking is the best kind

Last December it was reported that Ampleforth and Rugby schools both have new on-site bars, where pupils are allowed to drink in moderation. ‘We are trying to create somewhere where [the pupils] can let their hair down but we’re all on call,’ said David Lambon, the school’s first lay headmaster. ‘It’s a fine balance with children of that age — they need to be treated like adults and feel independent.’ The only shock was that this was presented as news. Booze and sex are the death and taxes of adolescence: they’re unavoidable, so you might as well find a way to manage them. Schools have had provision around alcohol since

Harry Mount

Looking up an old friend

As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for feeling both terrified and smug at the same time. That’s how I felt when I gave a recent talk to my old school, Westminster, from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. The talk was about how guilty I felt at taking the Westminster Abbey for granted when I was a boy there in the 1980s — the abbey being the school chapel. I worked out that I’d been to the abbey 400 times when I was at school. Well, to be precise, that’s 400 minus the number of times I bunked abbey — which I began to do

Aidan Hartley

The master Builder who made me

Michael Schützer-Weissmann was the greatest teacher I ever had. When I was 17, I got into trouble at Sherborne, my school in Dorset, after a friend and I each drank a bottle of whisky. I felt splendid, but my friend had to be stomach-pumped. For that the headmaster, Robert Macnaghten, caned me. It was amazing that he managed to hit me six times, because he was famously blind — and had once awarded a detention to a coat hung on a peg at the end of his classroom, mistaking it for a boy refusing to sit down. Caning probably saved me from expulsion, but I was thoroughly fed up with

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

When the slop had to stop

A spirited debate is under way at the Year One lunch table. This class of five-year-old Hackney epicures are discussing the merits of olives. ‘Olives are too disgusting and greeny,’ says Marley, prodding at the offending olive. ‘Olives are too yucky,’ joins in Eduardo, who is carefully hiding them under his knife. But Asar, a boy who obviously has a more developed palate, declares them ‘yummy’ and devours the lot. Olives are just one of the unfamiliar ingredients on plates at Gayhurst Community School on the edge of London Fields in north-east London. There are sticky pork ribs, a tabouleh made with mograbiah (giant couscous), parsley and tomatoes, sweetcorn fritters,

Constance Watson

Is a degree worth the debt?

You’ll never get into a good university if you carry on like this.’ A haunting threat from school days past, but since the coalition trebled university tuition fees in 2010, the question is — do you really want to? The decision to increase fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year was met with anger from students and parents alike. Riots broke out with police arresting 153 people at a demo in Trafalgar Square. Widespread fury was particularly directed at Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who had pledged to vote against any increase in fees — so much so that he was forced to broadcast a public apology: ‘We made

Alexandra Farrelly

The Force is still with me

My initial reaction on learning that my secondary school had compulsory CCF — Combined Cadet Force — on Wednesday afternoons was one of horror. As an ‘army brat’, the child of an officer, I was mortified to be following in my father’s footsteps and completing assault courses and weighted swims every single week. However, my view of the CCF was to change dramatically over the following five years. At 14, I aimed to be the coolest camo-clad teenager for our first day. On the evening before, we lurked in our boarding houses and laboriously pinned in our trousers, practised ‘messy buns’ and pouted in a mirror while sporting red lipstick. Unfortunately,

Alice Cockerell

Is there still a place for single-sex schools?

NO I am pretty sure my all-girl school turned me into a delinquent. All right, I might not have peed in phone boxes, graffiti’d on trains or spent time in a state penitentiary. But for all of this, I definitely think a strain of delinquency was bred into me by single–sex education. Just outside a sedentary market town in the West Country, my boarding school had presumably been chosen by my mother to instil in me a measure of gentility; it certainly wasn’t for the academia. Old dames, many of whom had been at the school themselves during the Boer War, made up the teaching staff. It is hard to

Ed Clarke

The joy of grammar

A virulent epidemic has in recent years spread across our island nation. I speak not of bird flu, Ebola or the plague, but of grammatophobia: the irrational fear of grammar, its necessity and its teaching in our schools. This has proven both highly contagious and severe in its consequences. The symptoms have never been more apparent than in the hysterical reaction to the government’s new Spag (spelling, punctuation and grammar) test for 11-year-olds. ‘This curriculum is the direct result of a government’s Gradgrind approach to curriculum development,’ thundered Mary Bousted of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in the TES. This Dickensian term is used for anyone with the temerity

Beth Noakes

Queue for boarding

Those whose only experience of packing school trunks is via Mallory Towers, Kingscote or Hogwarts may be relaxed about the rise in boarding-school fees. But with annual fees at some of our best-known boarding schools approaching £40,000, traditional boarding families which don’t include a hedge-fund manager, prime minster or Kazakhstani oligarch may well be casting a nervous eye at the private day school down the road. Or they, and others who prefer a broader social mix, may instead be applying to a different and little-known breed of boarding school. A state one, where tuition is free. Some charge for extended ‘day-boarding’ places (boarding life without the sleepovers), but full or

Mark Palmer

Blazers of glory

Most mornings on the way to work I pass students flowing out of Fulham Broadway tube station en route to the London Oratory School. They are an assorted bunch. Some seem more confident than others. One or two of the boys look immaculate, while others have clearly stirred their cornflakes with their ties. Some of the girls appear remarkably grown- up for their age — but presumably that’s my ‘how-come-policemen-are-getting-younger’ syndrome. What they share apart, obviously, from wishing they were still tucked up in bed, is a uniform chosen for them by the school, which they have adapted with varying success to their own personalities or moods on any given

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Can a school share out its success?

They have enviable results in the classroom and on the sports field. They command substantial fees and send large numbers of pupils to top universities. So why have leading private schools found it such heavy going transferring their success when sponsoring state schools? It seemed the ideal solution to help break down the great barrier between state and private schooling, as well as to address the charge that private schools were not doing enough to justify their charitable status: a leading private school takes a struggling state school under its wing, lends it some expertise, allows it to use some of its facilities and even shares some of its teachers.

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Blackboard jungle

The world of education is a complex one. There are so many options – public schools, academies, state schools; single-sex ones and co-educational ones – that it’s no wonder people get bogged down. This supplement, kindly sponsored by Investec Wealth & Investment, aims to make things at least a little clearer. When people raise the subject of boarding schools, for example, it’s normally expensive public schools that you think of. But as Beth Noakes explains, there are also state schools that also offer boarding – although you might find the odd frog in the swimming pool. School food is changing, as Laura Freeman discovers when she visits a state primary

Monday

Rod Liddle

Perhaps public schools do have their benefits, after all?

Guardian journalist in self-awareness shock. A very good piece by Hadley Freeman about the utter ubiquity of public school-educated monkeys at the top of every desirable profession (and, of course, trade). Here’s the crucial bit: Life is unfair, and I benefit from this unfairness every day. Even besides being born in the era of modern medicine and Ryan Gosling’s face, I went to a private school. As much as I’d like to think my career is all thanks to my special snowflake qualities, it’s difficult, when looking around at the rest of my heavily privately-educated profession, to draw any conclusion other than that my schooling might have helped me. Yes,

Wednesday

Professor Allyson Pollock

What schools don’t want you to know about rugby

Today, I have joined 70 doctors and academics in writing to the government calling for a ban on tackling in rugby matches, saying that injuries from this ‘high-impact collision sport’ can have lifelong consequences for children. I speak from both professional and personal experience. I remember as if it were yesterday, that autumn afternoon 11 years ago when my son’s school phoned me at work to tell me my child had been injured and hospitalised for a second time while playing rugby. I was sickened, upset, anxious and angry. School should be a safe place for children. The first time my son was injured the school had described it as ‘bad luck’ and promised

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The best state schools have pulled ahead of private schools. Why is that so hard to accept?

For years, now, the Sutton Trust has been releasing research showing how many doctors, judges, journalists etc were privately educated and conclude that it’s all a posh boys’ stitch-up. The British press loves banging this old drum, but in doing so they drown out a new tune. Today, there is more academic excellence in the state sector than the private sector. Not that many people want to know. Take, for example, an article in this week’s Economist. “Education should not be about wealth” it quotes Tony Blair saying in 1996. Wrong, Blair! The Sutton Trust’s report shows that “two decades later, it still is” about wealth. But when does the Economist think these ‘senior civil

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Big heads

The term ‘superhead’ was first used during the Blair government in 1998: an eye-catching word for a new breed of Superman-style headmasters or headmistresses, fast-tracked star teachers who would be parachuted into failing inner-city state schools and paid six-figure salaries to ‘turn them around’. It reaped rewards and can generally be considered a Good Thing. Sir Michael Wilshaw, for example, now chief inspector of schools, became known as ‘the hero of Hackney’ for transforming the academic record of Mossbourne Community Academy, built on the site of the totally-failed Hackney Downs School. Sometimes power went to the superheads’ heads and they were caught siphoning off funds to pay for their holidays.

Thursday

Joe Baron

A lesson in self-censorship

According to my former colleagues, history teachers in an urban English state school, anyone who votes for the Conservative party is ‘thick’, the British Empire was ‘unambiguously evil’ and capitalism leads to ‘mass inequality and misery for the vast majority of working people’. The only answer was, you guessed it, socialism. Yes, the cliché of the Little Red Book-carrying schoolteacher is alive and well. As the only right-of-centre teacher in the history department, I found lunchtime particularly galling. My colleagues would sit around denouncing the British empire, Michael Gove’s changes to the national curriculum and the government’s ‘ideologically driven’ attempts to cut the nation’s deficit. But what worried me more