Now, class, pay attention, and answer the following question. What is the purpose of education? Is it (a) to create adults equipped to compete in a global marketplace, (b) to develop imaginative and well-rounded individuals, or (c) to establish a homogeneous society with equal opportunities for all? If you are British, of a certain age and ticked (c), then you’ll almost certainly have heard of Holland Park School, London’s most celebrated comprehensive, which this September celebrates its 50th birthday. Far from being, in the words of Alastair Campbell, a “bog-standard” comp, Holland Park, in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, has from the first been known as “the Eton of comprehensives”.
In Britain, comprehensive education was an ideal that gradually emerged after the second world war. Butler’s Education Act of 1944 had introduced free secondary schooling for all up to the age of 14. But, while the act improved equality of opportunity, in practice most local authorities continued to opt for a tripartite secondary system: grammar schools for the most able; secondary technical schools for vocational training; and secondary moderns for those “whose future employment will not demand any measure of technical skill or knowledge”.
Only about 20 per cent of children – and most of those middle-class – managed to squeeze through the needle’s eye that set them on the path that led to university, and deepening dissatisfaction with the 11-plus examination led to increasing experiments with “multilateral” schools, long before a Labour government finally “suggested” comprehensives in 1965.
London County Council was one of the first local authorities to embrace the brave new educational future. The London School Plan of 1947 stated: “Life in school should promote a feeling of social unity among adolescents of all kinds and degrees off ability.” While a few East End secondary moderns were transformed into comprehensives in the late 1940s, it was the purpose-built Holland Park that became the LCC flagship.
Designed by the architect of the Royal Festival Hall, Sir Leslie Martin, and built at what was then an astonishing cost of £1m, the school was established on eight leafy acres of London’s most costly square footage. Its new playground was surrounded by embassies and aristocrats; a rattle’s throw from its discreet gates, white-gloved nannies wheeled Silver Cross prams to Kensington Gardens for a spot of boating before tea.
Of course, not everyone in the neighbourhood was thrilled by the prospect of a new school for 2,000 pupils. The naturalist Peter Scott (who claimed the children would frighten away nightingales), John Betjeman (who worried about the trees) and the High Commissioner of South Africa (who feared for his garden parties at nearby High End) were only a few of those who wrote in protest to the local newspaper. Typical of the correspondence was the claim that the school would “reduce Campden Hill to Earls Court”.
But early fears were confounded. The children wore blazers and ties, the teachers gowns. The school had “houses”, a Latin motto and the cane. And, though pupils of all abilities and a variety of backgrounds were educated under the same new roof, the demarcation between able and less able remained sharply defined. All years were streamed into sets A to E and, while set A was distinguished by girls called Emma and Sophie, those in set E were definitely not deemed suitable fodder for public examinations.
While the school’s location was definitely “posh”, its catchment area was not limited to those who might have considered public schools were their chief educational alternative. The bulk of its intake came from neighbouring Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush, where down-at-heel tenements and newly built council houses were the norm.
But the impoverished and the émigré were certainly not its only clientele. The school quickly attracted high-profile, left-leaning pioneers who, though often privately educated themselves, were convinced that state education was the answer to a more egalitarian age. The former peer and government minister Tony Benn and his well-born American wife, Caroline, famously transferred their two oldest sons from Westminster to Holland Park, and Charles Jenkins, son of Labour cabinet minister Roy, joined the sixth form from Winchester. (“Cabinet minister’s son picks a free school” ran the headline.) The school became increasingly progressive and cool: during the 1960s and 1970s trendy bourgeois parents of the type seen in Marc cartoons could feel happy that, as well as experiencing a judicious dose of “reality”, their children could stand in the lunch queue with the likes of Anjelica Huston, daughter of film director John, and the children of the Marquess of Queensbury.
Who’s winning in the primaries?
Many posh English families don’t trouble state secondary schools with their offspring, and will pay for independent schools that offer the cachet to launch a child in competitive society, write Isabel Berwick and Lisa Freedman.
But canny parents know that there are London neighbourhood state primaries that attract a disproportionate number of traditionally “old money” families – allowing them to save money for the ruinous public school fees while gaining green “cred points” by having the au pair walk the kids to school.
Here is the FT’s pick of the desirable primaries.
Canonbury, Islington
Attracts N1 luvvies and some seriously posh parents. At a 2006 auction, compèred by celebrity parent Boris Johnson, someone paid £5,000 to have Chris Martin from Coldplay sing a song. The auction raised £43,000.St Michael’s, Highgate
A traditional choice for people living in the “village”. Once in, expect to pay out – the parents’ association is possibly the highest-grossing in the UK. “We’ve made fundraising part of the St Michael’s culture,” the head of the PTA told The Daily Telegraph. Many go private afterwards, including two recent places at Eton.The Queen’s Primary, Kew
A CofE that requires long-term churchgoing. Once you have the place, you’ll meet second-home-owning families, often with high-flying mothers and fathers. Many very smart Kew-ies stick with this excellent school until Year 6 in preference to the abundant local preps.Dulwich Hamlet, Dulwich Village
A desirable alternative to Dulwich’s super-competitive clutch of independents, this school might be harder to get into than some of the selective preps.Honeywell in Battersea
A “honeypot” school, long beloved of the area’s bankers. It is so oversubscribed that parents can’t be guaranteed a place if they live even one street away. Consequently, plenty of “buying into” Honeywell Street goes on, at a premium.Allfarthing in Wandsworth
Another desirable catchment area school in the heart of Nappy Valley. It’s been known for some streets to have houses that are in on one side of the road and out (and cheaper) on the other.St Peter’s Eaton Square
Unspeakably wealthy catchment area, although many of the smart set leave after the infant years.St Mary Abbots, Kensington
Small, desirable CofE in a prime Kensington spot, possibly the most aristocratic primary of the lot. Strong commitment to the attached church is needed to get in, plenty of politico, media and very smart old-money offspring.
These days, however, Holland Park is no longer the school of choice for west London’s fashionable liberals and, though David Cameron sends his children to St Mary Abbot’s, a state primary down the road, it’s doubtful you’ll see Holland Park on the top of his “pan-London” admissions list when his eldest hits 11.
And this is not because Holland Park isn’t a good school. In many ways, it’s better than it’s ever been, with a head so passionate and committed it would be hard to find his equal anywhere in the country. Colin Hall, 47, took over the headship in 2001. What he inherited was a disenchanted fiefdom, with low attendance, low academic performance and its share of inner-city problems. “Standards are not high enough,” lectured Ofsted crisply, and “behaviour is unruly”.
Visit today and it’s difficult to imagine this was ever the case. There’s the scent of freshly cut hyacinths in its pristine, light-filled reception and chic retro sofas designed by mid-century modernist Robin Day. The corridors are polished and orderly and the pupils themselves, in elegantly cut grey suits, would do credit to any independent-school brochure. “The environment,” says Hall. “is part of an attitude, a landscape for learning. It transmits that we care about young people and, as a result, students want to work hard and feel they belong.”
Hall – an energetic terrier of a man educated at Sheffield and Cambridge – has worked 14-hour days and six-day weeks to transform Holland Park into one of Britain’s “most improved schools”. The school is everything a New Labour education aims to be about. Cosmopolitan and inclusive, with high aspirations set and high targets achieved. At least 70 languages are spoken in its corridors, and some of its parents have never themselves experienced classroom life, but Hall has blasted up the academic results from a meagre 30 per cent reaching the government target of five GCSEs at grades A*-C to a well-above-national-average of 66 per cent.
“The expectation is that everyone can achieve,” says Hall. But not everyone wants to achieve it here. “Our popularity has reduced the catchment to not much more than a mile,” says Hall, “but this isn’t rural Gloucestershire and middle-class parents often choose private because they feel there’s less potential for worrying influences. That said, we do now get more children coming in from middle-class primaries.”
Three such are the sons of a senior investment banker who could have afforded to make a different choice but selected Holland Park against the jeremiads of fellow parents. “We felt the head was a visionary, and we wanted our children to have an education reflective of the world they live in. We took a gamble, but we’re delighted with it.”
So why are other prosperous parents not queuing up to enjoy this fine and free education? Partly, of course, this being Britain, schooling remains a question of class. More than class, however, what has affected the continuing rise in demand for private education, particularly in London where 15 per cent of parents now pay fees, is the education agenda.
From the 1950s to the 1970s educational idealism concentrated on the formation of society and the formation of the individual; if the class-bound English were never unduly convinced by the notion of one education for all, the overriding concern was the development of character and intellectual enrichment.
Today, state or private, education is about competition in a global marketplace. When Labour came to power in 1997 it began treating schools as branches of a large business, setting them performance targets. Now schools, like public companies, are primarily judged on results. By examining children at 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18, and then ranking schools in order of achievement, the government has made it clear that the key merit of a school is its exam statistics.
The private sector, which has long prided itself in responding to market conditions, has, of course, changed to meet these new requirements. In the 1970s, my brothers attended Westminster School, now a consistently league-table topping establishment. At that time, boys who achieved three grade As in their A levels were in the minority. Indeed, I remember one clever chancer bragging, “I got into Oxford with ease,” – meaning he’d been accepted at one of the world’s elite universities with the minimum requirement of two grade Es.
Today, of course, no “top” school could possibly let that happen. In the past 15 years, Westminster’s A-level results have zoomed up from 40 per cent A grades to 86 per cent, an improvement to make any chief executive smile.
Dr Anthony Seldon, master of £26,000-a-year Wellington College, recently made headlines with his contentious statement that the private schools create a social apartheid by creaming off the brightest children, but he is only partially correct. That’s what they’d like to do, but they don’t always manage it.
My children attended a predominantly middle-class primary in pushy north London. Every year at 11 about half the year group goes on to the private sector, many with scholarships. A good percentage of these children also sat the intensely competitive exams for the three remaining north London grammar schools, where 10 children apply for every place. Usually, one or two succeed, and of those who do, even if they’ve also been offered a full bursary or large scholarship by the independent sector, most choose the state.
The current government boasts of having spent more than any previous government on enhancing state education, and at primary level in particular, they’ve seen considerable success. But social equality is only a subsidiary goal, our ability to compete in a globalised economy is hugely important both to politicians and parents. And the way this is achieved is by social exclusion, whether through paying fees, through selective state education, through church attendance, or through home purchase.
Private schools are good at producing exam results. They do it by a level of tutoring and intervention that is inconceivable in the state system. One boy I know, perfectly bright, but like many 15-year-old boys with his head in the clouds, recently sat his mock GCSEs at a leading public school. In order to keep him focused, he was allocated a private room and a teacher to snap his attention back to his work. Another, who recently left an illustrious “premier league” public school with some highly competitive A-level grades, had individual private tutoring from his teachers the night before every exam paper. No government is ever likely to underwrite anything like an equivalent level of support, though Gordon Brown has promised to try.
Whether the government’s overall strategy is right or not will depend on your politics and your outlook for the future, but the exam-passing agenda is certainly shared by our economic competitors in the east, and one English fee-paying school gives a flavour of the approach adopted by countries which consistently top international academic achievement tables.
At Concord College in Shropshire, where about 85 per of pupils come from south-east Asia, the goals are purely pragmatic. Pupils are there to pass exams and pass exams they successfully do, since Concord is now one of the top 20 exam-passing schools in the country. The A-level teaching is concentrated on science; history and geography have been edited from the curriculum. Every Saturday morning, instead of kicking round a football or slouching in front of the telly, every student sits internal exams.
The school offers little in the way of social positioning – you’d be hard-pressed to find an Ascot-going mother who’d ever heard of it – but it does deliver the goods. In 2007 Concord sent more than 30 students to medical school and 15 to Oxbridge out of an upper sixth of 120.
At well-funded Holland Park, on the other hand, with a significantly larger sixth form, only two or three students a year get in to Oxbridge. “Private schools are a parallel universe,” says Hall. “When it gets to achievement at the pinnacle, our students are eminently capable of Oxbridge, but they’re not necessarily accompanied by the diversity of other cultural experience. I imagine it must be very difficult to chose between someone who’s outstanding at maths and someone who’s outstanding at maths and can also quote TS Eliot and play the violin.”
The independent sector provides exam grades, a competitive cultural CV and confidence and certainly achieves a disproportionate share of the glittering prizes. As the Sutton Trust, an independent educational body set up to aid young people from non-privileged backgrounds, pointed out last November: “100 elite schools – making up under 3 per cent of the 3,700 schools with sixth forms and sixth form colleges in the UK – accounted for a third of admissions to Oxbridge during the past five years and a sixth of admissions to the top 13 research universities.”
Londoners have long been conscious of living in a global environment, and we know that today’s oligarchs and masters of the universe are increasingly likely to have three degrees, including a PhD and an MBA. Though we may not want our children to run the world, most of us would like to give them the opportunity to try. And state or private, middle-class parents are going to go out of their way to achieve that possibility.
Holland Park is now hoping to replace its 1950s buildings with a school-for-the-future costing £72.6m, the most expensive ever built in Britain. This time the plans have been designed by Philip Tilbury, an architect who has helped refurbish Eton. Once again, the school is destined to grab the headlines as a statement of English state education. But will it be enough to make it a truly local school?
Perhaps David Cameron has the answer.
Lisa Freedman runs a schools advice service and is a contributing editor to ‘The Good Schools Guide’
