Spectator schools

Thursday

William Cook

The league of gentlemen

Football is a game for gentlemen played by ruffians, and rugby is just the opposite. That’s what I was taught at grammar school, and for 40 years I believed it. Soccer is for oiks, our teachers told us. Posh boys are no good at football. And so football-playing oiks like me were forced to play rugby, in an attempt to turn us into proper gentlemen. Of course this was utter nonsense — a lot of Britain’s top public schools play football, and always have done. Yet this inverted snobbery prevails, which is ironic, because football in independent schools has never been in better shape. Having long been seen as the

Charlotte Metcalf

Did I destroy my daughter’s prospects?

Every year, thousands of parents face the situation I did in 2014 when I realised that I could no longer afford to educate my ten-year-old daughter privately. At first, I didn’t panic. After all, I lived near some excellent state schools. After queuing for two hours one cold winter Saturday morning for Open Day, we learned that to gain a place at Holland Park you had to live within yards of it, or win a heavily oversubscribed art scholarship, which my daughter attempted — and failed. I still didn’t worry. Why should I have, when 93 per cent of children under 16 in England are educated in state schools? We

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A parent’s dilemma

In my study at home stands a small cork board with the names of eight target schools for my ten-year-old son. The state schools are on the left, the private schools on the right. The decision is due soon and I still have no idea what to do. There aren’t many things that Britain genuinely does better than anyone else in the world, but secondary education is one of them. The discerning Russian plutocrat, who could buy anything anywhere, would have his son in England for his teenage years followed by an American Ivy League university. International league tables rank our private schools top of the world — their quality

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

A model school

It would be a cliché to say that Christian Heinrich fell into his career in education. But really, there isn’t any other way of describing his route into teaching. In his final year of a degree in American literature, he returned home to nurse his sick mother. When she passed away, his old prep school headmaster asked him for a coffee. ‘He played that wonderful trick,’ explains Heinrich. ‘He said, “Oh Christian, I’m taking a Latin class, come along.” Midway through the lesson he had to take a phone call. “Christian, just finish the lesson, and then come and find me.” I duly finished things off, and that was that.

The Spectator

School report | 6 September 2018

    MAKING THE GRADES   When he was education secretary, Michael Gove took it upon himself to reform the GCSE exam system. The A* to G grading system was replaced by a numerical one, with the aim of making it easier to differentiate between the top candidates — A* and A grades were, for example, replaced with three grades: 7, 8 and 9. These new exams were supposed to be harder than the previous ones, with former Harrow headmaster Barnaby Lenon commenting that they ‘contain questions of a level of difficulty that we have not seen since the abolition of O-levels in 1987.’ Despite all of this, GCSE results

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Editor’s Letter | 6 September 2018

State or private? Years of saving every penny in a bid to scrape together enough to pay the school fees, or months of cramming to get your child a scholarship, a bursary… anything to ease the pain. Is it worth it? Fraser Nelson is going through this process, and writes about his dilemma. Charlotte Metcalf, meanwhile, tells the tale of her bid to find the best possible state school for her daughter, and how she still wonders whether she has doomed her child’s prospects by being unable to afford to go private. Elsewhere in the magazine, classics teacher Emma Park argues that children shouldn’t give up on Latin just yet

Thursday

Joanna Williams

Sex education now means whatever schools want it to mean

I’ve never shied away from discussing sex with my children and they’ve always been precocious enough to ask probing questions, usually in public. So when the letter came home from school announcing sex education classes for my then ten-year-old, I was relaxed. And when I later asked him, ‘Did you learn anything you didn’t already know?’, I expected a bored ‘no’. In fact, he said, ‘Yes. Oral sex and masturbation.’ Clearly sex education has moved on since I was at school. Schools have traditionally covered reproduction in science lessons and, since the 1960s, sex education as a discrete subject has dealt with contraception, sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy. David

Mark Palmer

My football lesson

Every now and again my Tube ride to work on the District line is enlivened by children on a school outing. Presumably they are heading for the Science Museum or possibly the National Gallery. Often, they have different coloured badges stuck to their jumpers. As far as I can work out, if, for example, you are a red, then you’re meant to sit with other reds, and sometimes the teacher barks instructions such as: ‘Could the reds try to be a little quieter please?’, or asks: ‘Blues, how many more stops until we get there?’ This last question gives rise to a piercing shriek as a dozen or so blues

The Spectator

School portraits | 15 March 2018

Ludgrove There aren’t many traditional all-boys, full-boarding prep schools left in the UK, but Ludgrove in Berkshire is one. ‘Our boys speak for themselves and it is them that make Ludgrove special. They are full of spark and never short of things to say,’ according to the school. There are two mantras of Ludgrove life, ‘Be kind’ and ‘Be the best you can’, while the school motto is: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might’ (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Ludgrove has a strong academic record — around 70 per cent of the top year go on to Eton, Harrow, Radley or Winchester — but sport and tradition

Constance Watson

Join the club

I’m bored.’ ‘Read a book.’ This sequence more or less summarises my childhood (along with ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Eat some fruit.’) At the time, such instruction was loathsome and it never ceased to amaze me that the grown-ups didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I had obviously considered, and rejected, the idea of picking up a book. They never appeared to be sympathetic to my boredom, in spite of my heartiest attempts to reflect the ennui that was oozing from my every pore. In fact, boredom was positively encouraged by our parents — it was the mother of invention. Those were the days. For many of today’s parents, boredom is

Eleanor Doughty

Why pay for the privilege?

In downstairs loos of houses of a certain sort, the old school photograph is a constant. When you’ve seen a few of these slightly yellowing portraits, you’ve seen them all. But this trend might soon reach its end. If you listen carefully in particular enclaves, you’ll hear faint whisperings about a new way of doing things. Maybe, just maybe, public school isn’t quite for everyone any more. Say goodbye to the old school pictures; the toffs are going native. Last year, in a Viscount’s kitchen, I spotted an invitation to a school fair — at the local primary. A few weeks later, an Old Harrovian whose family has a 300-year

Toby Young Toby Young

Cash for questions

When my eldest child was four and I thought she might not get in to the good local primary school in Shepherd’s Bush, I applied for a place for her at the Harrodian. It’s an all-through independent school in Barnes surrounded by acres of freshly mown grass — almost like a stately home. An attractive school, to be sure, and popular with west London yummy mummies, but I was still a little taken aback to be asked for a ‘deposit’. When it was explained that I’d have to fork this out whether Sasha was offered a place or not, I was horrified. Wouldn’t a better name for it be a

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Matrons of honour

When choosing a boarding school for your child, what’s the most important thing to bear in mind? For some it will be the academic results, for others the location, the range of subjects or the variety of extra-curricular activities on offer. But for many, a big concern will be the pastoral side: who will be carrying out the parental role when your child is living away from home? At the majority of boarding schools, matrons bear most of that responsibility. ‘When you take on the responsibility of someone else’s child, it’s very daunting,’ says Rachael McGuire, who has been matron of Matheson’s House at Glenalmond College in Perthshire for 24

Ross Clark Ross Clark

IB or not to IB?

The International Baccalaureate (IB), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has — like its home town of Geneva — a slightly goody-goody reputation. Although not founded until the 1960s, it grew out of efforts to build a liberal infrastructure for postwar Europe. It was inspired by a pamphlet written in 1948 by the French pedagogue Marie-Thérèse Maurette called ‘Do Education Techniques for Peace Exist?’ We don’t want our schools and universities creating swots who might just turn out like Josef Mengele, the IB seems to be saying, but well-rounded citizens of the world. Nowadays, the IB is often sold by schools as a kind of academic Duke of Edinburgh

Katherine Forster

Minding the gender gap

Boys are behind girls: at primary school, secondary school and at university. In the UK, white working-class boys have long been at the bottom of the heap in terms of attainment, but these days boys of all backgrounds are underperforming relative to girls. Last year, girls got two-thirds of the new top grade 9 scores at GCSE, while just 32 per cent of boys applied for university, compared with 44 per cent of girls. It’s not just in Britain either. Across the OECD countries, a study has found that 15-year-old boys are 50 per cent more likely than girls to fail to meet the baseline standards in reading, maths and

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

The school beside the sea

When you see the name Lawson in The Spectator, it would be understandable if you thought of financial or political matters. And it’s true that Tom Lawson, the headmaster of Eastbourne College, did study PPE at Oxford’s Christ Church like his father, Nigel, and his half-brother, Dominic, before him. But unlike the rest of his family — who have ‘all been journalists, all the way down’ — this Lawson decided to become a teacher. ‘There were two reasons,’ he explains. ‘Firstly I loved my subject; I was wonderfully taught, and I didn’t just want to use my PPE as a stepping stone to another job. I wanted to carry on

The Spectator

School report | 15 March 2018

TRUE GRIT Education secretary Damian Hinds gave his first big speech at the Education World Forum in January, about the vital importance of learning from other countries and ensuring young people are able to thrive in a global economy. He also spoke of the benefits that come from sharing Britain’s educational excellence and know-how with the rest of the world. But he made it clear that he doesn’t believe education is all about exams and A grades. ‘There is much outside the relevant qualifications which matters a great deal as well,’ he said. ‘That you believe that you can achieve, that you can stick with the task at hand and

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Editor’s Letter | 15 March 2018

Is it the responsibility of schools to teach children about relationships and sexual consent? Or is that something parents ought to be teaching at home? This is the question Joanna Williams addresses in our opening feature. She takes a look at the changing face of sex education, and talks to some of its more evangelical exponents, as well as to a mother who has chosen to remove her daughters from sex education classes. It’s something of a controversial topic — but an undeniably interesting one. Gender neutrality is a fashionable subject these days, but Katherine Forster suggests that it’s quite harmful for boys if we pretend they learn in the

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Box of delights | 7 September 2017

No mother, wrote Roald Dahl in his childhood memoir Boy, would send her son off to prep school without, at the very least, the following in his tuck box: a home-made currant cake, a packet of squashed-fly biscuits, a couple of oranges, an apple, a banana, a pot of strawberry jam or Marmite, a bar of chocolate, a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, and a tin of Bassett’s lemonade powder. To these, a boy would add ‘all manner of treasures’, such as magnets, pocket knifes, balls of string, clockwork racing cars, lead soldiers, tiddlywinks, catapults, stink bombs and Mexican jumping beans. One boy in Dahl’s class at St Peter’s in Weston-super-Mare

Susan Hamlyn

Follow the money

In 2007, many of today’s young parents were either graduates or school-leavers testing their skills in their first jobs. They were saving for a mortgage or just enjoying the freedom of being young with few responsibilities. Back then, UK average annual earnings were around £23,765. Now, they are £27,271 — a rise of just under 15 per cent. The average house price in 2007 was £181,383. Today, it’s £215,847 — a rise of more than 19 per cent. Tough on today’s young families, you may think. But the rise in house prices relative to income is nothing compared with the increase in fees for independent schools. As with incomes and