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Britain is starting to see a small but growing movement of parents who want to open their own schools. Not comprehensive, not private, but a throwback to the all-encompassing state schools of old. Father-of-four Toby Young is leading the way.
Lying awake, I often fantasise about the day my new school opens. In this dream, I’m standing off to one side watching the pupils stream past in their new uniforms, faces full of hope. No fanfare, no plaudits. Just the quiet satisfaction of knowing I’ve made a difference. I then get on my bicycle and ride off into the sunset, Gary-Cooper-style.
OK, it’s a bit pathetic. But I need something to keep me going. I’m currently leading the efforts of a group of parents and teachers in Acton, west London, to set up Britain’s first “free school” – and it’s a Herculean task. We have to find a site, devise a curriculum, recruit the staff and persuade the Government to pay for the whole kit and caboodle.
I recently met up with Jonathan Fingerhut, the leader of a parent group that has succeeded in setting up a voluntary-aided school in Barnet, hoping for some encouragement, but he was plain-spoken to a fault. “To be honest, if I’d known at the beginning of this process what I know now, I would never have taken it on,” he said. It took Jonathan’s group nine years to set up the Jewish Community Secondary School and his children are now too old to attend. I hope it doesn’t take us that long.
Our plan is to start an academy, which can be done quicker than starting a local authority-maintained comprehensive, but no parent group has attempted to sponsor an academy before. The set-up procedure is designed to be engaged in by other bureaucratic bodies, not a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs. I often feel like an astronaut bobbing up and down in the void, trying to find an entry point into a space station that’s only been designed to dock with other spaceships.
So why am I bothering? The simple answer is I have four children to educate. Admittedly, if I was devoting as much energy to my career as I am to this school project, I could probably earn enough to send them all to Eton, but I don’t want to educate them privately…. Continue reading
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