When it comes to championing free schools, Toby Young is a class apart. Victor Smart takes a tutorial
Back in 2010, after a documentary on his proposed West London free school appeared on our screens, Toby Young confided to his wife: “As a self-obsessed, celebrity journalist, I wasn’t exactly universally loved, but it’s only since setting out to do something genuinely worthwhile and public-spirited that I’ve become truly hated.”
Six years on and the loathing has somewhat subsided. The West London Free School (WLFS), along with other free schools co-founded by Young, has become part of the education landscape, successfully navigating Young’s announcement that he was departing as chief executive.
Significantly, David Cameron visited a free school on his final full day in office, underlining the fact that he sees them as part of his legacy. Now, under our grammar school educated prime minister, the talk is of selective schools making a comeback. Young, who is also an ardent Brexiteer, can view events with some satisfaction.
So what turned the hustling celebrity reporter into an earnest educational reformer?
“One of the things I learned about myself after spending five years in New York,” he explains, “is that if I don’t do something worthwhile, with some redeeming social value, I’ll end up feeling miserable. But I didn’t get the education bug until I started worrying about where my four children would go to secondary school, around about 2008."
“My daughter, who is at one of the schools I’ve co-founded, is embarrassed by it. My eldest son, who started at the same school this year, isn’t. In general, they think the whole thing is a bit odd, as does my wife.”
The immediate spur to action was the cost of private schooling. A columnist at the right-leaning magazine The Spectator – previously also a showcase for his friend Boris Johnson – Young has a comfortable home in Acton, but four sets of school fees was financially beyond him.
So, he looked back to what had worked in his own education.
“I first went to two comprehensives and was then in the last grammar school year of a school that’s a comprehensive now. The last one was definitely the best.
“What were the differences between the good school and the two bad ones? Expectations were higher, behaviour was better, the teachers were committed. It was that experience that inspired me to create the kind of school that I’ve always described as a ‘comprehensive grammar’ – a school with grammar school standards, but a comprehensive intake.”
Young certainly deserves his share of credit for the shift in the public debate. He is a seasoned guerrilla fighter in the war against the pieties of the ‘liberal establishment’ – progressive education in particular – and his columns habitually scourge left-wingers and their various “pretensions”, rubbishing the insipid, politically correct opinions that have become a new educational orthodoxy.
It’s no surprise that the motto for WLFS – London’s first free school when it opened in 2011 – snubs ‘inclusivity’ by opting for a dead language: Latin. Sapere aude – a phrase first coined by Horace in the First Century BC and later adopted by Kant as a battle cry for the Enlightenment – is emblazoned on the emblem alongside an image of the grim-faced Roman poet.
Young may be stretching it a bit to translate the phrase as ‘Dare to learn’ – ‘Dare to know’, or ‘Dare to be wise’, would be more literal – but this rendering captures perfectly the ethos he is striving to attain: education that is about aiming high, not dumbing down; daring to master the complex, not shielding pupils from difficulty.
Young’s own motto seems to be that if you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing. He once based an entire book on the sweeping claim that “most educational experts are wrong about nearly everything.” Does he still hold to that?
“Yes, I do still believe that,” he declares. “A good example is the negative attitude of the vast majority of educationalists to the teaching method known as direct instruction, or ‘chalk and talk’. That’s the old-fashioned approach whereby a teacher stands in front of a class and passes on his or her knowledge. It’s the opposite of ‘discovery learning’, in which the teacher is a ‘guide on the side’, rather than a ‘sage on the stage’.
“Needless to say, that approach is much more popular. It’s the orthodoxy taught in most university education departments in the UK and America and in much of Europe, too. But if you look at the research into which teaching methods are the most effective, direct instruction comes out on top.”
It is an article of faith for the free schools movement that state schools should aim to deliver the calibre of education offered by independents charging upwards of £15,000 a year.
“I’m disappointed by how many parents of my children’s friends have chosen to go private. If you look at the data, there’s scant evidence that it represents good value for money. One of the reasons they often cite is that their children are bright and wouldn’t be stretched at a comprehensive. But a child predicted at the age of 11 to get 8 A*s at GCSE is no less likely to get them at a good comprehensive than at a good private school."
“There is some evidence that children educated privately, on average, earn slightly more over the course of their careers than those from similar backgrounds educated at state schools, but the difference is less than the total cost of going private in the first place."
“When I point this out to parents, they frequently express disbelief – and that in itself is revealing. They’re often beggaring themselves to afford the fees – foregoing holidays, driving cars that barely work, living in cramped homes. These people aren’t idiots, by and large, but when it comes to their children’s education they behave like Native Americans gulled by settlers trading coloured beads for land.”
The idea of Young ditching hedonism for worthiness is appealing, but it isn’t the full picture. Right from the outset of his career, he has deftly straddled the divide between brash popular culture and the scholarly highbrow.
Take his 2002 bestseller, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. This opens with a boastful story about blagging his way onto a first class flight to New York, before segueing neatly into an A-list party in Manhattan where he hits on a woman falling out of her low-cut dress. But the action soon gives way to lengthy reflections on the 19th century French aristocrat and philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville and his thoughts on democracy in America. Fearlessness about introducing unpromisingly difficult material is a Young trademark.
So where does he believe that Theresa May’s new government should take education?
“I hope it will look again at selective education, as I’d like to see more partially selective schools. They’re a halfway house between grammars and comprehensives; a variation on the ‘comprehensive grammar’ concept embodied by the West London Free School. I’d like a change in the law to allow academies and free schools to select up to 25% of their pupils on the basis of general ability, provided they admit a higher percentage of children on free school meals than the average for their locality.”
Will that happen? Young admits to pessimism here. But he is confident, at least, that there will be no meaningful attempts to unravel the education policies set out under David Cameron.
In the meantime, we can rest assured that he will continue to flay left-wingers, progressive educationalists and dumb-downers of every stripe, wherever he stumbles across them.
Check out another one of our great education pieces like our round up of the top 10 state schools in SW London
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