A Principled view

Time and Tide wait for no man…

Sixty years is a long tide to have turned together, and it started me thinking about what else has quietly gone out with it. This Sunday, my wider family gathered to celebrate my aunt and uncle’s diamond wedding anniversary. Their children had alerted the Anniversaries Office at Buckingham Palace to their impending “60th”, and so Helena and Michael received a lovely signed card from Charles R and Camilla R. An intimate gathering, a family celebration — and yet our kingdom has a lovely way of recognising that some things are worth marking properly. A great surprise, and a lovely connection to the first couple in the land.

I used to be able to tell you, within a year or two, exactly when a piece of music arrived in this country. Not because I was especially cool — in 1966 I was at prep school, not yet a teenager, which disqualifies a man from cool by statute — but because everybody found things out the same way, at more or less the same time, whether they liked it or not. Juke Box Jury on the BBC and Thank Your Lucky Stars on ITV filled Saturday evenings, Top of the Pops was Thursday, and if you missed them, you had genuinely missed it, not “caught up with it later,” because there was no later. We used to drop down from Claires Court’s boarding house, Ridgeway, into the town centre on Saturday afternoons with our pocket money, for a bag of Pic’n’Mix at Woolworths, which also sold affordable 7-inch singles and LPs and served as a primary destination for teenagers. Twelve or so of us boarders would hang about there, and half the point of standing in it wasn’t the record; it was the boy next to you, pretending to concentrate on the sleeve notes while working out whether you were friend or rival, and sorting out your posture to ‘fit in’.

None of that machinery was designed to build community. It was designed to sell records and fill the early evening slot on TV. But it did the other job as a by-product, almost despite itself, because there were only so many channels and everybody was forced down the same narrow ones. If you were the kid who didn’t fit in at school, who was hopeless at Latin or worse at rugby, there was still a decent chance you’d find your tribe at the record shop, because the culture hadn’t yet worked out how to give you a tribe of one.

I’ve been turning this over because of the NEET figures, which by now everyone with half an eye on education policy has had drummed into them: something over a million young people not in education, employment or training, a good deal of it now put down to mental health and neurodivergence rather than simple idleness, more than six in ten of them not even looking for work any longer. The usual explanation runs that the internet gave failing pupils somewhere comfortable to hide, and there’s truth in that. A teenager who feels like a washout in the classroom can feel, within the hour, like a minor deity on a leaderboard nobody at school has ever heard of. That’s a real trade, and not always an irrational one.

But I don’t think the internet’s real trick was inventing an escape. Boredom, failure and the urge to vanish from view are not new inventions; my generation had all three in generous supply, and we still turned up at the record shop on a Saturday. What’s changed isn’t the impulse to withdraw. It’s that withdrawal used to be witnessed. A teenager in 1966 who wanted nothing to do with the mainstream still had to go somewhere to reject it, stand next to other people doing the same, be seen not fitting in alongside people who also didn’t fit in. That’s not a small thing. It’s the difference between failing in public, among your own kind, and failing in a bedroom, alone, at scale, where nobody — not even the algorithm feeding you the next video — actually knows your name.

Take the Maidenhead Advertiser, which in my day ran to well over a hundred pages (and that’s not including the property supplement), and which I don’t think anyone actually bought for the leader column. Going back to those same Saturdays, once the store managers had moved us on, we’d slip out the back door directly onto Kidwells Park, where the mighty Thames Valley Wanderers played their rugby. We knew most of the players by sight; almost always some of the stars had their photos in the sports pages of the Advertiser. It landed on every doorstep whether you’d asked for it or not, because the advertising that paid for it depended on every household in the town seeing it. And a paper funded on that promise had to earn its keep by covering everyone, not just the town’s best team but every team, at every level, the Under 12s as faithfully as the First XV. That wasn’t civic virtue. It was the business model. A hundred pages (plus supplement) a week doesn’t get filled by winners alone; it gets filled because somebody has to justify the advertising rate by reaching everybody, and reaching everybody means writing about everybody. Whole swathes of young people who would never trouble a trophy cabinet still had their name in print some Thursday or other, in a match report nobody outside their own family read twice, and that was still a kind of witness. Today the same paper runs to perhaps thirty-two pages and no supplement, its remaining readers mostly over sixty, and there simply isn’t the money or the space left to do what the old hundred pages did without trying. Breadth was never a decision anyone took. It was a side-effect of a funding model, and when the funding model went, so, quietly, did the breadth.

Algorithmic recommendation doesn’t just offer a young person more choice than Top of the Pops or the Maidenhead Advertiser ever did. It actively works against the forced encounter that used to build community. Two boys in the same form room today can watch entirely different worlds on the bus home, each perfectly tailored, each the only member of its own tiny congregation. The scarcity that used to throw us all together — three channels, one paper, one high street — has gone, and nothing has arrived to replace the thing scarcity did for us by accident.

But I don’t think the record shop and the sports ground only mattered because they gave the disaffected somewhere to stand together. They mattered because standing together is how a movement finds out who its leaders are. Somebody in every one of those crowds turned out to have more to say than the rest, or the nerve to say it louder, and the crowd itself did the sorting: it promoted them, copied them, followed them out the door and into something bigger. The hippies who spent the late sixties rejecting the whole apparatus of straight society went on, a surprising number of them, to build the businesses, the magazines, the record labels and eventually a fair slice of the establishment itself. Punk’s loudest voices did much the same in fashion and music a decade later, tearing down one lot of gatekeepers only to quietly become the next. And the generation after them rejected exactly that, because that is what generations are for, and found their own meeting places to do it in. It was never a straight line from rebellion to obsolescence. It was a wheel: today’s meeting place produces tomorrow’s leadership, which becomes the day after tomorrow’s target. Who’d have thought those schoolboys, clutching their paper bags of sweets so preciously at the side of a muddy rugby pitch, would go on to spend a lifetime in the professions, lead the military, captain industry — or, like me, end up writing a blog suggesting things ‘ain’t what they used to be’.

What worries me about the bedroom rather than the record shop is not only that it is lonelier. It is that nothing sorts itself out inside it. A feed does not promote the young person with something to say to the top of a crowd, because there is no crowd, only an algorithm quietly serving each of them a slightly different version of agreement with themselves. Nobody gets discovered by the kid three streets over who happened to be standing in the same queue. The wheel that used to turn a generation’s disaffected into its next leadership seems, for the moment, to have stopped turning, and I am honestly not sure yet what, if anything, is meant to replace it.

So here’s where I’ve ended up, more tightly than when I started turning this over. The 2020s NEET crisis isn’t simply young people fleeing academic pressure into a more comfortable alternative reality, though for some of them that’s plainly part of it. It’s that the shared infrastructure which used to convert an individual’s sense of failure into something collective and visible — a subculture you could walk into, be seen joining, wear on your sleeve, and quite possibly end up leading — has been quietly dismantled, and nothing has been built in its place that does the same job. The withdrawal isn’t new. What’s new is that it now happens without an audience and without a wheel to turn it into anything, which means without anyone standing near enough to notice, and without anywhere for a struggling teenager to go and be a recognisable kind of person instead of an anonymous one, let alone the next person society ends up being led by.

As government money, whether it be national or local, has been steadily withdrawn to cover only the essentials, we’ve seen a massive reduction in available after-hours activities in schools, which, coupled with the closing of Youth Clubs, has left many of today’s children and young people standing on the shoreline of a tide that, in their view, has gone out. And yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Last Saturday was the annual Maidenhead Rowing Regatta; we loaned them 200 chairs and a gazebo to a riverside swarming with all ages. The Advertiser covered that, as it did the reopening of the Rugby season for the town as well. In Will Greenwood’s brilliant 5-short-episode series (The Heart of the Game) on Maidenhead Rugby Club, he celebrates the community, mental health support, and friendship at grassroots, emphasising that the sport’s survival relies on local volunteers. The series highlights the growth of women’s and inclusive rugby while addressing the financial and logistical challenges facing local clubs.

As I have highlighted, for whatever reason, the normal ebb and flow of our lives have changed. Whether that be the failure of government for society, or physically from the onset of global warming, we can moan all we like. Yet the answer lies in our own hands, does it not? Of course, it’s not time to disengage from the internet. But it is time to re-engage our children, young people and community to the common good of synchronous activity. For that, we do need our clubs, pubs and libraries of course, and we have a country whose monarchy is willing to celebrate those longer anniversaries too. 

Will Greenwood closed his own documentary on Maidenhead RFC with a similar thought, travelling the whole pyramid from England shirts to the volunteers sweeping the clubhouse floor, and landing on the same conclusion I’ve been circling here: that the game itself was never really the point, only the excuse the community used to gather. Swap rugby for records, or for a results-day scoreboard, or for a hundred-page local paper nobody bought for the leader column, and the shape of the argument doesn’t change at all. It was never really about the football, or the football on Kidwells Park, or the football Lucy keeps pulling away from Charlie Brown. It was about the eighty minutes, or the Thursday paper, or the Saturday afternoon, that gave two people — a boy and the stranger next to him in a listening booth, a volunteer and a player, this generation and the one it’s about to make room for — a reason to stand in the same place at the same time and notice each other. Greenwood calls that “the heart of the game.” I’d call it the heart of most things worth having, and I’m not yet convinced a bedroom, however comfortable, has worked out how to grow one.

Jenny and I spent the day at Bletchley Park this week. It is a place I could visit a dozen times and still leave with something new turning over in my mind, and this visit was no exception.

It is well over a century now since the founding of the organisation that eventually became GCHQ: the deliberately anodyne-sounding Government Code and Cipher School, formed from the merger of the Navy’s Room 40 and the Army’s MI1(b) in November 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Commander Alistair Denniston, who had run Room 40, was put in charge, an appointment Churchill himself insisted on, calling him simply the best man they had. Denniston has been poorly served by popular memory: The Imitation Game cast him as a blinkered martinet baffled by the brilliance around him, when the truth was closer to the opposite. He was the one who understood, well before most, that breaking machine ciphers like Enigma would need a different kind of recruit altogether, and went out and found the mathematicians, scientists and engineers, Turing and Welchman among them, to do it.

By the early 1920s GC&CS had passed to the Foreign Office, under Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, head of the newly formed Secret Intelligence Service. When war began to look likely again in the 1930s, and London itself looked likely to burn, Sinclair went looking for somewhere to relocate his people. In 1938 he bought Bletchley Park, and did it with his own money rather than wait for the Treasury to catch up, with no record I’ve seen of him ever being reimbursed. A small outfit that had employed a few dozen people in 1919, and still fewer than a hundred on the eve of war, grew to close to ten thousand across Bletchley and its outstations by 1945. The work they did is thought to have shortened the war by at least two years.

None of it happened in isolation, either. GC&CS was careful to credit the Polish Cipher Bureau, whose mathematicians had been breaking Enigma years before the war reached Bletchley’s gates, and who handed over their reconstructions and early machinery to Britain and France in 1939, a gift without which the whole enterprise might have started years behind where it did. And once the work was under way, Britain did not hoard it. What was learned at Bletchley was shared with its allies, generosity that helped establish the signals-intelligence partnership with the United States that grew into the modern UKUSA arrangement, still the backbone of how the two countries work together in this field today. Among Bletchley’s own inventions, built to break the even more complex Lorenz cipher used by the German high command, was Colossus, widely credited as the world’s first programmable electronic computer, running years before anything comparable was built elsewhere.

What I had never quite taken in before this visit is what the staff themselves called their own organisation, half in jest: the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society. Self-effacing, deliberately unmemorable, exactly the kind of name that invites nobody to look twice. And yet behind that throwaway nickname sat six thousand people bound by the Official Secrets Act, most not released from it until the 1970s, each working a fragment of a puzzle whose whole shape they were never permitted to see. Neighbours in the surrounding villages were told the new arrivals were there for shooting parties. No one, inside the wire or out, understood the sum of the parts. And yet the parts added up to something that shortened a war.

It is a remarkable case study in leadership, and not the kind that gets taught on most courses. Denniston and those around him could not lead by explaining the full picture, because revealing it would have destroyed the operation. They had to lead by trust, by clarity of task, and by conviction that the work mattered even when its purpose was invisible to those doing it. Titular authority was the least important thing in that building. What mattered was whether thousands of people, working in silos, believed their small contribution was worth making.
I mention all this because it has been sitting alongside something else in my mind this week: the new Education Secretary’s intervention in The Times.

Lucy Powell used her first significant public statement in post to describe the school system as having become, in her words, a straitjacket that has left too many pupils branded a failure. She was generous enough to acknowledge that standards, literacy and numeracy have all improved markedly over the past thirty years. But she then laid the blame for the number of young people not in education, employment or training — now standing at one million — squarely at the door of her predecessor Michael Gove, calling it his legacy.

Laura Trott, the Shadow Education Secretary, was quick to point out the apparent contradiction: you cannot credit a set of reforms with raising standards and simultaneously blame those same reforms for youth unemployment. She argued the more plausible causes sit in the labour market and the benefits system, not the classroom. Meanwhile the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has been talking about valuing the hard hat as much as the graduation cap, and floating a much earlier pivot to technical education from the age of fourteen. Katharine Birbalsingh and Amanda Spielman, from very different vantage points, have both pushed back hard against the idea that British education has been too academic.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the concern behind any of this. A million young people adrift from education, work or training is a genuine national wound, and any Education Secretary is right to lie awake over it. My concern is with where the blame keeps landing, and with the wider habit, well established in this government’s language about our sector, of treating independent schools as a punchline rather than a resource: privileged, faintly ridiculous, a matter of golf clubs and cheese boards rather than serious national purpose.
Which is where GC&CS’s own joke about itself turns out to be more useful to me than any insult a minister could invent. They called themselves the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society precisely because it sounded trivial, precisely because nobody would think to look twice at a name like that. The joke was the disguise, and underneath the disguise sat the most important intelligence operation of the century. I rather like the idea of borrowing it back. Our sector gets dismissed in almost identical terms, and it is every bit as wrong.

None of this is hypothetical any longer, either. Exeter Cathedral’s preparatory school, founded as The Chorister School back in 1179, has confirmed it will close from this September, its choristers moved to nearby Exeter School. The school’s own statement pointed to “unavoidable financial pressures” facing small independent schools generally, stopping short of naming VAT directly, but the timing speaks for itself: the closure follows the same window in which more than a hundred independent schools nationally have shut their doors since the tax took effect in January. The Independent Society of Musicians has been raising the same alarm about the country’s specialist music and dance schools, Chetham’s and the Yehudi Menuhin School among them, warning that VAT on fees lands hardest on exactly the pupils the Music and Dance Scheme exists to help: bursary-supported children whose talent, not their parents’ wealth, is what got them through the door in the first place. Squeeze the mechanism that pays for their place, and you do not touch the wealthy, you close off the route for the able and the poor.

Not every closure this year traces back to VAT alone, and it would be dishonest of me to suggest otherwise. Some schools have failed for the reasons independent schools have always occasionally failed: under-enrolment, weak governance, a site that had outgrown its viability long before any tax change arrived. That, too, has a Bletchley echo, if a less comfortable one. Not every intercept at Bletchley was broken. Not every hunch about a call-sign or a captured operator turned out to be right. The codebreakers were honest enough with themselves to know it, and what that honesty produced was not a monument to their successes but a system for recording everything, failures included: the Hollerith punched-card installation run by Frederic Freeborn, nicknamed by the staff who worked it “the Freebornery”, which grew into the Central Index cross-referencing every scrap the site produced, on the working assumption that no single head could hold the whole picture and that a wrong guess correctly logged was worth almost as much as a right one confirmed.

Education has its own version of that discipline, or used to. It lives less in card indexes than in staffrooms, in the accumulated, half-conscious judgement of teachers who have watched enough cohorts, enough exam cycles, enough difficult Year 9s, to know what actually works and what only looks as though it should. That corporate memory depends on people staying long enough to build it and then pass it on, and the signs in the state sector are not encouraging. Nearly a third of newly qualified teachers are gone within five years of starting, and the retention curve has been bending the wrong way for some time. Losing that many teachers that early does not only strain recruitment budgets, it erases precisely the kind of unwritten expertise no punch card was ever built to capture, because it never lived on paper to begin with.

Michaela’s results under Katharine Birbalsingh are real, and deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved away as ideology. But I am wary of anyone, on either side of the argument, who treats it as a template rather than a single, hard-won case study. What makes Michaela work is not a set of rules any school could photocopy. It is a head with a singular, forcefully held conviction, applied without compromise, in a community that chose to buy into it. Remove any one of those three ingredients and the model may not survive the transplant elsewhere. That is not a criticism of Michaela, it is closer to what I mean about Sinclair buying Bletchley Park with his own money rather than waiting on the Treasury: real change in institutions this complicated has usually come from an individual willing to back their own judgement and risk their own resources to gather the right expertise under one roof, not from a policy that assumes a working model will simply travel intact.

Independent education is not simply the handful of famous public schools that dominate the headlines, and it is not the golf, cheese and chess caricature either. It is hundreds of institutions of every size, right across the country, many of them modest, many of them quietly doing for children what the wider system has not yet managed to crack — offering them a way into the parts of education that have eluded them elsewhere. Parents who choose to invest in that, often at real financial sacrifice, are not opting out of the national effort. They are funding an enormous, distributed body of educational expertise that the country draws on whether it acknowledges the debt or not, and that contributes hugely to Britain’s standing abroad, where our schools remain among the most respected in the world.

And here is where Bletchley Park earns its place in this piece, not as decoration but as the point. Most of those six thousand people never knew what their work amounted to. They kept the secret because they trusted it mattered, and they were right, even though almost none of them lived to see that vindicated in public. I am not suggesting independent education operates in anything like that kind of secrecy. But there is a common thread: a great deal of quietly excellent work, spread across many hands and many small institutions, whose full contribution to the national picture is never quite added up or credited by the people best placed to do so.

What our sector offers was never only about academic scholarship and sorting the able from the rest, however much that is the caricature. Like Denniston sizing up which minds would break which ciphers, our real skill lies in placing each child at the centre of the work and helping them discover not just what they are good at, but what they might be good for. That is expensive, specialist, patient work, and the parents who fund it for their own children are not opting out of the system, they are relieving it. They should be recognised for that, not taxed a second time for needs the state itself has not yet found a way to meet.

We do not need the government to abandon its concern for the pupils the system is failing. We do need it to stop treating the sector that has spent decades solving exactly that problem, one school and one child at a time, as though it were a golf, cheese and chess society rather than the national asset many consider it to be

I have sat through eleven education secretaries. I know that because someone once made me count. Fifty years of running a school teaches you not to get too attached to any one minister, because they are, on average, gone before your Year 7s reach Year 9, and the next one will usually spend their first six months undoing whatever the last one thought was permanent. So I did not expect to feel much when Bridget Phillipson’s two years came to an end last week. I was wrong. I felt something closer to relief mixed with a low, familiar anger, the kind you get when someone has broken something that was not obviously theirs to break.

Start with the VAT on fees, because everyone else will, and because it is where the theory met the school gate. My brother Hugh and I were two of the nineteen pupils in the school our parents set up in 1960. We went off, got our degrees, learned the trades we needed, and came back to carry it forward together for more than forty years, Hugh as Administrative Principal, me as Academic Principal, until it became the largest school of its kind in the country. I watched that run brought to a juddering close by a policy dreamed up by Phillipson’s friend Rachel Reeves at the Treasury. You might think, at the very least, the mechanics would have been ready on day one. The rules for reclaiming that VAT. Oh, no, nothing so simple. The paperwork explaining how a school was actually supposed to claim it back only surfaced months after the tax itself had started being charged, and eighteen months on it is still stuck in a squabble between every VAT expert I have met, none of whom agree with each other.

It was never really spite against schools alone, when I think about it. It was spite against the whole idea of the independent, family-run business, the sort my parents started with nineteen children and a mortgage, the sort Phillipson and Reeves seem constitutionally unable to see as anything other than a tax anomaly to be closed. Nearly two thousand teachers left the state system in the year it landed, which nobody predicted in the press releases, because nobody in Whitehall had ever had to explain to a family why the fee they budgeted for in September was a different number by January. Phillipson never seemed to grasp that independent and state schools are not opposing armies fighting over a fixed pot of academic excellence. They are neighbours who borrow each other’s coaches for the cricket, share the swimming pool on a Tuesday, send staff across for CPD. Tax one hard enough and you do not redistribute quality, you just remove capacity from the whole ecosystem.

The Latin funding and the IB withdrawal made the same mistake in miniature. I have always thought the honest test of an education secretary is not what they say about ambition but what they are willing to fund when nobody is watching, and on that test she failed twice in a row, quietly, in ways that will only show up in ten years’ time when someone asks why so few state school leavers read Virgil or sit an internationally benchmarked diploma. That is not levelling up. That is deciding certain kinds of excellence belong only to families who can pay for them, which is precisely the outcome she claimed to be fighting.

What frustrated me more, though, is a vantage point I suspect almost nobody else in this argument actually has. I have spent a working lifetime on the academic side, marking essays, setting curricula, worrying about Latin and IB and what a rounded education is actually for. And I have spent recent years, unexpectedly, becoming something like a recognised voice on the digital and AI side too, sitting on the sort of panels where people debate what “digital skills standards” should even mean. Most of the people arguing about the DfE’s response to AI have only ever stood on one side of that divide. I have stood on both, and from there the department’s nervousness about genuine innovation looked even more indefensible than it would from either side alone. I sat in enough rooms this year listening to DfE officials talk about “digital skills standards” to know the ambition was there on paper. But the delivery vehicle was always something like Oak National Academy: centrally produced, safely bland, built to survive an FOI request rather than to excite a fifteen-year-old. A national education system run by people who have mistaken uniformity for equity will always end up building the educational equivalent of a service station sandwich. Edible. Nutritionally accounted for. Nobody’s idea of a good afternoon.

I do not think Phillipson lacked conviction. If anything she had too much of the wrong kind, the sort that curdles into performance once you start describing yourself, approvingly, as a class warrior. Real leadership in education, the kind I tried to practise across five decades and a great many arguments with parents and friends who cared enough to disagree with me, means playing forward when you find an advantage rather than retreating into caution and central control. We built the whole of Claires Court on four words we asked every pupil to actually live by: responsibility for yourself, respect for others, loyalty to school and family, integrity above all. They are not bad words for a secretary of state either. Phillipson had the respect, or said she did, but responsibility for the consequences of her own department’s decisions was harder to find, and when the choice came between loyalty to the people who had built something and integrity about what her policies were actually doing to them, she retreated. Compliance toolkits, top-down reviews, breakfast clubs rolled out without the workforce to staff them properly. Good intentions, administered badly enough to become their own argument against good intentions.

So here is Lucy Powell, the eleventh, walking into a department that has quietly outlasted every one of her predecessors. I should be honest about one thing before I go further: the DfE itself would never have imposed a twenty per cent tax on school fees. That was Reeves’s doing, and Phillipson’s department spent two years absorbing the consequences of a decision made somewhere else entirely, which is its own kind of lesson about where power actually sits in this government. And seeing her go is not, whatever the relief, any victory for education. It has mostly just added turmoil on top of turmoil, and handed the machine another excuse to centralise a little further while everyone is busy learning a new secretary of state’s name. That is really the point I keep coming back to. It is tempting to make this simply a story about one minister’s choices, but I think Phillipson was, in the end, mostly a symptom. The Department for Education has become one of the most effective obstacles to school improvement in the country, not through malice but through sheer institutional self-preservation, hijacking every reform agenda since Blair’s “education, education, education” and turning it into paperwork that justifies its own existence. Powell’s only real chance is to work out, fairly quickly, that her opponent is not the independent sector, not the academies, not the multi-academy trusts jostling for control. It is the building she now works in. If she cannot see that, she will be the twelfth in another two years, and someone else will be sitting where I am, watching the reclaim forms pile up all over again.

Hugh and I have lived our whole working lives within a few miles of that first schoolroom. Neither of us, unlike so many who did rather less with rather more, ever bought a place abroad, any more than our parents did. Maidenhead was always the ambition, not an escape from it. It has been our campus for sixty-odd years and, we hope, fingers rather firmly crossed, it will go on being so. And here is a small consolation I did not expect to find. The school is now owned by a charity founded in 1793, back when licensees were the ones collecting the tax that helped pay for the war against Napoleon, and which has spent the two centuries since quietly looking after people in a trade that government has never much liked leaving alone. That trade is being squeezed again now, harder than most people realise. Something close to two pubs a day were closing in England, Scotland and Wales in the first months of this year, taking thousands of jobs with them, and the industry’s own case is that a business rates concession here and there does not amount to the wider tax overhaul the sector actually needs. A charity with two hundred years of watching that particular fight up close is not a bad custodian for a family school that has just learned the same lesson the hard way. Whatever Whitehall decides a family business is worth taxing into, that is not something a Chancellor or an Education Secretary gets to take away.

Back on 12 July 2019, I wrote about jinxing things. A year earlier, in a newsletter to parents, I had briefly reflected on the challenges facing the England football team just after their World Cup semi-final exit, alongside observations on our then Prime Minister and local MP, the Rt Hon Theresa May. Twelve months later, the headlines were eerily familiar: England had once again stumbled at the semi-final stage, while Theresa May was still wrestling with colleagues in Parliament. It seemed I had become rather good at predicting history by accident.

At the time I confessed: “Dear Reader, please forgive me if I tread carefully today; I have become deeply superstitious over the years, fearing I might ‘jinx’ almost anything.” For anyone unfamiliar with the expression, to jinx simply means tempting fate by speaking too confidently—or too soon—about something we dearly hope will happen. Irrational? Almost certainly. But then football has never been an entirely rational pastime.

It will therefore come as no surprise to those who know me that I was unable to watch England’s 2026 World Cup semi-final. For reasons both rational and irrational, I believed it safer to keep my distance. When England scored, however, the inevitable message arrived: We’re ahead! Better still, momentum was with the Three Lions. Hope—always the most dangerous emotion for an England supporter—began to stir.

Then came what I can only describe as the defensive mind-set switch: the same team, the same players, no longer seeking another goal, now seeking to protect what they had won.

Extra defenders arrived, the shape became even more cautious, and the emphasis shifted from winning the game to not losing it. The initiative quietly slipped away. Argentina sensed it, equalised and, ultimately, prevailed. Thomas Tuchel later spoke about aspects of England’s organisation and aerial vulnerability, but that felt like only part of the story. The larger lesson was painfully familiar. Having gained the advantage, England no longer played with the confidence that had earned it.

Watching from a safe distance (which, of course, made absolutely no difference whatsoever), I found myself asking a rather larger question. Has virtuosity become unfashionable? By virtuosity, I do not simply mean extraordinary talent. I mean the confidence to pursue excellence through imagination, mastery and creative courage, even when the safer option beckons. It is the quality that separates the merely competent from the genuinely exceptional.

On a football pitch, virtuosity means trusting gifted players to keep expressing themselves rather than assuming another defender will somehow make everything secure. The beautiful game flourishes in what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as flow—that wonderful state where complete concentration takes over, action becomes instinctive, and excellence feels almost effortless. England seemed to step out of that rhythm. Argentina did not. Excessive caution invited precisely the pressure it hoped to avoid.

The thought stayed with me because football has an irritating habit of exposing truths that extend well beyond ninety minutes. In football, defensive substitutions are made to protect success. Yet, all too often, they surrender initiative. I cannot help wondering whether we are making rather too many defensive substitutions elsewhere—in our economy, in public policy and, perhaps most worryingly, in education. Confidence gives way to caution. Aspiration yields to preservation.

Take the economy. Britain works hard to establish fiscal stability and international credibility, only then to appear reluctant to build confidently upon those foundations. Too often we reach for tighter controls, higher burdens and policies designed to minimise risk rather than maximise opportunity. Stability surely exists for a purpose. Once ahead, the instinct should be to invest, innovate and encourage enterprise—not immediately retreat into our own half.

The same question arises in education. Britain’s independent schools have earned an international reputation for excellence over generations. They are places where scholarship, character, creativity and service are intentionally cultivated. Young people are encouraged to think deeply, build secure knowledge and experience those moments of complete intellectual engagement that underpin genuine learning. These are hardly indulgences; they are among the conditions in which individuals and societies flourish.

Against that backdrop, the decision to impose VAT on independent school fees from January 2025 risks becoming another defensive substitution. Whatever the policy’s intentions, it replaces encouragement for a flourishing sector with a fiscal mechanism whose longer-term consequences remain uncertain. Families already making significant sacrifices to educate their children face further pressure, while schools inevitably have fewer resources to invest in innovation, bursaries and educational excellence. It seems an odd way to treat one of Britain’s educational success stories.

After more than forty-five years in education, I have become convinced that genuine learning resembles virtuosic performance far more than it resembles risk management. Children grow when they are challenged, trusted and inspired to attempt difficult things. Teachers flourish when they are free to exercise judgement and creativity. Schools thrive when excellence is celebrated rather than quietly apologised for.

Virtuosity is not dead. Far from it. But it does seem increasingly asked to justify its existence, while caution is too often assumed to be a virtue in itself. The latest figures highlighted by the Sutton Trust provide an interesting illustration. It notes that around 15% of England’s 2026 World Cup squad and almost 60% of the men’s international cricket team were educated independently. For some, those statistics are evidence of imbalance. I find myself asking a different question: what are these schools doing consistently well that enables talent to flourish?

That should not be a cause for embarrassment; it should provoke curiosity. Britain’s independent schools have spent generations cultivating scholarship, character, creativity and opportunity. They create environments where young people are encouraged to pursue mastery, experience the ‘flow’, and develop the confidence to excel. Excellence is not a finite resource to be rationed but an example to be emulated. If our response is to penalise institutions that have demonstrably fostered high achievement, we risk making yet another defensive substitution—replacing aspiration with ideology, and confidence with caution. A confident nation should seek to multiply excellence wherever it finds it, not diminish it.

Whether on the football pitch, in the Treasury or in education policy, leadership requires the confidence to keep playing forward when the temptation is to retreat. The greatest rewards rarely belong to those who simply protect an advantage. They belong to those prepared to build upon it.

And yes, before anyone writes to me, Lionel Messi remains footballing royalty. There are moments when genius simply bends events to its own will, and we should have the grace to acknowledge it. England may have been defeated by more than tactical substitutions. Sometimes the other side really does have the better magician.

At least this time there was no Hand of God. Just a timely reminder that defensive substitutions—on the pitch and off it—rarely produce greatness.

I was standing at the school gate on Thursday, doing what I’ve done for fifty years and counting — watching children arrive — when I noticed something that stopped me mid-thought. A line of Year 8s, games bags on backs, walking in a tight little knot, and not one of them talking to another. Six thumbs, six screens, six separate worlds, all occupying the same six feet of pavement. Nobody bumped into anybody. Nobody laughed at anything that had actually happened in the previous ten seconds. It was oddly, perfectly synchronised, like a flock of starlings that had all individually decided to stop being a flock.

Two men enter, one man leaves — that was the line I couldn’t shake off the rest of the day. Bartertown*’s rule, not mine, but it kept surfacing because it’s not a bad description of what a smartphone does to a child’s attention. Something goes in — an hour, an afternoon, a Saturday — and something rather less than what went in comes out the other side. Not violence. Nothing so dramatic. Just erosion, quiet and continuous, of the ordinary boring magic of being bored, which is where half of childhood’s best ideas have always come from.

I don’t say this as a man who thinks the old days were better simply because they were his days. I’m wary of that particular vanity in myself, having watched enough colleagues fall into it over the decades to recognise the shape of it coming. Children have always needed adults to be a bit anxious on their behalf; that’s more or less the job. But there is something different about handing a twelve-year-old a device engineered by some of the best-resourced psychologists and designers on the planet to be as close to unputdownable as humanly possible, and then being surprised when they can’t put it down. We didn’t do that to any previous generation. We’ve done it to this one, largely by accident, and mostly because it was easier than the alternative.

The alternative, of course, is harder. It always is. It means a school being willing to say no to phones in a way that will annoy some parents who quite reasonably want to reach their child at pickup time. It means a parent being willing to be the one house on the street where the eleven-year-old doesn’t have Instagram yet, and living with the eye-rolling that follows. It means all of us admitting that “everyone else has one” was never actually a good argument, even when we were the ones using it about our own bicycles fifty+ years ago.

I was listening to Radio 4’s You and Yours this morning on the way in, and there was a segment on precisely this — except for once it wasn’t dressed up as another dopamine-addiction scare story, the sort nobody much acted on when the same warnings were doing the rounds about mobile phones the way they’d once done the rounds about cigarettes. Nobody gave up smoking, in my experience, because a doctor explained the biology of it to them. They gave it up when it stopped being what a certain kind of person did. What was interesting this morning was the suggestion that something similar might finally be happening with the always-on life — not children being told to comply, but grown adults, Gen X downwards, quite deliberately choosing friction back into their own days. Vinyl instead of a playlist that never ends. A flip-phone instead of the one with everything on it. Alcohol-free beer that exists, as far as I can tell, purely so the pub can go on being a pub rather than a place people leave early to get back to their screens. And half the country, by the sound of it, found itself in exactly that kind of room early this morning (6 July 2026), roaring at a football match in Mexico City that had no business being as dramatic as it turned out to be — ten men holding out at the Azteca, a stadium eight time zones away, and pubs the length and breadth of the country doing something no feed can replicate, which is a room full of strangers feeling the same thing at the same second.

What I keep coming back to is that none of this is really about technology at all. It’s about what childhood is for. It’s for scraped knees and arguments about whose turn it is and the particular tedium of a wet Wednesday in August with nothing to do, out of which children have always had to invent something — a game, a grievance, a joke that only makes sense to the two of them. The algorithm doesn’t want that kind of boredom to exist, because boredom is the one state a feed cannot monetise. So it fills every gap before the child even notices the gap was there. And the child who never experiences the gap never quite develops whatever it is that used to grow in it.

I don’t have a tidy policy announcement to make here, and I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I do think schools like ours have a part to play that goes beyond banning phones in corridors, useful as that is and a practice over a decade old. It’s about deliberately, stubbornly protecting the parts of the day where nothing is optimised for anyone — a games afternoon with mud on it, a form period where the conversation is allowed to wander, a Founder’s Day where the whole point is standing about in a marquee talking to people you didn’t choose.

It’s not a new idea for us, particularly. We were putting sailing and outward-bound trips and the sort of debating that makes a child look a stranger in the eye at the centre of the timetable long before anyone thought there was anything to protect children against. We didn’t do it because we saw any of this coming. We did it because it seemed like more fun, frankly, and more useful, than another hour at a desk. It just happens to look, in hindsight, rather like exactly what a childhood needs when the alternative on offer is a feed.

Beyond the Thunderdome, there was still a world. Someone had to decide to walk out into it. I’ve always wanted Claires Court to be the sort of place that helps our children make that walk a little sooner, and a little more often, than the rest of the world currently seems to want to let them. That’s why my children followed my childhood into the school, and why the grandchildren will both be at Ridgeway in September. But for now, it’s time for the final school bell to ring this term, and for all of us to enjoy what looks like a lovely Summer ahead. People who know me well, know I have a set of clubs in one hand, and a trowel and secateurs in the other.  If Mad Max had to pick between a manicured golf course and a gritty allotment this Summer, he would choose survival. He might say: “You can either walk the wasteland in polyester, or you can grow potatoes and rule the dirt. I know which one keeps the apocalypse away – it’s time for the new potatoes to be dug up!

*Bartertown is a remote market-town outpost situated in the midst of the Wasteland. It was likely created during the two decades that saw Max Rockatansky wandering said region. Its primary focus and income is the trade and bartering with scavengers in the area, and travellers passing through.

There’s a scene I still enjoy teaching, every time I get the chance: Macbeth, told he’s safe until Birnam Wood marches against him, treats the prophecy as a kind of cosmic permission slip — an impossibility dressed up as a guarantee. Forests don’t walk. And then, of course, they do; not by magic, but because an army cuts down branches and carries them, and what looked fixed and immovable turns out to have been waiting for someone to actually move it.

I’m not going to pretend a change of Prime Minister is Birnam Wood arriving at Dunsinane, and I’d be a fool to promise the children in today’s attainment report that the cavalry is coming. Governments have promised “national renewal” before, and the trees stayed exactly where they were. But there’s something in that scene worth holding onto: the wood only moves because somebody decides it can, and starts cutting branches. Stories do that — they let us rehearse the moment before we have to live it. Which is, as it happens, more or less the entire argument of Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s tenure as Children’s Laureate: that a child who has been read to, who has been allowed to sit inside someone else’s impossible forest for a while, comes out better equipped for whatever their own turns out to be.

Today’s report on white working-class attainment landed with the depressing inevitability of a wet Monday in February. Another year, another set of figures confirming that a sizeable chunk of our children are leaving school having been measured constantly and served rarely. I read it over breakfast and thought: we’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again, and somewhere in between those two visits the actual children involved will have grown up and left school anyway, none the wiser as to why nobody fixed it in time for them.

I want to tell you about a hundred headteachers in a hotel conference room, because it’s relevant, and because I’ve been waiting years for an excuse to tell this story again.

It must have been around 2003 or 2004 — a couple of years before his death — when Ted Wragg addressed the Independent Schools Association conference. A hundred of us, heads of school, notebooks out, doing the thing headteachers do at conferences, which is nod sagely while mentally drafting the email we’ll send when we get back to the office. Wragg told us about some research he’d been involved with into Singapore’s accountancy students. Apparently they were astonishing in their first set of professional exams — flawless on the calculations, faultless on the spreadsheets — and then fell apart spectacularly in the second set, which asked them to sit across a table from an actual client and tell them, in plain language, what to do with their money.

Wragg’s diagnosis, as I remember it, was that these students were brilliant at what they’d been trained to be good at, and had no idea what any of it was good for. A roomful of headteachers laughed nervously, because every one of us recognised the shape of the problem. We just didn’t know yet that twenty years later we’d still be writing the same speech.

That distinction — good at, versus good for — has lodged in me ever since, the way only the really useful ideas do. It’s not an argument against rigour. Spreadsheets matter. Exams matter. I am not about to stand here, fifty years into this career, and tell you that getting the basics right is somehow beneath us — that ship sailed long ago and good riddance to it. But a child who is magnificent at the test and has no idea what the test was for is a child we have half-finished. We’ve built the engine and forgotten to ask where it’s supposed to go.

Cottrell-Boyce’s Reading Rights campaign makes the same case from a different angle. The children most likely to be let down by the system — the same children in today’s report, more often than the headlines admit — are also the ones least likely to have had the “invisible privilege,” as he calls it, of being read to. He isn’t asking for another testing regime. He’s asking for time, attention, and the rather unfashionable belief that a child who has been read to is better equipped for absolutely everything else, including the spreadsheets.

I don’t think today’s report and Cottrell-Boyce’s campaign are two separate stories. I think they’re the same story told twice. We have built a system that is very good at measuring what a child is good at, and almost entirely silent on what a child might be good for. The white working-class boys — and it is mostly boys — at the centre of today’s report are not short of testing. They are short of someone making the case, convincingly and early enough to matter, that any of it adds up to something they’d want.

I don’t have a tidy three-point plan to fix this, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims they do, especially by lunchtime on the day a report drops. But I keep coming back to that hotel conference room, and a hundred heads laughing nervously at a story about Singapore, all of us recognising the problem and precisely none of us having solved it since. If a new government — and it increasingly looks like Andy Burnham’s government, with Ed Miliband installed at the Treasury — wants to be more than a prophecy nobody believed, that’s where I’d start looking for the army. Though I suppose the real question is whether the Chancellor permits the cutting down of any trees at all, or simply asks the Office for Budget Responsibility to confirm the forest was always going to march on schedule. Wragg would, I suspect, find it darkly funny that we’re still here. He’d also, I suspect, tell us to get on with it.

This week, as thousands of England fans have poured into stadiums across the USA — with reports of up to 15,000 Three Lions supporters turning out in Dallas to watch England beat Croatia 4-2 in their first game in the 2026, a historic line in the sand has been drawn back home. With the government’s landmark announcement legally banning social media for children under the age of 16, the public conversation has hyper-focused on a singular, urgent mission: giving our kids their childhood back.

For over a decade, headteachers and parents have stood on the front lines, managing the heavy fallout of the algorithmic playground — from fractured attention spans and low-level classroom distractions to the steady erosion of youth mental health. A legal digital curfew is a welcome step, but as we all know, policy alone cannot fill the vacuum left behind by the infinite scroll. It simply clears the room. The real challenge for educators and leaders is deciding what we choose to put back into that sacred space.

To find the antidote to this digital isolation, we don’t need to look forward to the next tech gimmick. We need to look out the window — to the grass, the track, and the river.

The timing of this digital shift aligns beautifully with a motif close to my heart: the spirit of the Three Lions. What does that iconic badge truly represent? It is the absolute antithesis of an algorithm. Social media teaches a child to look down, trapping them in an isolated audience of one, chasing superficial validation, streaks, and likes. The Three Lions spirit, however, forces a child to look up. It demands physical presence, sweat, and visceral accountability to the people standing next to them. On the pitch, you learn quickly that effort is seen, character is tested, and belonging is earned. And when Gary Linekar, former England manager, makes it clear that these are the lessons he now wishes to embue in his next steps to make a difference to society.

This isn’t just idealistic theory; at Claires Court, we see the fruits of this analogue devotion in action every single week. Our school’s immense, historic contribution to sports education is not a mere co-curricular add-on — it is the baseline for our academic excellence. Look no further than the national stage this term. Our pupils and staff provided the literal backbone for the ISA London West athletics squad, which triumphantly retained the National ISA Championship title for the third consecutive year. Our partnership with Delgado & Lee at Bisham Abbey means our Under 18 Tennis team have made the finals in Nottingham for the third year running too. A three-year regional dynasty doesn’t happen by accident. It is forged out on the track, court, and in the field, through grueling practice, grit, and collective pride. As a school, we’ve managed the ISA Area championships and emergent regional team for a quarter of a century. We don’t just practice what we preach, we make it permanent.

When you combine that track and field dominance with our renowned heritage on the open water, you get a holistic education that engages every element of a child’s being. There is a profound, meditative reality to water sports. The open water demands absolute, acute awareness of your environment. You cannot check a notification while trimming a sail, navigating a kayak, or balancing a blade against the current. The water, like the running track, pitch or court, commands total presence.

It is for this exact reason — to ensure our children have vibrant, real-world spaces to thrive in — that Claires Court established its sports development pathways and committed to the deep integration and support of local sports clubs. We don’t just coach sport within our gates; we anchor it in the wider Maidenhead community. The celebration by England Hockey of Ellie Raye’s 150th international cap this week is perhaps the greatest achievement of the longevity contribution of a Claires Court Alumnus.

This summer, we are proud to put our resources precisely where our principles are. I’m delighted that Claires Court is financially supporting Maidenhead Rugby Club’s girls’ development pathway from Year 10 to 13, alongside sharing our coaching knowledge and expertise to help nurture the next generation of athletic talent. Furthermore, in a landmark moment for our local sporting infrastructure, we have successfully negotiated a 30-year lease extension for the Sports Club we jointly own with Phoenix. This vital agreement secures a proud, 42-year community legacy for another entire generation of young athletes.

We aren’t just giving our children their childhood back — together, we are building a legacy worth inheriting.

While the state introduces boundaries to pull our children back from the edge of the digital void, Claires Court is actively building the real-world infrastructure to welcome them back to reality. Banning apps only removes the symptom of a hyper-connected, deeply lonely age; embedding team sports, outdoor education, and community play solves the underlying problem. On the track, in the field, out on the open water, and now secured on our local pitches for decades to come, the spirit of the Three Lions is burning brighter than ever.