A Principled view

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.