A Principled view

The Third blog of three in a series on creating, growing and caring for a school, now during the most turbulent of times.

Last week, I wrote about my mother Josephine’s singular worldview: her sharp, unsentimental reminder that life is a game of “impartial injustice to all.” It was a philosophy forged not in an ivory tower, but in the trenches of running a boarding house at Ridgeway while balancing data-driven linguistic research. If the first two parts of this trilogy charted how David and Josephine Wilding overcame institutional inertia in 1960 to build an educational community asset from scratch, this final chapter is about what happens when the wider macroeconomic weather turns entirely toxic.

Because the reality of institutional scepticism has been written into our family history from the very beginning. Back in 1959, when my parents set out to buy the house in Maidenhead that would establish their vision, the local Barclays bank manager flatly refused to support them. Looking at the local landscape, he coldly noted that nearby private schools and secretarial colleges were already closing down, declaring that the town simply did not need another independent school. Fortunately for generations of local families, their bank manager in Ealing took a completely different view and backed their determination.

That Ealing manager, sitting outside the immediate Berkshire bubble, didn’t view independent education as a dying trade. He looked at the determination of David and Josephine Wilding. He recognized what the local manager missed: when an operator possesses a distinct vision and a refusal to yield, they don’t just join a market—they define it. Scepticism and systemic shocks are nothing new. In over fifty years in teaching and forty-four in leadership, my brother Hugh and I have seen the sails rip before.

As now Principals of Claires Court, we survived the sharp, sudden shock of 1992 when Britain unceremoniously exited the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and interest rates spiked to 15% overnight, leaving families sitting around kitchen tables wondering how to balance the mortgage against term fees. We steered through the Millennium dot-com bust, navigated the tectonic frozen credit lines of the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse, and found our way through the structural map-redrawing of Brexit. Then came Covid-19, testing collective operational and emotional capacity to the absolute limit.

Yet, none of those historical crises carried quite the same cynical flavour as the current landscape. What independent education is witnessing across England today isn’t an organic economic downturn; it’s a targeted, political smash-and-grab. The imposition of 20% VAT on school fees, coupled with the abrupt removal of charitable business rates relief and spiking employer National Insurance contributions, has dealt a severe blow to the wider educational ecosystem.

As I watch the sudden insolvencies of historic institutions mid-term, as with Leweston in Dorset—where boards of volunteer governors are abruptly forced into devastating mid-term closures to avoid personal liability for wrongful trading—the human cost becomes painfully clear. These weren’t elite, heavily endowed castles; they were “best value” schools serving hard-working, dual-income families. The government keeps telling parliament that these would be happening anyway, yet in my knowledge prior to the Labour party coming to power, that’s been very few. Just this last academic year we have seen Abbotsholme School (Staffordshire), Moorland School (Lancashire), St Lawrence College (Kent), Avon House Preparatory School (Essex) and South Lanarkshire Private School (Scotland).

The tragic irony, as the latest data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the OBR reveals, is that while local authorities face intense localised bottlenecks, the state system nationwide is sitting on a demographic cliff. By 2030, declining birth rates will leave over a million empty desks in state classrooms. The government is aggressively squeezing a sector to fund state spending at the exact moment the state sector is structurally contracting. Impartial injustice, indeed.

Faced with this brutal environment, school leadership everywhere must recognize the core message of Jim Collins’ Good to Great—the profound reality of the Stockdale paradox: you must retain unwavering faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, while simultaneously confronting the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

In the same manner my mother was well known for her aphorisms, so perhaps am I. My approach across a lifetime as a school principal, as a charity trustee, and as a volunteer director of a local sports club has always remained the exact same: “Ruthless and relentless enthusiasm” needs to be the approach.

I was struck by this exact reality when reading a LinkedIn post by TEDx speaker Sharon Hulce. Her point was sharp and unvarnished: a CV only tells you where a person has been; it can never predict how they will choose to show up when a crisis hits. When the wind shifts violently, credentials become secondary to character. True leadership is about being ever-present. You must be there as a witness in the good times because success is always a collective team effort that needs to be seen to be believed. Yet you must be equally present when the storm blows, showing up on deck so that the crew knows they are not facing the gale alone.

That “ruthless and relentless” enthusiasm is precisely how you choose to show up. It is the fuel required to look past paper-thin metrics, confront the brutal numbers, and make the hard, unsentimental choices that absolute preservation demands. In education, as in business, true leadership isn’t about waiting for a quiet sea—it is about commanding the ship through the teeth of the gale.

The template for surviving a predatory environment isn’t found in isolation. It is found in the lessons of organisational survival, mirrored perfectly by cult brands like Harley-Davidson. In The Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin, we learn how Harley-Davidson, facing total annihilation in the 1980s under the weight of fierce global competition, was saved because the management had built the unique product their customers and community actually wanted—hence the creation of the Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.). The brand survived because its people, its riders, and its local champions refused to let it die. And it’s not forgotten that message:

https://barnraisersllc.com/2010/09/03/harleys-consumers-saved-company-bankrupcy-case-study/

Let’s be realistic: independent school communities are not going to suddenly rise up and create consumer-style fan clubs to pay the bills. The current unfolding tragedy of the sudden closure of Leweston school is a stark reminder of the practical difficulties our sector now faces, not unique by any margin, look no further than the high-profile examples of St Lawrence College in Ramsgate, the Royal School in Haslemere, or Malvern St James—even the arrival of high-profile external corporate investors does not automatically solve the problem. The baseline law of economics is unyielding: customers must both want the product and actually possess the disposable finances to achieve that wish.

This is the fundamental lesson that the Labour government keeps getting wrong. Blind taxation will never solve structural problems. If you levy punitive taxes on landlords, you simply cause rents to rise for tenants. If you tax banks for their windfalls, mortgages and baseline interest rates reliably spike for the consumer. When you tax independent education, the friction simply passes down to the family bank account and the local state infrastructure. With the sector providing places for a huge percentage of children with special needs, any closure puts further pressure on the one part of state education that simply has insufficient capacity to meet the needs already in their care.

Now less of the hand wringing, because our sector still has amazing strengths an energy. The path forward for independent school leadership requires looking inward. Institutions need to check out their legacy in their community, and as far as possible, keep those pieces firmly in place. Schools need what they offer to be entirely unique, distinct, and unmistakably worth valuing. Simultaneously, leaders must figure out how to lower their operational costs while keeping their community involvement high-profile.

The pretty mainsails may need trimming, and right now, it is absolutely all hands on deck. But the essential timbers of the institution need to be kept intact, because that structural integrity is exactly how the ship will navigate these fierce political and economic headwinds without breaking apart.

Individual actions help highlight how those foundational timbers are built. Decades ago, it was a parent—Derek Bayley from our Parents’ Society—who invited me to open a sailing club at the school. As a direct consequence of that community spark, I joined the Maidenhead and District Schools Sailing Association (MDSSA) and became a member of Maidenhead Sailing Club back in 1979. We started with just two small wooden Heron boats—proudly christened Iron Maiden and Angel Witch. From those modest, grassroots beginnings, we slowly and relentlessly engineered the journey to the leading national status the Claires Court Sailing team now enjoy.

That is how lasting value is created. It starts with a single, passionate connection within your community and builds, timber by timber, into something immovable. As John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” An institution cannot survive as an isolated fiefdom behind iron gates. It survives by proving its relevance through genuine, embedded service to its neighbours, cementing its legacy so deeply into the wider community fabric that its absence would leave an irreplaceable void.

The macroeconomic winds of 2026 will undoubtedly continue to howl. Inflation will fluctuate, policies will pinch, and education will be continually weaponized for political theatre. But by meeting the storm head-on with cold-eyed realism, all hands on deck, and a relentless community focus, the independent educational tradition will ensure its light remains far too bright for any passing government to blow it out.

Collins, J. (2001) Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. New York: HarperBusiness.

Atkin, D. (2004) The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers. New York: Portfolio.

The second of three. Last time I ended with Haliburton’s sailor, who comforted a friend with the thought that this life ain’t all beer and skittles. My mother had her own version of that consolation, and hers had an edge. ([Part one](https://jameswilding.blog/2026/10/20/life-is-not-all-beer-and-skittles-how-josephine-wilding-bridged-ucl-mit-and-the-drawing-room-fire/))

My mother had a phrase for the unevenness of things. When fortune appeared to smile on one child while another carried a heavier load, or when effort went unrewarded and the scales tipped without obvious reason, she would offer a small, knowing smile and say, “Impartial injustice to all.”

She was a practical Catholic, the sort who had once taken herself off to study linguistics at MIT for nine months while the rest of us carried on at home, who helped build a parish church, and who still found time to remind her sons that the world had never been designed as a perfect ledger. Equality of outcome was not the promise. The Fall had seen to that. Original sin, the crooked timber of humanity, the simple fact that gifts and burdens are handed out without consulting any committee—these were the given conditions of the journey rather than grievances to be endlessly litigated.

Her remedy was older than any white paper. “Offer it up,” she would say. Not as resignation, and certainly not as permission for real injustice to go unchallenged where it could be challenged, but as a deliberate act: take the sting, the disappointment, the sense that the arrangement is unfair, and present it quietly as something that might, in the mysterious economy of grace, spare someone else a longer stay in purgatory. Waste less time resenting the unevenness. Convert it, if you can, into something useful.

I grew up watching that instruction put into practice on the long drives down to Capel. My grandmother Helena—Grannin to my brother Hugh and me—lived in a grace-and-favour, almost derelict rambling country pile known as Taylors, near Dorking. In the early 1960s there were no bypasses worth the name. The journey from Maidenhead involved traffic lights, endless queues, and a good three hours on high days and holidays; even now the same route can take the better part of two. We would pile into the red-and-white Hillman Husky estate, often with an odd spare boarder whose parents could not collect him for half-term, and set off. Somewhere after an hour the narcolepsy that afflicted my mother—and more severely her brother John—would hit hard. She would pull into a patch of woodland, tell the boys to get out and run around for twenty minutes while she slept, and answer our predictable complaints with the same calm phrase. “Offer it up.” Or, with a dry half-smile, “Better ten minutes late than dead on time.” It was a comforting thought, even if we did not always recognise it as such at the time.

She woke when the twenty minutes were up, and we drove on to Taylors. Sixty years ago, in the days before safety belts and air bags in cars, nobody would have thought twice about letting good kids run around in a strange, edge-of-settlement coppice while the driver had a snooze. We were wary, mind you, but exploring was an opportunity drilled into us by our reading books, whether by Enid Blyton, E. H. Shepard or Geoffrey Willans. We knew that adventures always needed to be had!

I notice now how little of that day was about the road. The narcolepsy, the boarder whose parents couldn’t collect him, the three hours in the queue all landed on us in turn, and none of it could be argued with. Nobody held a meeting about it.

When I look at English education today I hear her voice again, with one qualification. Her phrase is about fortune, and nobody sets fortune. A tax is different, because someone chose it. A judge, or a minister, is not allowed to let the unevenness of the world bend the verdict, and that is the argument I take from James Bruce, Professor of Philosophy at John Brown University, below. It is where my mother’s acceptance stops and my objection starts. VAT has been laid on one kind of schooling and left off its near neighbours, nurseries, universities, private healthcare and regulated care among them. That unevenness was chosen, so it can be defended or fixed.

I am about to propose an arbitrator of my own, so please read the rest as a warning to myself about clever instruments.

***

This week the Prime Minister called the number of young people not in education, employment or training a “moral failure”. I will come back to that in the last of these three posts, once Alan Milburn’s final report is out after the Budget. I mention it here because NEET status has no interest in a family’s income, its postcode or the school its parents did or did not choose. It lands on rich and poor alike, and any serious policy has to start by ignoring everything except the young person in front of it. That is exactly the discipline I want to apply to the tax on school fees.

Those who do not move do not notice their chains. The line is long attributed to Rosa Luxemburg, with a footnote to follow on that. Independent schools have been moved since January 2025, and the chafing is now easy to see.

James Bruce’s essay on impartiality in *Religion & Liberty*, which I read recently, says justice asks two things of us. We should ignore what ought to be ignored, and we should attend to what matters. The King James Bible puts the first half of that bluntly: “Thou shalt not respect persons.” The second half is the one I had underrated. A bribe blinds a judge, but not only by making him favour the wrong man. It stops him seeing the alibi that is sitting in front of him. Bruce gives the example of a parent who promised a reward for chores and then finds the reward inconvenient. The parent doesn’t lie. He just stops looking at the facts that are in the child’s favour.

Apply the two questions to VAT on fees. What should be ignored? The wealth of some families, the political convenience of a visible target, and the tribe the policy is aimed at. What should be remembered? The nature of the service and the consequences of taxing it.

The nature of the service is the trouble, as I said above. Only day and boarding education for children of about five to eighteen has been picked out, while its close cousins stay exempt. A tax on discretionary spending would be a coherent thing, but this one makes it a tax on a particular target.

The consequences are also now visible. Cairneagle’s analysis of the latest DfE and ISC data finds that since the last full year before VAT, enrolment at mainstream independent schools in England has fallen by 40,197 pupils, or 7.5%. Falling birth rates are part of the story, but they explain only about a third of that decline. The rest is a loss of market share, with VAT the principal driver. The falls have been steepest at the entry points: among eleven-year-olds the fall was 6.9% in independent schools against 1.9% in state schools, and the number of new joiners to ISC schools fell 6.1% in a year. When government sets independent fees against state per-pupil funding, the comparison rarely includes the long-term costs of the state estate, such as capital spending and residual PFI liabilities. Marking your own homework is rarely an exact science.

The children who move still need places. The state sector is unevenly distributed, and housing markets capitalise school quality, so a good state place is partly bought through a postcode premium. Taxing one slice of private provision resolves none of that.

My proposal does not ask the Treasury to give up revenue. A government-appointed arbitrator would establish a transparent, full-cost figure for delivering primary, secondary and sixth-form education to eighteen, and a parallel figure for state boarding. The stated cost of a state place, currently £8,580 for a pupil aged 5 to 16, covers revenue funding only. It leaves out the capital cost of the buildings and grounds, so it understates what a place really costs. My own starting estimate for the full cost is a total somewhere between £11,000 and £14,000 a pupil. The range is wide because schools differ in how they were built. A school rebuilt under PFI carries financing charges that a school built or refurbished with direct capital funding does not, and those liabilities are still on the state’s books. An arbitrator would have to decide how to treat that variation, which is one more reason the method must be published. That figure becomes the VAT-exempt part of any fee, and tax is charged only on what a school charges above it. Input tax would be recoverable only in proportion to the taxable part of the fee.

A hypothetical shows how it would work. Suppose the arbitrator settled on £12,500, within that range. Parents choosing a school that charges £13,000 would pay tax on £500 for each place taken. At 20% VAT that is £100 a place. Parents choosing a school that charges £25,000 would pay tax on £12,500 for each place, which comes to £2,500. The first school is no longer treated as if it were the second. Under the present rules the same tax would be £2,600 and £5,000 a place. Every family saves £2,500, but that removes almost all the tax at the lower-fee school and only half of it at the higher-fee one. The tax follows the premium element of the fee, and a school charging above the baseline has to justify to the parents who pay it what that premium buys, which is a sensible incentive for any school to face.

The Treasury does not lose all of that VAT. A school can currently reclaim the VAT on its own costs, such as building work, energy and equipment. Under this proposal the part of the fee covered by the state allowance becomes exempt, and the school could no longer reclaim input VAT on the share of its costs that relates to it. The Treasury would therefore keep that money, and the net loss to it is smaller than the VAT forgone on the headline fee.

Sixth form colleges are the Cinderella of the state system. They take young people at sixteen and give them a serious, well-regarded route into university, training and work, and they do it on less money than anyone else in the 16 to 18 sector. Projected funding per student in 2024–25 is about £5,500 in a sixth form college, against £5,900 in a school sixth form and £7,350 in a further education college. In real terms, sixth form college funding is 15% lower than a decade ago. I recommend that the VAT raised on the premium element of fees be directed to those and the wider further education college provision. For comparison, the national base rate for 16 to 19 education in 2025–26 is £5,105, while state schools receive £8,580 per pupil aged 5 to 16 in 2026–27, revenue only. The £11,000–£14,000 full cost I would expect an arbitrator to find, once capital is included, sits well above all of these, which exclude it. The whole of the state sector has been squeezed hard, and the colleges are no exception. A premium-fee contribution would put money behind the institutions best placed to support the growing cohort of NEETs, and I’d argue that is a better use of it than a general addition to the Treasury’s receipts.

The weak point is the figure itself. Whoever sets it will be accused of setting it too low by one side and too high by the other, so the arbitrator would have to be independent in fact, and the method would have to be published and open to challenge. I would rather argue about a published number than live with a boundary nobody can explain.

It would not cure every inequality. It would replace an arbitrary line with one that can be defended: the state defines and funds a core entitlement at a transparent cost, and amounts charged above that are treated as discretionary and taxed accordingly. That is closer to impartiality than what we have now, and Bruce is right that nobody can know in advance whether it will favour their side. I think that is a reason to try it.

*Sources: [Bruce, “Justice, and Only Justice”, Religion & Liberty](https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-33-number-3-4/justice-and-only-justice-beauty-impartiality-and-ugliness-her); [Cairneagle, “Independent school enrolment trends”, 8 October 2026](https://www.cairneagle.com/independent-school-enrolment-trends/); [Morning Advertiser on Burnham and NEETs](https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2026/10/19/burnham-vows-welfare-system-overhaul-to-help-young-people-into-work/); [Parliament written evidence on 16–18 funding](https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/139181/html/); [NEU on the 2025–26 funding rate](https://neu.org.uk/advice/member-groups/further-education-teachers/funding-16-19-education); [DfE school funding statistics](https://www.explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-funding-statistics)

*Footnote (my original post on Rosa Luxemburg can be found here https://jameswilding.blog/2013/02/20/those-who-do-not-move-do-not-notice-their-chains-rosa-luxemburg/): On reflection, and after some correspondence over the years questioning the source, I should note that this quotation appears to be apocryphal — no primary citation in Luxemburg’s own writing has been traced, and it seems to be a later amalgamation, gathering pace especially in the Cold War period and after, that stacks her ideas about praxis revealing the nature of oppression alongside Marx’s “nothing to lose but their chains” language from the Manifesto. The sentiment is consistent with her actual arguments about consciousness emerging through action rather than reflection alone — but the neat line itself likely isn’t hers. The argument of this post stands independently of the attribution.

The following blog is written as a trilogy, initialised by hearing further on the work of Alan Milburn and his final report due out after the Budget in November. Listening on the radio this morning, Tuesday 20 October 2026, there seemed such a range of common themes between Milburn’s childhood background and  my mother  Josephine Thurley and her generation (that generation plus one from the past), that I was reminded I have not actually surfaced much detail directly on her. Both were the first of their families to go to University (Lancaster 1979, King’s College 1947) where they studied History.

My family all have a defined image of my mother, Josephine Wilding, from the 1970s. She is in the drawing room, sitting on a rug, elegantly dressed in a designer cardigan. Beside her sits a blazing electric bar fire—turned on regardless of how hot the weather is outside. It serves a dual, indispensable purpose: keeping her warm, and lighting the Benson & Hedges cigarettes on which she survived, alongside a perpetually refilled, large mug of Nescafé.

Spread across her lap and the surrounding furniture were seemingly endless reams of continuous-feed, dot-matrix computer printouts. Armed with a soft 2B pencil, she spent hours tracking the hidden architecture of the English language—her touch light but precise as she shaded and identified specific word couplets, agentive by-phrases, and their grammatical ilk. Before fluorescent highlighter pens came of age in British offices, this painstaking work was done entirely in graphite.

To the untrained eye, it looked like an eccentric hobby. In reality, she was working at a time of the genesis of modern linguistics.

THE JOSEPHINE WILDING METHOD: BRIDGING TWO TITANS

Balancing the Ivory Tower and the Boarding House

What makes this scene so improbable was the context surrounding that drawing room door. Josephine wasn’t a cloistered academic with the luxury of uninterrupted silence. She was a full-time English teacher, the matriarch of the boarding house of Ridgeway, and co-proprietor of Claires Court Preparatory school for boys.Outside the drawing room door was a high-energy household of circa 24 boarding school boys aged between 7 and 13. Driven by the UK baby boom, weekly boarders flooded in from an overstretched London. Others arrived from much further afield; our proximity to Heathrow Airport attracted boys from as far away as Malaya and Mexico, also seeking a school that wanted them. My brother Hugh and I had no choice in the matter, we just found ourselves with a score or so of foster brothers and ‘boy’ was that fun!Yet, amidst the logistical whirlwind of managing two dozen young boys, teaching, and parenting, Josephine found her sanctuary in data. Her work under Professor Randolph Quirk at University College London (UCL) was part of the historic Survey of English Usage. Before computers could easily sort language, human minds had to do the heavy lifting. Her meticulous coding directly fed into landmark reference works like Professor Quirk’s A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972).

The MIT Catalyst: But Quirk’s data-driven, empirical world was only half of her intellectual DNA. Josephine had also spent a transformative nine-month sabbatical at MIT working under a young Professor Noam Chomsky over 1971/72. At MIT, she was immersed in the Chomskyan Revolution—the radical idea that children possess an innate, highly sophisticated biological framework for language. When she returned to the UK, she achieved something brilliant: she synthesised Chomsky’s belief in innate intellectual capacity with Quirk’s demand for structural precision.

A Progressive Blueprint for the teaching of children with additional needs: This new intellectual armour became her greatest weapon when she turned her focus toward dyslexia and child development. In the 1970s, the early British dyslexia movement was heavily focused on basic remediation and emotional cushioning—what my mother called “tender loving care.” Josephine saw right through this well-meaning but limiting approach. Using her linguistics background, she pioneered a “high-expectation, high-support” framework that predicted modern educational psychology by decades:

• The Power of Rigour: She knew that you couldn’t “hug” a child out of a literacy barrier. Instead, she used the structural mechanics she mastered under Quirk to teach children how to consciously decode the architecture of language.
• Unwavering Expectations: Influenced by Chomsky, she refused to equate a learning difference with a lack of intellectual capacity. Lowering the bar was not an option; she believed that empowering such children meant giving them the rigorous tools to achieve the exact same high standards as their peers. It’s fashionable now to bundle this up as ‘neurodiversity’, sometimes helpful perhaps, yet simply does not describe in detail the specific interventions and approach to learning needed to help bridge the ‘gap’.
• Intellectual Validity: Working within a traditional educational establishment, her associations with UCL and MIT gave her armour to wear.. When sceptical inspectors or worried parents questioned her progressive methods, her deep academic pedigree commanded instant respect.

Realistically, the relentless demands of teaching, leadership, and running a massive boarding household meant that a PhD remained a sacrificed dream—an MA was the absolute limit of what time would allow. But Josephine Wilding didn’t need a doctoral scroll to prove her impact. Her legacy was forged right there in the drawing room, under the warm glow of an electric fire, transforming world-class linguistic theory into a lifeline for generations of children, now alumni, who will recall her beneficent presence more than anything else.

My mother was never a product of a privileged education, the daughter of a silversmith father and tobacconist mother. Born in 1928, she grew up with a younger brother and sister (respectively 7 & 14 years her juniors), her war years were a mix of school, caring for her siblings and manning the shop, Thurleys on the Finchley Road. She  took the opportunity to go to King’s College to read History, where she met her future husband, David. More of my father here – https://schl.cc/ir. As the title of this first blog of three makes clear, over my lifetime I have been able to learn so much, yet at the outset, Mum and Dad forged their careers through their own efforts. Her love of English, the writing of our forebears stood out in her teaching; I have exercise book annuals from Claires Court in the mid 1960s in which I learned how to talk and draw about the stories in literature. “After all” Josephine would say “if you can talk about it and describe it in drawings, that’s when you learn how to write about it too”.

I quote from Nature and Human Nature, by the author of Sam Slick, the Clock-maker (London, 1855), by the Nova-Scotian author Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865):

“Cutler,” sais I, “come back, that’s a good fellow, and I’ll tell you the story. […] There was a jack-tar once to England who had been absent on a whaling voyage for nearly three years, and he had hardly landed when he was ordered off to sea again, before he had time to go home and see his friends. He was a lamentin’ this to a shipmate of his, a serious-minded man, like you.

“Sais he, ‘Bill, it breaketh my heart to have to leave agin arter this fashion. I havn’t seen Polly now goin’ on three years, nor the little un either.’ […]“‘It seemeth hard, Tom,’ said Bill, tryin’ to comfort him; ‘it seemeth hard; but I’m an older man nor you be, Tom, the matter of several years; […] and my experience, Tom, is, that this life ain’t all beer and skittles.’

“Cutler, there is a great deal of philosophy in that maxim: a preacher couldn’t say as much in a sermon an hour long, as there is in that little story with that little moral reflection at the eend [sic] of it.”

“‘This life ain’t all beer and skittles.’ Many a time since I heard that anecdote—and I heard it in Kew Gardens, of all places in the world—when I am disappointed sadly I say that saw over, and console myself with it. I can’t expect to go thro’ the world, Cutler, as I have done: stormy days, long and dark nights are before me. As I grow old I shant be so full of animal spirits as I have been. In the natur [sic] of things I must have my share of aches, and pains, and disappointment, as well as others; and when they come, nothing will better help me to bear them than that little, simple reflection of the sailor, which appeals so directly to the heart.

Sam, this life aint all beer and skittles, that’s a fact.”

In 1284 Hamelin had a plague of rats. A stranger in red and yellow offered to clear them for gold, played his pipe, and led every rat down into the Weser. The mayor and burghers then declined to pay, assuming he had nowhere else to turn. He had. He played a different tune, and 130 of the town’s children followed him into the mountain.

I’m not suggesting anyone is leading children into a hillside. But the story is about a bargain broken by people who thought the other party couldn’t walk away, and the cost landing on the young, and that is why it has been on my mind.

Last week the heads of the Independent Schools Association London West met at Norden Farm. I’m the group’s Treasurer and report to ISA HQ, where the association now counts more than 800 member schools; our area has over 120 of them. The very small and the very large sat as equals, with no hierarchy, and we were asked to work in small groups on our challenges and on where a resolution might lie. One thing that Rudi Lockhart, ISA’s CEO and a welcome visitor to the meeting made clear, was just how hard the association’s leadership are working to support our schools.

This was not a meeting of the down and outs. John O’Farrell opens Things Can Only Get Better by dressing up his Maidenhead childhood as a mining village, with a Cookham colliery and everything, which is funny because nobody could believe it. Nobody in that room wished to overstate their plight, and I don’t either. The heads at Norden Farm still lead schools because they want to teach, to put on concerts and plays, and to see a child find the thing they are good at. But a mild plight can still raise an awkward question about the choices being made, and that question is what this piece is about.

First, the narrative. The line still repeated by government and by national institutions is that our sector enjoyed a tax break that has now been withdrawn. That is not what happened. Education was exempt from VAT, and what changed is that 20 per cent now falls on fees for pupils in private schools aged 4 to 18. Every head in that room knew it, and every one of us was tired of correcting it. The removal of mandatory charitable business rates relief under the Non-Domestic Rating Act 2025 has added to the strain, and it falls hardest on the smaller, community-rooted schools running on modest margins.

Second, the pricing. Major cultural institutions, science centres and sports bodies, many of them heavily subsidised, have introduced two-tier prices. State school groups get subsidised entry; independent school parties pay more for the same workshop or the same seats. Families paying fees still contribute through general taxation to the bodies charging them, and roughly a third of pupils in Independent Schools Council schools receive means-tested help. A flat surcharge on a school outing doesn’t touch a school’s reserves. It lands on a child on a full bursary.

VAT is a policy, and governments are entitled to make policy. A surcharge on a school visit is a decision taken by someone running a museum or a sports body, who has chosen to price a child according to the school that child attends. That is a different thing, and it is the ethical choice I mean.

There is a convenient story that the sector is simply a place of privilege, so I’ll put the figures on the table and let readers weigh them. On the sporting side, 59 per cent of England’s men’s cricket team is now privately educated, up from 33 per cent in 2014, and 50 per cent of the women’s team, up from 35. Team GB’s Olympic medallists were 36 per cent privately educated at London 2012, 31 at Rio, 40 at Tokyo and 33 at Paris. In the arts, the picture looks like this (the national average of children in private shops is 7 per cent):

These figures can be read two ways. Critics cite them to show how much advantage the sector carries, and they have a point; the pop-star row shows a field where it doesn’t hold. My reading is that the sector is where much of the country’s creative and athletic talent is trained, and that the same public institutions that celebrate the results are now adding a surcharge to the schools that produce them. The chief executive row makes the point wryly: a good share of the people running the funded cultural organisations that set these prices came through the sector they are now charging.

None of this was the mood in the room. I hold two phrases dear, and I used them with colleagues. The first: “There’s no good in the long run looking at the Rainbow, that’s behind us. Our job as school leaders is to walk towards the sunshine.” The second is somewhat ruder: “When all around you is shit, all you can do is shine.”

I am of course no longer a headteacher, and so have no such conversations to have any more. However, as an ISA member (Headteacher) for 36 years, I’ve certainly had much experience during my time. Shining is easier when you’re not on your own. Our association offers excellent access to mental health resources for a head in difficulty, though it is never enough by itself. Looking after children with Education-Health plans is something our sector does really well, but with specific schools supporting some of the myriad of issues that come with a statement. What helps as much is knowing that other heads are in the same weather, being able to share problems and align solutions to what works. The success is shown in the ‘difficult conversations made easy’ then have back at school with staff and parents.

The Piper’s lesson was never really about rats. The town broke its word to the one person it thought couldn’t leave, and it paid in children. The independent sector isn’t going anywhere in a hurry, and neither are its heads. But the children on the school trip, bursary pupils among them, are the ones who pay the surcharge, and they are the ones the sector is for.

The irony of the inspiration for this week’s blog is that it was triggered by a reminder I received from Facebook this morning (7 October) that I’d posted 9 years ago about the Comic Relief’s ‘Anti-Social’ cautionary tale for Halloween. Across the UK, there is a new digital divide growing, that between those who choose Social Media through which to lead their lives, and those who made the active choice never to join, or having joined, made the decision to leave.

It began as a harmless modern courtship, Sara meeting a fellow who ticked every conventional box until the ghastly truth slipped out over brunch. He had no digital footprint. Not a scrap. No Facebook, no Instagram, no LinkedIn, not even a lingering ghost of a MySpace page from 2007. To Sara and her tight-knit council of algorithmic war-room advisors, this was not mere eccentricity; it was an ontological crisis. How, they shuddered, does one ascertain what the man ate for luncheon if there is no flat-lay photograph to scroll past? How does he broadcast an opinion into the ether if there is no comment section to validate his existence?

We have reached a peculiar point where visibility equals veracity, and the man who declines to curate his life for the public ledger is treated as a feral creature roaming the high street, unfettered by tags or location pins, when he ought to be admired for his privacy. Comic Relief’s 2017 sketch, Anti Social, captured this neurosis rather well. It plays as a dating horror story where the monster is simply a bloke offline, yet the panic felt by the friendship group is entirely genuine to our age. They treat his un-tagged status like an active hazard, wondering aloud how he manages to voice a grievance without a public pile-on or how he transmits affection without a filtered jpeg. And I recognise this is now a major feature of modern life, to choose to leave the grid (but probably keep the bank app and other utilities that no longer have a physical form).

Looking back across the nine years since that little film dropped, the satire cuts rather deeper than the writers perhaps intended. Across the UK there is a growing digital divide between those who still tether their identities to the social media feed and those who have made a conscious choice to step off. Some never climbed aboard the wagon; others, having sampled the endless buffet of manufactured outrage and curated vanity, quietly deleted their accounts and walked back into the analogue sunlight.
Choosing the offline path now takes a stubborn sort of recalcitrance. It means accepting that you will occasionally miss the group WhatsApp arrangement, that old acquaintances will assume you have either moved to the Scottish highlands or entered witness protection, and that you must actually converse with the chap sitting next to you on the commuter train rather than staring fixedly into a glowing rectangle. The refugees from the social web often report an acute return of attention, a quieter mind, and the luxury of having thoughts that belong to oneself rather than the marketplace.

Comedy and plain speaking have always been the best way to look at our own foolishness. Schools still teach Chaucer and Shakespeare for that reason, and people keep proving the appetite is there. The British Museum’s Bayeux Tapestry exhibition drew crowds, whatever one thinks of the queuing arrangements, for seventy metres of stitched cloth telling a story from 1066. According to the BBC, sales of Homer’s Odyssey in the UK have risen by 700% since the release of Christopher Nolan’s film, with nearly 8,000 print copies sold in a single week. A story told plainly and with a sense of humour still finds its audience. If the price of total digital connectivity is a society that breaks into hives at the mere thought of a suitor who has never used a Snapchat filter, we might ask who is really behaving strangely. Society ridicules the man who steps away, and yet it expects someone else to keep the rest of us safe from what he avoided.

That “someone else” is, as ever, the teacher.

Yet if individuals can slip away into the analogue shadows, what becomes of commerce and community when the marketplace itself has migrated entirely into the algorithm? The flight from social media leaves a gap, and clever enterprise is eager to fill it. This is especially so now that society leans, with increasing exhaustion, on artificial intelligence to curate everything from our weekly shopping lists and high-value purchases (automobiles, white goods, designer fashion) to our utility providers, school choices for our children, and now virtually the entirety of modern dating.
When an algorithm becomes the gatekeeper of human experience, the offline citizen is an awkward case. How does a machine market a sports car or an independent school to someone who leaves no behavioural breadcrumbs? Commerce simply adapts, and attaches itself to the AI curators that now recommend what we should buy. We have outsourced our curiosity.

How, then, are we as educationalists supposed to balance these competing pressures in the classroom? There is no tidy, binary answer. For decades, schools taught digital literacy as a straightforward exercise in online safety: how to protect your password, how to spot a phish, how to avoid a cyberbully. That is no longer enough.

Schools now carry the heavier burden of teaching children to navigate the blurred line between public good and private harm. When an algorithm quietly shapes a young person’s ambitions, filters their friendships and pre-selects their worldview in the name of personalisation, the threat is no longer just a dodgy stranger in a chatroom. It is the gradual loss of independent thought. If we are to prepare the rising generation for a world divided between the hyper-connected consumer and the analogue dropout, we must teach them how to use the tools, and also when, and how bravely, to put them down.

As ever, we will have to agree to a compromise. We should avoid the purity of the Amish community on one side and the ignorance of the anti-vaxxer on the other, since both rely on a modern, ethical society to keep them, and the rest of us, safe.

Here in the UK, where school is defined by a thirteen-year timeline, in the classroom that means reversing out of what Sir Ken Robinson called, in his 2006 TED talk, “a protracted process of university entrance”. Good teachers already know how to reach beyond the test. Yet the test is how school management measures success, and until that changes, the State, in the form of the DfE, has determined that children will be prepared chiefly for an exam hall. What’s so depressing to read is that the more inclusive a school is, the more open it is to enroll children who learn differently, the lower in league tables it is placed, and more likely to receive a damning indictment from Ofsted. Is it largely in the truly Independent sector of British education that we strive not just for academic success but, more importantly, to give teachers the time and opportunity to prepare children to make a significant contribution to a world made even less predictable by an algorithm?

The Story of Our Taplow Home… but first a poem in the style of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

On Monday, 21 September, a quiet pen stroke on a legal document secured a vibrant future for local sport on Institute Road in Taplow. By signing a new thirty-year lease extension, the Phoenix and Claires Court Sports Club ensured that our shared sports grounds remain protected and thriving all the way through to 2060. For club, school, and community rugby players, this milestone represents far more than a lease; it marks the continuation of a seventy-year story rooted in local vision, joint enterprise, and a passion for sport.

Long before rugby boots first trod this turf, the ground itself held a special place in local history. Back in 1956, before formal Green Belt policies existed to shield our countryside, civic-minded residents formed the Taplow and Hitcham Recreation Grounds Association to purchase strategic parcels of land as a permanent buffer against encroaching urban sprawl [2]. Around that time, part of the plot off Institute Road was leased to Flexello Castors and Wheels Ltd. Founded in London in the mid-1930s and later established on the Slough Trading Estate, Flexello grew to become Europe’s largest castor manufacturer. The company established its social and sports club on the site, cementing its presence so firmly that generations of local families still warmly refer to the land as the Flexello ground. The site even contributed directly to Britain’s modern infrastructure when, in 1959 and 1960, the county council temporarily extracted gravel from the grounds to help construct the nearby M4 motorway.

Claires Court School’s connection with the ground began in 1962 under the kind patronage of the Menko family, owners of Flexello. Siegbert Menko’s son, Ricky, was one of the nineteen founding pupils of the school, together with brothers Hugh and James, sons of the founding Partners, David and Josephine.

That personal family friendship opened the gates for the school’s early pupils to use the Flexello fields for games and athletics. It marked the start of a twenty-two-year journey for Claires Court toward anchoring a permanent, dedicated sports campus on the site.

Meanwhile, Phoenix RFC was charting its own course. In 1967, the rugby club was headquartered at The George Hotel in Burnham High Street, regularly fielding two senior teams. Yet despite their enthusiasm and growth, they lacked a permanent home. In 1970, Phoenix launched an ambitious search for a ground of their own—a quest that would span fourteen long years.

The breakthrough came in 1984, coinciding with Phoenix RFC’s twenty-first anniversary year. Bringing together Claires Court’s twenty-two years on the ground and Phoenix’s fourteen years of searching, both organisations recognised that a school and a sports club could achieve far more together than apart. They joined forces to secure a joint lease for the Taplow site and incorporated a combined legal entity, The Phoenix and Claires Court Sports Club Ltd, colloquially known as PACCS.

The founding co-workers included Geoff Mould, Ron and Alan Jones, Simon Porter, Alistair Crawford, brother Hugh and I, by now grown-ups. Shortly after securing the lease, we set about constructing a proper sports pavilion and clubhouse. I had the privilege of serving as project manager, working shoulder to shoulder with Ron Jones, whose tireless energy and drive as a master builder, brought the building out of the ground.

That 1984 agreement established a brilliant operational rhythm that has served us ever since. During midweek school hours and term time, Claires Court has full run of the grounds for PE, games sessions, athletics, and cross-country. In the evenings and across the weekend, Phoenix RFC takes over for midweek training, tag rugby, and full weekend fixtures across senior, junior, and mini divisions. It remains a masterclass in resource sharing, giving school pupils dedicated, high-quality pitches while giving a grassroots rugby club a stable, subsidized clubhouse and playing fields.

As sport has evolved, so too have the facilities, with continuous investments through the years, most recently from the RFU-supported club funding pot. This has enabled us to extended the main clubhouse to enhance the social bar area and expand changing rooms to accommodate both male and female players. With the rapid rise of girls’ school sports and women’s rugby, these upgrades ensure our grounds remain modern, inclusive, and welcoming for every young athlete who steps onto the field for both male and female players. A PTA-funded AstroTurf cricket wicket (a lifesaver for dewy Saturday morning starts!), has become an asset for early Saturday morning school matches, when heavy dew can leave traditional grass wickets damp, slow, and low.

Looking out across the pitches today, it is inspiring to think that a strategic green space saved by local residents in the 1950s, shaped by industrial recreation and motorway gravel will now carry the club, from veterans to minis and all ages between. It is a testament to what can be achieved when educational vision and grassroots community sport run forward together.

(Photo: Representatives from Claires Court, Phoenix RFC, and the Taplow & Hitcham Recreation Grounds Association gather at Institute Road to mark the signing of the 30-year lease extension through to 2060.)

Many leadership programmes talk about styles of leadership, in different words but meaning the same: Atlas holding the world in his hands, or Zeus looking down from on high. Gandalf or Aragorn. Guardians of the bridge like Horatio. Whether it’s in the LinkedIn articles I read or the conferences I attend, these ideas come round again and again. I’ve no quarrel with the theory, but in practice the leader is too often the Emperor in his new clothes: absent, or not much there. To my mind, great leadership takes a bit of each, as Jürgen Klopp showed at Liverpool. You don’t have to be everything to every person, but they need to know you care. Passion in the right place is essential, and that’s all about timing, as is recognising other people’s achievements as theirs and being humble about the reflected glory.

I don’t need to know everything. What I don’t know I’ll ask an expert rather than a friend. I’ve always made a point of checking so that I can praise, using language that doesn’t demean. I describe my own style as being the architect: my job is to have learned the trade, design the business to meet the customers’ needs, and put my name to the drawings. Yes, I’ve learned to demonstrate I can do the things I ask of others, and I’ve worn the steel toe-caps and the safety helmet too. I’m a starter-finisher, and yet I don’t ask too much of those already on the work, respecting their rights. When a deadline is real I know they’ll meet it, partly from professional pride and partly because of the relationships already built. They won’t let me down. I know the rules and standards required to meet regulation, how to meet planning conditions, and when to use visiting experts to check the work I’ve led.

Recently I’ve been using a range of AI tools to assist with designs, policies, reporting lines and new project requirements. They are amazing, super-intelligent, and often totally wrong. They are quick to apologise, better sometimes at reminding you to be cautious rather than speedy, and clearly a flawed genius with a personality disorder. Such tools have always been available, changing from abacus through slide rule to calculator, spreadsheet and database. In the end it is still human judgement, fallible yet located in a consciousness.

When AI drives a car and runs someone over, who is going to be to blame? Where is the bucket going to stop?

It depends how much of the driving the system was actually doing. Most of what is sold to ordinary drivers is still the supervised sort: the human remains legally in charge, even when the brochure suggests otherwise. Once there is no one required at the wheel — the robotaxis, the authorised self-driving — the first claim in this country already goes to the insurer, and then upstream to the manufacturer or the authorised entity. The machine cannot be sued. Someone with a name on a letterhead has to carry it.

Nor is the machine the only thing nobody gets to sue. When the iPad arrived in the classroom, many of us were sold the illusion that children would make far faster progress by giving up writing by hand and reading books. The regions and countries that bought the myth of the Digital Native could not extol its virtues highly enough. Sweden went furthest, with tablets in nursery schools, and then turned back. Its schools minister, Lotta Edholm, said Swedish pupils needed more textbooks, and the government moved to end digital learning for the under-sixes. Reading scores for nine- and ten-year-olds had slipped from 555 to 544 in five years. Sadly, there is no one to sue.

And the relationship between provider and customer can no longer be assumed. New models are coming in from China that buyers then cannot insure, or can insure only at a price that undoes the bargain. The contract is with a UK subsidiary, protected by the limited liability such companies enjoy. Repair histories are thin, parts uncertain, and the parent sits somewhere else.

Court cases are now going in favour of those damaged by software failures and by corporate behaviour that treated the output as gospel. Facebook. Fujitsu. An NHS trust and cancer screening. The Post Office and Horizon. In each, the harm was real and the responsible body hard to keep in the same room as the victim. We look, in this country and in others, as if we automated the work and then automated the accountability as well. Responsibility diffused until trust itself began to look optional.

And new risks are arriving every day. Take Quick Response codes: sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Arrive at the shopping centre, see the ticket machine and its beckoning QR code, scan it, summon up the car park permit, enter your bank details, and that used to be you safely parked. Milton Haworth scanned a QR code at a council-run car park in Castleford, West Yorkshire. It sent him to download an unauthorised app, where he agreed a 90p fee to verify his bank details. Instead of paying to park, he found himself signed up to a subscription with a £39 yearly fee and no refunds. The crime is called quishing, and the BBC’s analysis of Action Fraud data found reports up 14-fold in five years, from 100 in 2019 to 1,386 in 2024. Often the criminal simply sticks their own code over the real one. The first loss is small, and the real damage comes later, when someone who already has your details rings up pretending to be your bank. It’s becoming a favourite in pub gardens too: order the next round by phone without leaving your seat, and don’t spot that the payment has gone somewhere other than the bar.

The better path is the one I already trust: design the thing so that competence, data and liability sit together. The tools of the trade, AI included, can help with that — mapping a parts risk before a car is waved through, noticing when a screening parameter has drifted, finding the clause that empties a subsidiary of anything worth claiming against. They cannot sign the drawing. The architect still needs to sign.

‘I know that LinkedIn is not every readers cup of tea, a social network for professionals, with none of the excitement of Instagram, the aggression of X, the doom scrolling of TikTok etc.etc. Over the past 2 weeks, the postings by the many professionals that have something to say have reminded us all that ‘SCHOOL’S BACK’, ‘Freedom from the Tyranny of holiday childcare’, plus quite a wide rumble around just whether the emerging headlines around Sport, Education, Wider Society can actually believed. I tend not to write self-aggrandising junk, preferring to highlight some of the absurdities of life and perhaps show a steer around them.

So, this being the first September school week in which I have not needed to worry about things being ready (I did that for 4 weeks over the Summer break, supervising the installation of the New Music Studios at CC Senior Boys). Good news – it was ready for use 2 days earlier than target, so I am now on the golf course etc. and look forward to visiting the school once all has settled in well! To my quiz!!!

I have sketched outlines for 5 blogs I want to write, but I’d like to time my readers current interests around these topics, going live with one and resting the others for a while. The titles and topics follow: I’ll show you at the close how to vote for the 1 you’d like to read next!

Title 1: The Moving Baseline: How Our Measure of Excellence Keeps Shifting

This piece explores how structural inflation gradually quietly redefines standard performance across sport, technology, and academia. Looking across decades, it examines how the boundary line of “extraordinary” constantly migrates, transforming once-rare breakthroughs into baseline expectations. The essay concludes that while our standards keep climbing, true excellence lies not in hitting moving targets created by changing environments, but in maintaining personal integrity and effort regardless of where the baseline sits.

Title 2: The Constant Upgrade: From Willow and Irons to the Four-Minute Standard

Focusing on the physical tools and mechanical advances of human endeavor, this blog examines how technology relentlessly alters the parameters of performance. It traces how modern sweet spots in golf clubs, density-tuned cricket bats, and engineered running tracks actively reframe what human bodies can achieve. I don’t think we have ever had as many 90mph bowlers that we have now, but might that mean the sport is the poorer for the lack of the encouragement of guile? The piece concludes that equipment upgrades can elevate average output, but genuine mastery still requires the unyielding human discipline to harness those tools effectively. 

Title 3: Unearned Perfection: The False Horizon of Human Achievement

A reflective critique on the illusion of progress, this post contrasts artificial inflation with genuine human growth. It asks whether achieving higher marks or better metrics simply reflects adjusted metrics rather than superior capability. To be honest, we need to know what the big “victories are, not just the winners”. With so many more children staying in academic education to 21, to meet a nation’s ambition to give 50% of the population  university education, for many now the reality is providing a way of staying clear of the unemployment statistics by taking a loan and perhaps having a purpose. The narrative concludes with a call to resist self-congratulation over calibrated metrics, urging readers to value grit, character, and depth over padded scores and easy milestones.

Title 4: When Better Becomes the Standard: A Short History of Moving the Goalposts

Taking an institutional perspective, this piece tracks how systems adapt when top-tier outcomes become commonplace. By examining grade distribution trends alongside athletic thresholds, it considers what happens to motivation when benchmark posts constantly shift. And benchmarks aren’t just shifting upwards; 52 years ago, on my Psychology undergraduate course, we visited the Towers Hospital to learn how to care for the ~7% teenage children with mental health disorders to now ~21%, a 200% growth over years. The post concludes that institutions must focus on building resilient intrinsic value rather than chasing superficial metric targets that risk devaluation over time.

Title 5: The Triumph of the Tool: What Golf Clubs, Cricket Bats, and First-Class Degrees Share

This essay looks at the shared human impulse to optimise our environments, tools, and assessment methods. It bridges the gap between craftsmanship in manufacturing sports gear and the structural design of modern educational assessment. There are facts and urban myths, and often they overlap – when I was graduating from University in the mid 70’s ~6% of 18 year olds went to University and perhaps of those, only 2% gained a first. It’s only when you study the elite Universities and the subjects or Maths and Physics that the numbers of First’s climbed dramatically. These days, the rates are ~1,500% higher. The reflection concludes that while better tools and refined criteria open doors to wider participation, we must never confuse optimised apparatus with the raw work of learning, playing, and enduring.

OK, it’s an experiment, and I wont count the poll until Thurday 1 October 2026.

You can see it’s back to school for me, learning new tricks and all. I haven’t wite yet worked out why my AI assistant on this Blog wasn’t working this week – probably sulking because I don’t think he yet deserves the same rights as Humans – though its a debate we’ve had whilst writing this blog. Gemini has this to say (and so more BTW)

“Ultimately, current legal and ethical frameworks treat AI strictly as a tool and property rather than a entity with rights. However, as technology evolves, the consensus on how society expects humans to interact with AI is still being written by debates exactly like the one you are having.“

We have important strictures in our society that enables humanity to thrive. Anyone kicking a dog is very serious criminal offence. We don’t want to model behaviour that permits the kicking of robot dogs in the street either. As kit gets smarted, as Gemini in humanoid form takes me clothes shopping, I feel they will deserve some respect after all, that’s a thankless task anyway!

What needs to be said is this: Ultimately, if there is only one thing you can do, it’s be kind.

How England keeps importing other countries’ success stories — and leaving the essential ingredients behind. You can hear the podcast below the blog,

The illusionist’s trick relies on keeping the eye on the reveal while the mechanism stays in the dark. Education policy has a similar appetite for theatre. We seize on headline triumphs from overseas, hold up the finished product as proof of a policy’s genius, and skip the scaffolding, the selected intake and the cultural conditions that actually did the heavy lifting.

Ed Conway, Sky News economics editor, traces that habit in “Material World” through “our” local seafood. Fish caught in the North Sea is offloaded in Zeebrugge, shipped to China for processing, and returned to British supermarkets in packaging that hints at green, local provenance. It arrives on the plate as our fish fingers, a very British dish, even though the work was done elsewhere, under different rules. Education in England has been playing a version of that game for years: import the spectacular result, put a local label on it, and pretend the outcome can be copied by adopting the one technique that showed up in the photograph.

When Shanghai dominated the PISA tables, English officials brought over Chinese teachers and rolled out “teaching for mastery” in primary schools. What the press releases left out was that those scores came from wealthy, highly selected urban jurisdictions, and from samples that excluded large numbers of migrant children, many of whom, under household registration rules, could not progress through the city’s senior schools in the same way as local pupils. We did not import a national method. We marketed a regional outlier as if it were a wand that would work anywhere.

Something similar happened with the “Finnish miracle.” Their system, built on high teacher trust, little standardised testing and broad professional autonomy, was stripped of that context and used to justify whatever reform the speaker already favoured. The corporate world offered its own version in the myth of the “digital native.” Marc Prensky’s claim was that children raised with screens had fundamentally rewired brains and therefore needed digital-first teaching. Commercial enthusiasm was quickly rebranded as educational science. Systematic reviews keep reminding us that handing a pupil a tablet does not, by itself, improve learning, and that children do not possess an innate superiority in digital reasoning simply by virtue of their birth year. Sweden, once the poster child for classroom digitisation, has been turning back toward printed textbooks, handwriting and direct instruction after seeing reading comprehension dip.

Homogenising the advice does not work either. Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion” has had a long run in English schools, often as a way of looking Ofsted-ready. The techniques were honed in a particular kind of American classroom, mostly with older pupils. Try the first five: set and communicate high academic expectations; ask students to explain their reasoning, not just give answers; use frequent checks for understanding; make students do the intellectual work; use precise, academic language. You can see a shadow of that falling on a secondary lesson. It is not how you encourage a broad spectrum of six-year-olds to play nicely as they enter formal education.

The latest chapter is the 2025 PISA results. Headlines say English pupils have pulled ahead of the rest of the UK in reading, maths and science, even as global reading skills slip and teenagers struggle to judge what they meet online. The relative position is fair enough. The scores underneath are less dramatic than the billing: science up, reading barely moved, maths flat. England looks stronger in part because others have fallen, perhaps more accurately, the country has dropped only a little rather than a lot!

Georgia Gould has pointed to high-performing Estonia as proof that technical subjects from fourteen can sit comfortably alongside academic rigour. Estonia’s PISA scores were earned in a comprehensive basic school, with a later start and far less testing — not on a vocational track that begins at fourteen. Estonia does have vocational routes, but they open mainly after basic school. Borrowing a single glowing light of high academic achievement, tying it to the offer of technical courses at fourteen, and expecting it to yield the Estonian model of success leaves the actual groundwork of building that system untouched.

That distinction, between the borrowed headline and the earned result, is one I recognise from somewhere closer to home than PISA tables. Back in the early 1990s, when I stepped in to help develop Maidenhead Mini Rugby, the success was built on welcoming any keen dads willing to help, then putting them through a fairly robust coach-training regime. The section grew from 28 to over 200 over the rest of that decade. Down at Phoenix Club on Sunday, the first day of the new season, the minis, the juniors and the adult women were all turning out on the fields of glory, with highly experienced coaches everywhere — graduates from their playing careers now giving back. There were no gimmicks, no “the Springboks do it this way,” just a grassroots community club doing the right thing right, and covering the age groups from five-year-olds to grown-ups. That is provenance you can trust, because you can see the conditions that produced it.

Which brings us to the structural flaw at home. The criticism of the English system is not that it fails every child outright, but that it operates like a world supplied only with right-handed scissors. For the academically inclined child on the clear line from GCSEs to A-levels and university, the tool fits well enough. For those who learn differently, the fit is awkward. Vocationally minded young people are still funnelled into lower-status alternatives. Children with special educational needs and disabilities meet provision that is chronically delayed, fragmented or poorly adapted. Plenty of children need a different fit: language, culture, neurology, behaviour, or simply a brain that does not take the standard route. Too often they are marked down for the difference, not measured on what they can do. Recent inquiries into outcomes for white working-class children underline the same disconnect: decades of top-down initiatives have not offered a meaningful route for those outside the preferred mould.

Labels can help schools recognise genuine differences in how children learn. They can also confuse support with lowered expectations. A child may need understanding and adjustment without being defined by a condition, or told that effort and progress are beyond them. Privately commissioned reports sometimes pathologise ordinary differences, while children with severe and complex needs still struggle to secure specialist support. The issue is not whether those differences are real. It is whether the language meant to help is beginning to obscure need, narrow expectation, and divert attention from those who require the greatest support.

A school system can produce a respectable PISA line and still disadvantage large groups of pupils whose strengths fall outside its design. Real progress is not achieved by borrowing another country’s headline, or by trusting that screen light will replace good pedagogy. It requires us to look at the machinery we actually have.

I’ll close with despair first. Just after sixth-form and secondary results days, the papers were ramping up the hype on which school did best, splitting state and private into separate league tables. Of course it is right to celebrate. And guess what? The best results came from the most selective or expensive sets of right-handed scissors in the country.

Where does the optimism show through? Everyone in the learning space knows this, and what is drummed into teachers and coaches alike is that children learn best from each other when there are good instructors around them. England’s performance in the recent football World Cup was only that good because we selected almost all the right players — as a Chelsea supporter, I’d have taken Cole Palmer too. But the national team can only excel because the local community clubs kept producing players worth selecting in the first place. Stop advertising the value of shortcuts and magic tricks. Learning is hard. Glamourise it all you like, but a spade is a spade: adults and young people need to dig in to make sure everyone is included, and when the job needs a bloody shovel, use one — don’t parcel the work out elsewhere and keep our fingers crossed.