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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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