Toby Young

Toby Young is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his stint in New York as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine. He is currently leading the efforts of a group of parents and teachers to set up a free school in West London. It is intended to be a “comprehensive with grammar school standards” and hopes it will open next year. Toby took part in our recent fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, joining Schools Minister Nick Gibb to debate the issue of literacy in the UK today.

What inspired you to get involved with the West London Free School project?

Well, I guess it’s partly being a Dad and having four kids: my oldest child is seven so she’ll be applying to secondary school in 2014. My wife sat me down one day and said, “Look, either you become religious so we can send our children to the local CofE secondary school, or we move to the catchment area of a really good comprehensive or we educate them privately”. I don’t want my children to go to a fee-paying school, I want them to go a state school just like I did, so that wasn’t an option. But I thought perhaps there’s a fourth option, which is starting a really good school ourselves. It sounds a bit radical but this was around the time Michael Gove began talking about allowing groups of parents and teachers and voluntary organisations to set up free schools if the Conservatives won the election. I went and visited some charter schools in America and free schools in Sweden and realised it could be done and assembled a group of like-minded parents and teachers and we’ve been working on it now pretty much flat out for 13 months.

What was the overall impression you got from Sweden’s experience of free schools?

That free schools have been very successful in Sweden. The policy was introduced by a conservative government which was fairly short-lived at the beginning of the 1990s. The policy was as widely criticised then as the Coalition’s education policy is now. Every other political party in Sweden apart from the conservative party bitterly attacked the policy, but it proved so popular with parents and so many free schools sprang up that it proved politically impossible to reverse the policy and I’m hoping the same will happen here. Loads of people think that because only 16 applications have been approved so far by the Department for Education that the policy has been a humiliating failure but actually 16 is a pretty good number when you consider how difficult it is and I’m sure that number will begin to grow very quickly.

In what ways do you think free schools will transform the British schooling experience?

Well, I think for the children at the schools they will offer a better education than that available to parents in the areas that they are being established. Generally speaking, the only parents that have access to good academic schools are those who are of a particular faith or live within the catchment area of an outstanding school or who can afford to go private. Free schools will make a comparable education available to parents who don’t fall into any of those categories. So for their children it will definitely make a huge difference.

What sort of impact they will have on the rest of the education system is more controversial. I believe that the effect of competition will be to galvanise neighbouring schools to improve. Interestingly, in our area the local secondary school which was really struggling has already rapidly improved. It’s astonishing how quickly it improved between last year and this year. Last year it got 38% of its student passing 5 A-Cs, this year it’s gone up to 54% and they’ve also said they’re going to introduce Latin to the school. A lot of people have said, “Why don’t you just get involved with the local school and try and improve that?” but merely by talking about starting a free school in the area we appear to have had a transformative effect on this school! Having said that, I’m sure the head wouldn’t give us any of the credit and in truth she deserves the credit for turning the school around so quickly.

Does the West London Free School plan to utilise any local resources such as libraries to help achieve its aims?

Yes we do. We certainly hope to work with our local authority and the neighbouring schools to make sure that the whole community of schools benefits from our school and not just our pupils. We haven’t really begun to think in too much depth about what we’re going to do about libraries:  we’re beginning to do that now. We’ve been completely wrapped up in the set-up process, in navigating the foothills of the process, and we’re now going to get into the nitty gritty or what some people have described to us as “the fun part”…I’ll be able to answer that question better in three months time. 

Professionally you’ve written and performed in plays. Will you be teaching literacy in a more multimedia-based or traditional phonics based setting? (e.g. screenplays, blogs)

I think probably in a traditional, phonics-based way. The local secondary school is a specialist media arts school and one of the reasons for setting up our school is to give local parents a wider choice, so if we were to duplicate too many of the things the other school is doing, and now doing quite well, then that would be less useful than trying to do something a little bit different. The shorthand description of how we want our school to be is “traditional curriculum, radical pedagogy”. We’re going to use state-of-the-art best practice when it comes to teaching and learning but what we’ll be teaching the children will be a traditional, core-knowledge curriculum.

Why do you think it’s important for schools to rise to the literacy challenge?

Well, literacy is an absolutely fundamental skill. One of the challenges I think we’ll have at our school is we’ll have many children who won’t have English as a first language and we’ll need to bring them up to speed in the first year. We want to introduce extended school days, stretch-and-support classes and so on to ensure that everyone’s literacy level at the school, even those who have just arrived in the UK and speak no English, is above a certain minimum standard because without that they won’t be able to access any other part of the curriculum.