Toby Young: 'Floreat Actona'

Can Toby Young realise his dream of founding a state school in Ealing to rival the very best the independent sector can provide? Tim Johnson goes and finds out...

Toby Young is something of a legend. The man who founded The Modern Review and then printed its first edition on Robert Maxwell's presses, without asking permission, leaving a thank you note in the magazine's acknowledgements just to rub it in. The man who accidentally invited a stripper to work on 'Take Your Daughter to Work Day'. The man described by Roger Ebert as 'the kind of man you might enjoy having dinner with, but you wouldn't risk staying for dessert.' He's not, in short, the sort of chap you'd pick as the figurehead for the Coalition Government's flagship education policy.

On the face of it, it's a strange direction for him to be taking as well. He has, after all, made his career out of the pursuit of low culture. Most famously, he has made a living out of failure, although it's getting harder to classify his work - two bestsellers and one Hollywood movie - as really being failure any more. He has plunged so deeply into loserdom that he has emerged, glistening, on the other side. So when I went to interview him one question above all was running through my head: What on earth has happened to Toby Young?

Family is one answer. His last book closed with him ensconced in domestic bliss with his wife and two children in Shepherd's Bush. The passage of years has seen the addition of two more children and a move to East Acton (presumably not entirely unrelated). Perhaps it is a combination of the civilizing influence of his wife Caroline Bondy, a woman so formidably nice that even Lynn Barber liked her, and the sober realisation that, with four children, Eton is probably out of reach that has led Toby to plan an educational revolution out of his garden shed.

We should probably take a step back and identify what it is we're actually talking about. The idea behind Free Schools is a pretty simple one - it is, after all, the idea behind all independent education. Schools are better placed to run themselves than either central or local government. The gentleman in Whitehall really doesn't know best, and the sound of a dropped board-rubber should not reverberate through the corridors of Westminster. Implementation of this idea is also pretty straightforward. Any existing school can elect to become an academy and, provided there is sufficient demand for places in the area, a charity (or group of parents operating as a charity) can apply for funds to set up their own new academy.

These schools will be funded on a per-pupil basis and will be free from Local Authority control - the need to consult with the Local Authority before establishing an academy has been abolished, a crucial move in side-stepping entrenched vested-interest opposition. But setting up and then helping to run a school is a serious business. It's not, if I'm honest, the sort of project one immediately associates with Toby Young, the man who... (oh, wait, I've done this bit). Presumably his school will be specialising in celebrities, booze and street pharmacology - what Polly Toynbee referred to as the 'Toby Young School of Ethics'?

Um, no. The West London Free School has a proposed curriculum and ethos straight out of Thomas Arnold. Aspiration, academic achievement, competition, classics, discipline, and small class sizes. If this sounds heavily traditional, even a little archaic - no child centred learning? No post- modern deconstruction of traditional ideas? - that is entirely deliberate. 'All the best schools are characterised by offering a classical liberal education - it's the common thread that links Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Latymer Upper School - all the best former grammar and direct grant schools.'

And there's no reason why what works in the independent sector shouldn't work just as well in the state sector. 'We want our school to be the Eton of the state sector, not in the sense of top hats and posh boys, but a stripped down but nevertheless philosophically similar education to the education you get at Eton.' He has little time for the educational establishment's disparaging of the independent sector and believes that the state sector should assimilate its best parts not least because 'independent schools do a hell of a lot better than state schools and the attainment gap is getting wider every year.'

Look, for instance, at the way history is taught. 'At present,' he says, 'most children under the age of 16 at state secondaries are taught about the Third Reich, Henry VIII and Martin Luther King and nothing else.' The West London Free School proposes a more joined-up chronological and sequential approach to history - along the lines of recent proposals by Niall Ferguson, who Toby hopes could be involved in some way. Other ideas include taking one grand topic, the Italian Renaissance for example, and studying it from several different angles - language, art history, political history and literature.

New schools, based on traditional academic ideas, free from state control and yet non-selective in admissions. Essentially, a new generation of comprehensive grammar schools. Who on earth could possibly object? Well, lots of people. In his capacity as unofficial figurehead of the Free Schools movement, Toby has been assailed by the heavy-artillery of the old New Labour establishment - Polly Toynbee, Fiona Millar, Mary Riddell and, um, the Honourable Tristram Hunt - who have united in their chorus of disapproval. First and foremost among their complaints is the idea that Free Schools will really only cater for sharp-elbowed middle-class mums. How does Toby respond to this?

'Well, I can show you our database of interested parents.' He does so. It is a very long list, and he shows me some emails from parents almost parodically countering this point. Emails from traditional working-class Londoners, desperate to find the best possible education for the children. 'It's typically condescending,' he says, 'of the Polly Toynbees of this world to imagine that the only parents who will respond to ideas like this are middle class. We've been deluged with calls from non-middle class parents.' He also hates the suggestion that admissions to the school will be manipulated. 'When people make that criticism it's as though the system we have at the moment is absolutely perfect, as if middle class parents don't have any advantages at present and will only get them after Free Schools are introduced. In reality middle class parents game the system in any number of ways and I think our school will be less vulnerable to that than almost any other type of school.' It's a reasonable point - the West London Free School has no religious requirements, and since admissions are not based on a catchment area, you can't even jump the queue by buying a house in the area.

What about the argument that the success of a new Free School in an area is dependent upon, and indeed causative of the failure of existing schools, as the brightest are creamed off and the funding follows them? 'It does sound a bit like "we can't possibly allow parents and teachers to set up Free Schools, just in case they're better than existing state schools and thereby attract children who would otherwise be forced to go to mediocre schools", and that's a pretty bad argument.' Competition, rather than being bad for existing schools, may in fact force them to up their game in response, raising standards across the board.

Dramatic as the potential impact of Free Schools is, it is not entirely without precedent. In 1969 the Government set up a new university designed to provide higher education without academic barriers to entry, providing opportunities to thousands of people who had not been able to go to university as undergraduates. It was a remarkably successful innovation, and one designed to counter, as far as possible, the entrenched advantages held by those fortunate enough to have had either an independent or grammar school education. The prime architect of The Open University was Michael Young, author of the 1945 Labour manifesto, and Toby's father. Does Toby see a parallel?

'I do in one sense, in that one of my father's motives for starting the OU was walking around Cambridge when he was a lecturer in sociology in the 1950s and seeing all those extraordinarily privileged undergraduates just taking for granted the buildings, and the grounds, and the teaching that they encountered. It wasn't just the feeling that it was unfair that this should be limited to just a small section of the population but also a resentment of the sense of entitlement on the part of this privileged elite. To a certain extent I share that slightly chippy motive - a feeling that most public schoolboys have it far too easy and that successive administrations have made their lives even easier by dismantling grammar and direct grant schools and by doing so little to raise standards in state schools. Part of the motive for doing this is to unleash onto this complacent pool of privileged young men a group of incredibly talented, clever children, who can beat them at their own game.'

When Toby showed his father the manuscript of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, he was kind but unenthusiastic. Wasn't it time, he said, that Toby stopped chasing the cheap baubles of fame and money and did something worthwhile? The Free Schools project may just be his answer. In the heart of the West London School's mission statement is a phrase of Max Weber's that Toby has said exemplifies his father. 'It is only by attempting the impossible that we discover what is possible.'

We're about to find out.

Tim Johnson is a Contributing Editor of Attain.
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue of Attain.