New
Eton head to put emphasis on pupils' emotional intelligence
School’s
youngest headmaster signals change in tone and will take holistic
approach to focus on happiness and mental health rather than elitism
Sally Weale
Education correspondent
Wednesday 21 October
2015 09.29 BST
The new headmaster
of Eton College wants to develop emotional intelligence in his pupils
and provide them with a “holistic, rounded” education.
Simon Henderson, who
took over the headship of the top public school at the beginning of
this term, is attempting to signal a change of tone at Eton – a
byword for privilege, power and considerable wealth.
“The whole point
of school is to prepare young people for happiness and success in
their personal lives and working lives,” Henderson told the
Guardian.
“There’s more
awareness of emotional intelligence and of mental health, of young
people building confidence and resilience to manage themselves in a
fast-changing, challenging environment,” he said.
The move is the
latest attempt by private schools to reduce some of the stresses
pupils can find themselves in in highly competitive environments.
Cheltenham Ladies’ College announced in the summer that it was
bringing in meditation and curbing homework demands.
Henderson said that
while excellent academic standards were important, he wanted Eton
College – which has educated 19 British prime ministers, including
the present incumbent, as well as countless members of the
establishment over generations – to be innovative, forward
thinking, outward looking and open.
“Any
self-respecting institution should be reflecting from time to time on
things it does,” he said. “The best traditions should stand up to
modern scrutiny. This is about incremental change.”
Henderson, who went
to Winchester and studied history at Brasenose College, Oxford, wants
more bursaries for boys from disadvantaged backgrounds, so that
anyone with the necessary talent can be financially supported at the
£35,000-a-year school.
Currently, Eton
spends £6.5m on means-tested bursaries; 73 of the 1,300 pupils have
their entire fees paid by Eton, while a further 270 receive
significant financial support, and have on average two-thirds of
their fees paid for them.
Among those who have
recently benefited from a full scholarship, Henderson said, is Andrew
Isama, a former pupil at Wayne Rooney’s old school in Croxteth,
Liverpool, who is now on his gap year after sixth-form studies at
Eton. “We want talented boys to be able to come to Eton whatever
their financial circumstances,” Henderson insists.
At 39, Henderson is
the youngest Eton headmaster. Formerly head of Bradfield
co-educational college in Berkshire, he was encouraged to apply for
the job, vacated by Tony Little, after a period at Eton as head of
history from 2001-2009.
For his interview
with the Guardian, Henderson is trying his best to defy expectations.
Rather than the formal black gown usually worn by Eton beaks, he wore
a smart but casual felted blue suit with striped shirt and red tie.
He was speaking in the brand new Tony Little Centre for Innovation
and Research, which, with its sleek white walls and designer chairs,
would not look out of place in a smart inner-city academy.
Traditions remain,
however, and at the end of the interview boys emerge from their
lessons dressed in their traditional tailcoats, waistcoats and formal
striped trousers. Despite reports, there are no current plans to
scrap the distinctive uniform.
Henderson, a father
of four small children aged seven, five, three and two, clearly
wishes to be seen as a modernising headmaster. That was his pitch for
the job, which he finally secured after four interviews.
He talks
energetically about technology transforming teaching, about the
importance of the creative arts in developing life skills, about
partnerships beyond the school, opening up facilities, service and
being socially responsible. He said he wants better access to sports
for all boys at Eton – not just those at the top of their game.
His references are
not grand or literary – he mentions former England rugby coach
Clive Woodward’s 2004 autobiography Winning! and his theory of
“critical non-essentials”. And at an assembly at Holyport College
– the boarding free school Eton sponsors down the road – about
success, determination and team work. Incy Wincy Spider and Bob the
Builder are used to make his points.
Henderson
acknowledges that the vast majority of pupils will leave Eton with
outstanding results and go on to universities such as Oxford,
Cambridge, and further afield in the US. What’s more important to
him, he says, are the values they leave with.
He wants them to be
“confident without being arrogant”, to have integrity, moral
courage, resilience and perseverance to overcome obstacles so as to
make “a really positive contribution” to wider society.
It’s a long way
from the perceptions held by many of Eton, not helped by recent
accounts of hedonistic behaviour by wealthy Old Etonians who party at
Oxford in clubs such as the Bullingdon and the Piers Gaveston then go
on to dominate British political life.
Henderson accepts
that the school is a political football, “particularly at the
moment as the prime minister is from Eton”.
“I understand that
people will have particular perceptions of Eton,” he says. “They
are entitled to their opinion. There’s no point us being defensive
about it. The responsibility sits with me and Eton as an institution
to try and show people what I regard as the real Eton.
“Utimately it’s
a school,” says Henderson. “It’s a school full of teenage boys
and teenage boys are teenage boys.”
Is
this the end for tailcoats at Eton College?
Eton’s new (and
youngest-ever) headmaster Simon Henderson wants more bursaries, 'real
world’ values – and might even bin the tailcoats
By Peter
Stanford7:00AM BST 10 Oct 2015
Simon Henderson
greets me with an apology. Eton’s new headmaster – at 39 the
youngest ever – says he can’t welcome me into his office because
he hasn’t got one yet.
It is not, however,
a sign that he’s struggling to find his feet at Britain’s most
famous public school, alma mater to 19 prime ministers, including the
incumbent, and many others now at the pinnacle of public life.
Quite the opposite.
Henderson is relocating the head’s study from its traditional spot
in a quiet corner of an ancient quad to a central new location where
the 1,300 pupils mill about between lessons. “I want to be in the
middle of the passing traffic of boys,” he tells me.
That Henderson
intends to shake things up a little is clear: updating traditions –
possibly even the uniform, with its distinctive tailcoats and
“spongebag” trousers – and making more places available to
pupils for whom the yearly fees of £35,000 a year are out of reach,
are a priority.
He is committed to
maintaining excellence but says a '“string of A*s” is not a
guarantee of future happiness and wants his charges to understand
that. Ultimately, his mission is to use the school’s resources and
status to make a wider “forward-looking” contribution to British
education policy.
"Schools are
about people, and should be judged by the quality of the human
relationships within them."
But how will this
contribution be greeted? The over-representation of Old Etonians in
the Cabinet and the House of Commons of late has made the school
something of a political football.
Stories of alleged
unsavoury high jinks on the part of OEs in various exclusive Oxford
university clubs such as the Bullingdon and the Piers Gaveston have
created an impression that it exists in a parallel universe with
rules of its own.
“I’m not going
to make any political comments,” Henderson replies diplomatically.
“We live in a democracy and everyone can have their opinion, but I
do understand that people will have their perceptions of Eton.” In
challenging them he intends to do more listening than lecturing.
“In building
further on the partnerships with state schools that Eton already has
we will have as much to learn, if not more, than we have to give. But
I’m struck by what a forward‑thinking place Eton is trying to
be.”
By appointing
Henderson, the school governors couldn’t have given a clearer
signal that they recognised the need for change.
He is, he says, “a
normal sort of guy”, with an accent that is hard to place. Three of
his children – aged seven, five and three – attend local schools.
His wife, Ali, a civil servant and former adviser to Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown, today is looking after their youngest, aged 2, in the
headmaster’s lodgings on site.
In a school where
the boys still wear Victorian tailcoats and white dickey bows to
lessons, their head is instead sporting what he calls “teacher
casual” – a linen jacket and chino-like trousers. He dons a tie
for the photographs but discards it immediately after.
Will he be extending
that privilege to the 1,300 pupils? “Tradition is important here,”
he replies cautiously, “and the uniform is a physical connection
with that tradition. However, Eton hasn’t survived since 1440 by
relying on tradition alone. It has constantly reinvented itself.”
So is he hinting that something a little more 21st century might be
on the cards?
“I’m not getting
rid of the uniform this week,” he replies with an expression that
suggests “watch this space”. He has perfected the knack of
embodying the spirit of change, without actually promising anything
concrete.
And what about
co-ed? “My previous school” – he was head of Bradfield College
in Berkshire for four years – “was co-educational. What makes a
good school isn’t about whether it is all-boys or co-educational.”
That, at least, sounds like a resolute “no”.
"It was an
unexpected challenge when it came but one that I felt ultimately I
couldn’t turn down."
Henderson was
“encouraged to apply” for the vacancy at Eton, having previously
spent eight years here as head of history, before decamping to
Sherborne en route to Bradfield.
“It was an
unexpected challenge when it came but one that I felt ultimately I
couldn’t turn down,” he says.
And though his own
schooling was solidly in the private sector – his South
African-raised lawyer father and doctor mother sent him first to a
local prep school near the family home in Kent, and then to
Winchester – Henderson has a greater first-hand knowledge of other
types of school than most of his illustrious predecessors.
A career in teaching
was already in his sights when reading history at Brasenose College,
Oxford. In his gap year he went to South Africa and taught in a
school on the outskirts of Johannesburg. “I’d already thought I
might want to teach, but it was my time there that inspired me.”
After a brief and
unhappy flirtation with the City, he opted for a PGCE, the
postgraduate teaching training qualification that is not as
widespread in the private as in the state sector. His first job was
teaching history at a comprehensive, Windsor Boys, between 1999 and
2001. A conscious choice of a state school? “At that stage, it was.
I thought it was important to be in the state sector and get a wide
experience, particularly given my own background.”
His next move was to
Eton. Reverting to type? “I want to educate children and I think
that my passion is educating young people whatever their background.
That has always been my driver, rather than the particular type of
school.”
That, surely, is to
gloss over the substantial differences between state and private
schools in terms of class size, resources and social mix.
Educationalists, for example, refer to an “Eton effect” whereby
privately educated pupils emerge from their schools with an inbuilt
confidence.
“We take the view
that young people learn as much, if not more, from each other as from
their teachers and as much, if not more, outside the classroom as
within it,” he replies. “This all breeds confidence.
However, I think it
would be a big generalisation to say that privately educated pupils
leave school with much more confidence than their state peers. That
ethos of being confident without being arrogant, of having high
expectations, being willing to challenge yourself is key at Eton, but
is not exclusive to us, or to private schools.”
It is a reasonable
defence, but I wonder how easy it is going to be to disarm the
school’s detractors when he starts offering his thoughts on
improving the nation’s schools.
"Young people
learn as much, if not more, from each other as from their teachers
and as much, if not more, outside the classroom as within it."
“Clearly at Eton
we are fortunate in the resources, and we don’t have some of the
challenges that teachers face in other schools. But ultimately
schools are about people, and should be judged by the quality of the
human relationships within them.”
And anyway, he adds,
that picture of competitiveness, even hostility, between private and
state sectors is misleading. “I have been a governor of several
state schools and have always found that similarities between pupils
and between teachers are far greater than their differences.”
High on Henderson’s
agenda are more bursaries – “a top priority”. Currently some
£6.5 million per year is spent on 73 pupils who pay no fees at
all, and 270 who “have significant levels of financial support”.
But what will this charismatic head be arguing for beyond the walls
of the school?
Like his
predecessor, Tony Little, he is not a fan of the exam and league
table culture heavily promoted by Michael Gove when in office, and
which still exerts such a steely grip on school timetables.
“While league
tables show one important feature of a school – the examination
results – they do not demonstrate the quality of the all-round
education. And they tend not to take into account the academic
profile of the intake and so do not usually demonstrate the progress
made by pupils,” he explains.
Eton opts out of the
league tables that are published immediately after the release of
results in August – on the grounds that results change following
re-marks. It is one policy that Henderson has no intention of
reforming.
“Of course, exam
results are the currency that the world uses, rightly or wrongly. If,
as a school, you have a strong exam profile, that opens doors to the
future for your pupils.”
But there is, he
acknowledges, a cost. “How happy and successful your pupils are in
their personal and professional life when they walk out of those
doors depends on a much broader range of things than exam results. We
must promote creativity. This country needs young people who have
ideas for themselves and that must be encouraged in the curriculum.”
He quotes the
benefits of drama, art and music – all marginalised in recent years
by policymakers as non-“core” subjects and, according to teaching
unions, starved of resources – as key. Pushing youngsters to strive
solely for strings of A*s is a mistake, he argues.
"Exams don’t
reflect work in the real world. You work with other people. You
collaborate. You discuss."
“When I am going
about my daily work at no point am I going to be asked to sit in
silence in a room for two hours and write everything I know about a
topic without consulting other people, or without the use of notes.
"Exams don’t
reflect work in the real world. You work with other people. You
collaborate. You discuss. The types of real-world skills required are
not necessarily what is tested in exams.”
He is also
determined to promote teachers and teaching as a career, believing
that the profession deserves to be held in greater esteem. Even
today, precious few Oxbridge graduates choose, as he did in 1998, to
opt for teacher-training.
With some 20 or even
30 years ahead of him as Eton headmaster, Simon Henderson will have
plenty of time to make a distinctive contribution to education
debates. Does he worry as the new broom about getting people’s
backs up? “Maybe I’m not everyone’s perception of what the Eton
headmaster would be,” he concedes, “but I am the one they have
got.”
Eton
and the making of a modern elite
The world’s
most famous school aspires to become an agent of social change; but,
as old boy Christopher de Bellaigue learns when he goes back, it is
also an increasingly effective way for the global elite to give its
offspring an expensive leg up in life
Christopher de
Bellaigue | August/September 2016
One of Simon
Henderson’s first decisions after taking over last summer as
headmaster of Eton College was to move his office out of the
labyrinthine, late-medieval centre of the school and into a corporate
bunker that has been appended (“insensitively”, as an
architectural historian might say) to a Victorian teaching block.
Here, in classless, optimistic tones, Henderson lays out a vision of
a formerly Olympian institution becoming a mirror of modern society,
diversifying its intake so that anyone “from a poor boy at a
primary school in the north of England to one from a great fee-paying
prep school in the south” can aspire to be educated there (so long
as he’s a he, of course), joyfully sharing expertise, teachers and
facilities with the state sector – in short, striving “to be
relevant and to contribute”. His aspiration that Eton should become
an agent of social change is not one that many of his 70 predecessors
in the job over the past six centuries would have shared; and it is
somehow no surprise to hear that he has incurred the displeasure of
some of the more traditionally minded boys by high-fiving them. What
had happened, I wondered as I left the bunker, to the Eton I knew
when I was a pupil in the late 1980s – a school so grand it didn’t
care what anyone thought of it, a four-letter word for the Left, a
source of pride for the Right, and a British brand to rival Marmite
and King Arthur?
To judge from
appearances in this historic little town across the Thames from
Windsor Castle, which many tourists think is worth a visit between
the Round Tower and Legoland, the answer is actually not a lot. Aside
from the fact that there are more brown, black and Asian faces
around, the boys go about in their undertakers’ uniforms of
tailcoats and starched collars, as they seem to have done for
centuries, learning in the old schoolrooms and depleting testosterone
on the old playing fields before being locked up for the night in
houses they share with 50 of their peers (each boy has his own room).
As the absence of girls demonstrates, Eton considers itself exempt
from the modern belief in the integration of the sexes that so many
independent schools now espouse. And it remains a boarding school –
a form of education which is in decline, and which some people
consider a mild form of child abuse. Add to all this the statue of
Henry VI, who founded the school in 1440, amid the uneven cobbles of
School Yard, and the masters cycling in their gowns to their
mid-morning meeting, resembling nothing so much as a synod of ravens,
and you get the opposite impression to that conveyed by Henderson:
one of solidity, immobility – anything but dynamism.
To the question,
“which is the ‘real’ Eton?” – the laboratory for
progressive ideas about social inclusion, or an annexe to Britain’s
heritage industry – the answer is of course “both”.
All schools are
defined by their intake, but none more so than Eton, which for
hundreds of years received the pipsqueak sons of the ruling class and
disgorged them to become statesmen and administrators. (Nineteen Old
Etonians – OES – including David Cameron, have served as prime
minister.) This has now changed, and a new admissions policy has
brought in poor clever boys, foreign boys and “new money” that
the school would not have welcomed in the past. A recent parent
described his surprise at finding out that the commonest name at the
school was Patel.
At the same time,
many elements of the timeless, traditional Eton have been preserved.
They’re among the reasons new parents send their sons here, along
with the belief that the school will coax and push and cajole the
best out of the boy – that Eton is, as the headmaster puts it,
“unashamed in its pursuit of excellence”. The school aims to
educate the elite, as it always has, but it has reshaped itself in
order to accommodate a new elite defined by money, brains and
ambition, not pedigree, titles and acres.
A delicate
relationship seems likely to exist at Eton in the coming years,
between deserving boys of modest background who enter the school on
bursaries, often in the face of incredulity or even opposition at
home, and the poised, prepared, nutritionally optimised children of
the new upper class whose parents are expected to finance all this
largesse – not simply by paying their fees, but also by responding
to pretty much continuous appeals for money. The latest “exciting
and strictly limited opportunity” is the chance to have your name
inscribed on a stone around School Yard, costing £10,000 spread over
four consecutive tax years.
Eton’s rich and
poor coalesce and become each other’s raison d’être in the
context of the school’s ambition to be “needs-blind” in the
manner of Harvard – that is to say, able to offer a boy a place
regardless of his parents’ ability to pay. Eton’s big plan was
evoked succinctly by William Waldegrave, the provost (head of the
governing body), when he told me, “what I hope is that this school
will continue to produce the prime minister, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and entrepreneurs of all sorts, but that three-quarters
of them will have been here on bursaries.”
Waldegrave and
Henderson may be the latest advocates of Eton’s transformation, but
the process began a generation ago. Over the past quarter-century
many places have opened up to poorer families, with some 270 of the
pupil body of 1,300 now receiving substantial or complete fees
remission and the school recently taking out a £45m loan to raise
this number further. The school can also draw on a very large
endowment by British standards. As of August 2014 it had investment
and property portfolios worth £300m and an annual income from school
fees of around £45m, not to mention all the immovable assets and art
collections. For all that, many more millions need to be wrung from
parents and OES if the school is to become genuinely needs-blind.
As the school
mediates between the aspiring rich and the deserving poor, a third
group fights for survival: old “Eton” families who have been
sending boys to the school for generations. This group dominated the
Eton I attended in the 1980s, when the school was still a
barely-selective rite of passage for the descendants of Britain’s
Edwardian upper and upper-middle classes – complacent, snobby and
full of surnames recognisable from the inter-war diaries of Harold
Nicolson. This tribe’s representation is shrinking. The percentage
of pupils at the school with an OE father went down from 60% in 1960
to 33% in 1994 to 20% now. Eton has gone from being an heirloom
handed down through the generations to a revolving door.
Rainbow education
Pupils cheer during
the Eton wall game, a sport unique to the college
No elite connives in
its own dethroning, however, and Eton is a living illustration of the
oft-forgotten truth that social mobility cuts both ways. Having
striven to get their son into a school whose fabric reeks of
continuity, it would not be a surprise if the new Eton families
showed tenacity in trying to hang on to their new status by forming
dynasties of their own. This new elite, floating on its liquid
wealth, is probably better placed to preserve itself than the old,
landed one. As often as not Mum is as high powered as Dad, and the
progeny are primed not to rest on inherited laurels but to go out and
achieve material success.
Here, in the
emergence of a new upper class – more fluid, more international,
and yet revelling in its association with the old, snobbish, British
continuities – lies the tension at the heart of Eton’s ambition
to become a meritocracy. To borrow from the Patek Philippe advert,
“You never actually own a place at Eton. You merely look after it
for the next generation”.
I performed badly in
my entrance test to Eton and squeaked in only after my mother pleaded
with the admissions tutor that her father had been at the school: in
those days, Eton took care of its own. The establishment I entered in
the spring of 1985 looked to me like the embodiment of continuity,
but across the country, the mood was turning hostile. The immediate
post-war period had witnessed three Etonian prime ministers in
succession (one of whom, Harold Macmillan, named no fewer than 35 OES
to serve in his government), but the squall of egalitarianism in the
late 1960s, aggravated in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher’s ethos of
self-help and aspiration, loosened the school’s grip on power. In
1990, when Thatcher lost the Tory-party leadership, Douglas Hurd, who
stood to succeed her, found his Eton background being used against
him. “I thought I was running for leadership of the Conservative
Party,” he complained, “not some demented Marxist sect.” Hurd
lost the election – and the keys to 10 Downing Street – to John
Major, a state-educated former insurance clerk.
Tony Blair’s New
Labour administration of the late 1990s and early 2000s married
Thatcher’s brassy meritocracy with a social conscience. Oxford,
Cambridge and the other major universities came under pressure to
admit more state-educated pupils, and private schools were told to
share their facilities with publicly funded neighbours or forfeit the
tax breaks to which they, as charities, were entitled. In 1999, in a
clear sign that the school could no longer count on its old links to
parliament, almost 700 hereditary peers (many if not most of them
OES) were expelled from the House of Lords.
In any case by now
Eton had read the runes. There was a feeling among masters and
governors that the school needed to raise standards in order to
maintain market share in the new, more meritocratic Britain – to
keep feeding boys to Oxford and Cambridge; to keep producing prime
ministers – and a more competitive admissions system was the key.
But the school had an image problem. It was widely considered a
closed shop that would favour the dim and idle viscount over the
up-and-coming City trader’s brilliant, motivated son, with the
result that the City trader didn’t apply. The school’s policy of
allowing parents to register their sons at birth for the so-called
“Eton List” exemplified the school’s built-in prejudice in
favour of its own. The Eton List effectively allowed an OE to sew up
a place for his son while the boy was in nappies.
In 1990 the Eton
List was abolished and a decade later a uniform entrance test and
interview were introduced for all would-be entrants at the age of 11,
under which the children of OES enjoyed no head start over the sons
of people who had not been privately educated, or, for that matter,
the offspring of successful Pakistani immigrants or Malaysian
electronic-chip manufacturers. In time the tests got harder, the
yearly intake cleverer, and the dim, idle viscounts were turned away.
(Clever, industrious viscounts continued to get in.) Aided by its
proximity to London, whose attractiveness as a safe deposit box for
the super-wealthy was on the rise, the school became heavily
oversubscribed. (In the 1950s the school had empty places.) Each
year, around five and a half boys compete for each of the 260 places
on offer.
Although Eton’s
internal reforms were well under way by the time Tony Little,
Henderson’s predecessor, took over in 2002, this former scholar (an
Etonian in the 1960s, he was the first member of his family to be
educated over the age of 14) introduced them to a sceptical world. He
was “more foreign secretary than home secretary”, as one master
recalls, giving interviews and making friends with educational
reformers in the Blair government; his railing against the “deadly
cloud of class awareness” rates as one of the more unexpected
interventions from an Eton headmaster.
Under Little, Eton
sponsored a state boarding school up the road in Ascot and a
sixth-form college in the London borough of Newham. Bursary schemes
were also set up by wealthy OES. At first, bringing in boys from some
of the poorest parts of Britain and overseas turned out to be
surprisingly difficult; heads weren’t keen on losing their
brightest boys, and parents needed some convincing that Eton wasn’t
another planet. A documentary about three Eton scholarship boys that
was shown on the BBC’s children’s channel in 2014 led to a spike
in applications, the school’s access officer told me, “not
because parents saw it, but because their sons did, and thought, ‘I’d
like to do that.’” Of two former bursary boys in their 20s I
recently spoke to, one has gone on to become a speech-writer for a
Conservative MP and aims to go into parliament; another is a rising
actor.
Changes to the
admissions policy have seen the school’s non-Anglo-Saxon intake
rise considerably, though for all the foreign names one sees on
pigeon holes in each house, Eton remains a “British” school, and
its policy of diversifying its intake seems aimed at preventing it
from being captured by any particular sub-group of the global elite.
Traditionalists have chafed at the more international atmosphere,
however, and Little described how one “finger-jabbing” OE accused
him of being a “socialist who won’t rest until you have built a
mosque on the school playing fields”.
Visiting Eton this
spring, I spent an hour in College Library, watching the school’s
Arabic master show three 16-year-old Palestinians some medieval
manuscripts that the school had recently purchased, among them a page
from a ninth-century Kufic Koran. Born in refugee camps in Lebanon,
these boys had been flown to Britain for interview. Come September,
two of them will be in tails.
Little’s memorial
at Eton is a shiny research complex, the donor-funded Tony Little
Centre for Innovation and Research in Learning, which joined forces
with Harvard to advance research into the adolescent brain – all
synaptic pruning and neural pathways. The centre’s mission
statement is a slightly laboured attempt to establish Britain’s
poshest school as a public good: “we want Eton and the wider UK to
be at the forefront of new developments in teaching and learning, for
the benefit of all.”
The new Eton –
friendly to the international plutocracy while also containing strong
elements of political correctness – naturally went down badly with
the established Eton families whose names adorn the war-memorial
plaques and the sporting cups, and whose sons have been rejected in
big numbers. In 2009, at a reunion I attended, Waldegrave delivered a
speech lauding diversity of intake and beating the drum for an
appeal. “They want our money,” my neighbour growled, “but not
our sons.” In the main, however, the old guard seems resigned to
its demotion, in part because, however exercised they are by the
newcomers, many OES would be unable to afford the school even if
their sons were admitted.
My father paid
around £6,000 per year (around £14,500 today) for me to go to Eton
in the late 1980s. The annual fees are now £34,000 ($50,000, or
about £7,000 more than the average annual wage in Britain). The
merely well off – the country solicitors and provincial landowners
who once formed the school’s backbone – have been priced out. In
the words of one OE, “many people in my circle have decided that
it’s not worth it, and that a good state school will do just as
well.”
To say that there is
a cultural divide between the old Eton and the new one would be an
understatement. Traditional parents wince as they describe
corporate-hospitality tents and sushi bars being erected by brash
parvenus for the Fourth of June, the school’s annual shindig (which
is not, of course, held on June 4th). Back in the 1980s it was
hard-boiled eggs and wine out of a box, consumed while rocking on
one’s haunches on a picnic blanket.
For all the talk of
270 bursary boys and rising, furthermore, the vaunted egalitarianism
of the new Eton is not always obvious. “We tried to identify the
bursary boys who are with my son,” remarked a pupil’s mother,
“but his year group includes two oligarchs’ sons and a family
with four children all at different English boarding schools. Our
suspicions fell on the parents of an Indian boy but then we bumped
into them while skiing in Val d’Isère.”
Some newcomers feel
that change hasn’t gone far enough. As an American mother said,
“you still get some students who would have been there 100 years
ago, and they’re not always the cleverest. But”, she went on with
evident relief, “they don’t dominate.” Her only regret is that
Little didn’t bring in girls. Henderson is rumoured to want to
abolish tails, though that would face opposition from the boys, who
are attached, in quite a sweet way, to Etonian traditions.
Master plan
Inevitably, the
cultural divisions felt by parents are less important to the pupils,
in part because the uniform has the advantage of flattening
socio-economic disparities. One former bursary boy told me, “Only
after I left the school, and visited my friends in the amazing flats
they had been given by their parents, did I realise just how rich
they were.”
With every place at
Eton so keenly contested, enterprising parents sometimes try the back
door. The recently retired head of admissions, Charles Milne, was
visited by a famous Russian oligarch whose son had been placed on a
waiting list after failing to win a place in the entrance test. “They
crowded into my little office,” Milne explained, “the Russian and
his two bodyguards – one of them eight foot tall. I began
explaining how the system works, that other boys would have to give
up their places for his son to get in.” Milne had not got far
before the oligarch raised a hand to silence him. “Mr Milne,” he
said, “I won’t waste your time. When you have decided what needs
to be done for my son to get his place, you will tell me.” The boy
ended up at another school. Another very rich foreigner, whose son
had been rejected, phoned Milne to tell him he was a “fucking
bastard”. It became an in-joke between Milne and Little. “When I
went to see the headmaster, he would greet me, ‘hello, fucking
bastard’.”
Given the intense
competition to get a place, it’s no wonder that the waiting room
before the test (much harder than the one I took) is like the Russian
roulette scene in “The Deer Hunter”. Children sit ashen-faced
while their parents confer in whispers. No one speaks to anyone else;
the tension is palpable. Some boys burst into tears when they get
into the interview room.
The contest isn’t
simply between candidates. It’s a battle of wits between a school
whose proclaimed intention is to identify deserving talent and
ambition, and parents who will do everything to stack things in their
child’s favour. Well-off, well-organised parents prepare their sons
ruthlessly, hiring tutors, making the boys do ceaseless verbal and
non-verbal reasoning tests and sending them to interview classes to
learn how to be sparky and empathetic. The school is wise to these
constantly evolving efforts to game the system, however, and a lot of
boys who have done brilliantly in the computerised test are turned
down because they aren’t “interesting” at interview. “If
a boy makes me laugh,” says one of the school’s interviewers, “he
stands a good chance of getting in.”
The battle to enter
Eton is the first exchange in a relationship between parents, boys
and school that is characterised by high expectations. The rich
parents want their kids to flourish and go on to an excellent
university, preferably Oxford or Cambridge. The school wants these
parents to show their appreciation in five figures. The bursary boys
need to validate the decision to give them bursaries. Meanwhile the
OES bite their fingernails and hope that the 20% figure won’t go
down or the fees rise even further.
The story of Eton’s
reconquest of the commanding heights of Britain is one of gradual
rehabilitation. With the weakening of the hard left, the prospect of
private schools being abolished receded, while Eton’s efforts to
present itself less as a throwback to an earlier age than a guarantor
of achievement in the current one began to pay dividends. Though
confessing to an Eton education remains a conversation-stopper in
liberal-left north London, in general the school has become less of a
lightning rod for class resentment. And over the past decade OES have
become more pervasive than ever.
Back in the 1950s it
was the fact of having been to Eton, more than the education you
received there, which set you up for success. Now the inverse is
true. The teaching is superb, the facilities unparalleled, the
results impressive. This year 85 Etonians were offered places at
Oxford or Cambridge. St Paul’s, Westminster and Winchester have
higher Oxbridge admission rates, but then those schools always
specialised in cultivating clever boys. What’s interesting about
Eton is the way it changed its focus from class to brains. The school
has seen off the threats to its continued relevance by taking in
clever boys, and sending out cleverer young men into a world that no
longer defers to inherited privilege, and prizes cleverness and
ambition above all.
This shift in
strategy has changed the culture of the school. The ordeal of the
entrance test; the upwardly mobile parents; the fact that the boys
know they got into the school on their own merits, not because their
fathers are OES – all this militates against the studied unconcern,
the famous “entitlement”, that was the default pose of Etonians
in the 1980s. Just as it was intensely uncool to be industrious then,
now the opposite is the case. “It’s the boy who doesn’t take
advantage of all the opportunities at Eton who’s considered odd,”
a current Etonian told me, “not those who do.”
A strong work ethic
comes naturally in a school that opts in to the hardest public exams
and fosters competitive relationships between pupils. One recent
Etonian noticed this cultural peculiarity while observing a debate at
St Paul’s, Concord, a posh American boarding school. (Eton’s
debating teams often sweep the board at inter-school competitions.)
“The Americans were elaborately polite to each other,” he
recalled, “whereas at Eton we could be brutal, saying, ‘that’s
an incredibly stupid thing to say’.”
The Fourth of June
in the 1980s
More than schools
with higher Oxbridge acceptance rates, Eton stresses activities
outside the classroom. Drama, one of its particular strengths, is an
opportunity for collective endeavour that also contributes to the
legendary Etonian self-assurance. The production budget at the
400-seat Farrer Theatre is higher than that at one of Britain’s top
drama schools. No wonder scouts and agents are often to be spotted
there, looking for the next Eddie Redmayne – one of Eton’s many
recent showbiz alumni.
The investment in a
wide range of extra-curricular interests may help explain why, when
it comes to success defined more broadly than through exam results,
Eton comes top. According to the Sutton Trust, a charity which works
to widen opportunity, the school educates just 0.04% of Britain’s
secondary school population, but some 4% of nearly 8,000 “leading
people” whose education the trust tracked were OES. Eton produces
more than three times as many big cheeses as its nearest rival,
Winchester (Henderson’s alma mater). Taking into account Eton’s
larger student body, its high-achiever output rate is 50% higher.
And that figure
underplays Eton’s success, for OES cluster at the very pinnacle of
British life. The closer you get to power and achievement, in other
words, the more likely you are to run into one. David Cameron and his
rival for the soul of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson, the
former mayor of London, both attended the school. So did Prince
William and Prince Harry, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby,
the actors Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis as well as Redmayne, the
adventurers Bear Grylls and Ranulph Fiennes and the Nobel
prize-winning biologist Sir John Gurdon. The law, business and
banking fester with Old Etonians.
It’s very likely
that Eton has a higher “strike rate” than it did in the 1980s,
when for every top banker or ambassador there were one or two who
conspicuously failed to enter well-paid careers (or indeed careers of
any sort), and ended up cultivating marijuana or running a small
country estate into the ground. No father of an Etonian in the 1980s
would have admitted to thinking about anything so crass as a “return”
on his investment, nor were we boys party to our parents’ financial
affairs. This too has changed. A recent bursary boy who attended the
school with a third of his fees remitted told me that his parents,
both teachers at state schools, had sold the family home in order to
afford the other two-thirds.
Britain no longer
has a ruling class, and the boys who enter Eton are anyway too varied
to constitute one. Yet by the time they leave they belong to
something like an emerging global elite. They have in common brains,
determination and, in many cases, an aspirational family that sets
great store by worldly success. These qualities got them to Eton, and
they are deployed again and again to ensure they get the most out of
the experience. Whether it’s arranging holiday internships with
City law firms, Skype tutorials in the run-up to a geography exam, or
a reels refresher course before the Caledonian Ball, parents are
constantly (and expensively) bolting on all kinds of optional,
mini-advantages to the considerable advantage of an Eton education.
The great project of modern elite parenting is all about leaving
nothing to chance.
There is, of course,
a natural tension between the school’s role in this enterprise and
its ambition to be an engine of social mobility – just as there is
at the American Ivy League universities that Eton’s admissions
system seeks to emulate. A small number of Etonians are poor; some
are only modestly well-off; but the majority of them are seriously
wealthy by the standards of most of the world. One of the
consequences of Eton’s transformation is thus to ensure that the
children of the very rich stay that way.
For all its inbuilt
advantages, the task facing Eton at the turn of the millennium was a
tricky one. It needed to entrench its position at the top of British
life while carrying out controversial and difficult reforms. Few
would argue that the changes have been anything but necessary and
skilfully accomplished, but they have come at an intangible price. A
recently retired master complained that teaching has got more boring
because boys constantly harp on the need to stick to the syllabus:
“are we going to need this for the exam, sir?”
Eton used to have a
strong sideline in rebels and oddballs. My time there was enriched by
exposure to some truly unusual characters, both masters and boys,
which engendered a tolerance of human foibles and acted as vital
redress from a hierarchical, rules-based institution. Inevitably, as
the school has grown more concerned with outcomes and assessments and
ever keener to maximise the use to which its facilities are put, the
eccentrics have been purged from the institution.
The value of such
people is hard to quantify; their achievement doesn’t show through
in the exam results, but in the diffusion of a spirit of irreverence
and scepticism. One boy in my house, William Sinclair, was a
brilliant subversive and satirist of the school; his lampooning of
the authorities and disrespect for conventional hierarchies among the
boys punctured the pretension and self-regard to which Eton is easily
prone. William’s planting of a live chicken in our housemaster’s
bathtub was the least of his misdemeanours.
My tutor over my
final years was Michael Kidson, a lop-shouldered historian who
terrorised us in thrilling, beautiful, confident English, threw
blackboard rubbers at boys who offended against syntax and grammar –
I got one in the head for pluralising “protagonist” – and
defended his oversexed spaniel for trying to solace itself against
our thighs. (“Nothing wrong with a young man wanting a wank!”)
Above all, Kidson was loyal and would fight fiercely for you if you
got into trouble; several boys escaped expulsion thanks to his
efforts. On all sorts of levels it is hard to imagine either Sinclair
or Kidson being welcomed to today’s Eton, but back then they were
among the school’s best-loved figures and knowing them seems as
useful to me now as any City internship would have been.
Eton isn’t alone
among reformed institutions to have got duller as it has got better,
and few of the current boys’ families will rue the absence of
eccentrics if their son gets his Oxbridge place. The school has gone
from being a rite of passage for a now-defunct upper class to a
coalition of different sorts of people who have signed up to an
ambitious agenda that may not, in fact, be their own. If Eton hasn’t
quite become the liberal, socially transformative institution the
reformists seek, it is undeniably more discerning in allocating one
of the best starts in life that money (or brains, or ambition) can
get you.
Christopher de
Bellaigueis an author and journalist. His forthcoming book, “The
Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to
Modern Times”, will be published in 2017
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