You notice the chill at either end of the day. The dewfall is heavier. You still get hot days here and there but the heat doesn’t start early and linger into the evening as it does in high summer. There is a change in the light. To adequately describe it is far beyond my poetic powers, but in the evening, when the long shadows fall on the hills behind the house, the glow from the sinking sun seems somehow richer and deeper.

I do regret the end of summer. It means no cricket on the radio and no picnics with the children; no early morning cups of tea in the garden, listening to the dawn chorus before the rest of the family are awake. It means no more pleasant evenings sitting outside with a cigar and a beer after the children are in bed, watching the stars come out and hearing the owls hooting in the trees on the hillside.

More than other seasonal transition, the end of summer feels a little sad. Winter into spring is joyous, exciting, a triumph of colour and warmth and fertility. Spring into summer is a promise fulfilled, a glorious unfolding. Autumn into winter is often almost imperceptible. But the fading of summer is unmistakeably the end of something. Possibly it’s an artefact of childhood memory, when the second half of August meant that the long carefree days of the summer holidays were drawing to a close.

The approach of autumn is undoubtedly also a symbol of the passage of time, especially at my time of life, when middle age is starting to loom on the horizon in a mildly alarming fashion. It is a reminder that the children are growing up, nothing ever stays the same, beauty is fragile. If you’re anything like me you think of other summers long ago, old friends neglected or departed, the roads not taken. As Housman puts it, “The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again”.

More from this author

The great artist of Deep England

By Niall Gooch

All the same, autumn is my favourite season. The best part of the year, for my money, is the stretch from Michaelmas (30 September) until Epiphany. To some extent I think it’s my North European soul. I remember with great fondness the exhilaration of walking across the causeway to Holy Island in Northumberland as a fierce wind whipped in off the North Sea. I like bare trees and storms and empty moors and big waves crashing on to windswept beaches. I like how the world feels shortly after dawn on a grey, clear morning, when there’s been rain overnight.

I like returning to the warm glow of the front door on a cold, drizzly evening, that magical moment of homecoming. I even find a sort of contentment in the slightly melancholic mood of October and November, which is tempered by looking forward to Advent and Christmas. It’s probably also nostalgia: I look back very fondly on my university days, and my first term stands out particularly in my memory as a time of promise and excitement and novelty. Nor can I deny the pure childish satisfaction to be gained from crunching leaves underfoot or aiming a big kick at a pile of them. It is a longstanding theory of mine, strongly confirmed by having children, that one of the secrets of a happy life is to cultivate your delight in simple, innocent pleasures.

On a less poetic level, autumn is more promising on the fashion front than summer. Like most Englishmen, I am not at my sartorial best in the warm months, heavily dependent on ageing T-shirts of uncertain shape and lurid Bermuda shorts. One such pair is lively enough that a fellow cycling commuter once said that she noticed me every day on the Clapham Road. Greyer skies and cooler temperatures offer the opportunity for a more varied and elegant wardrobe — jackets and jumpers and scarves, subdued colours and an air of sophistication that is only achievable in summer by dressing in a white linen suit like the villain Belloq from Raiders Of the Lost Ark.

More from this author

Tolkien's mythic plan for England

By Niall Gooch

In my childhood, a highlight of the season was always Bonfire Night, that old and strange English celebration, full of dramatic historical resonance. I wonder now whether mine was one of the last generations to experience proper Guy Fawkes celebrations. Just in my adult life — the last two decades — the Fifth seems to be fading away, partly of course due to being overshadowed by the hideously ersatz commercialised ghoulfest of Halloween, but also, I suspect, because the cultural and demographic revolution in Britain since the 1960s has rendered it more and more incomprehensible to modern people.

We are no longer defined by Protestant Christianity, and the virtues that supposedly or actually flow from that. What does it really matter, then, if the Protestant Settlement and national independence were saved from destruction at the hands of plotters working for a foreign Catholic power 400 years ago?

Nevertheless, in those places where 5 November is going strong, like Sussex and west Kent, which have a venerable and robust tradition of extremely raucous Bonfire Nights, you can get a sense of an organic institution deeply rooted in our shared history. The notorious Lewes Bonfire commemorates the Lewes Martyrs, Protestant dissidents burned in the 1550s under Mary I, but its historical significance goes well beyond that.

In later centuries it became a focus for anti-establishment radicalism, and an opportunity for the kind of occasional tolerated mayhem that was a feature of earlier feasts — think Lords of Misrule on Twelfth Night. So perhaps there is hope for its survival. After all, it falls at the right point in the calendar, halfway between the end of summer and Christmas, soon after the clocks go back to make the evenings darker still. It is a moment when a cheerful, boisterous communal event, rooted in what remains of our collective memory, is much needed.

Suggested reading

The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

The subjects of memory, and the more sinister and bloody parts of the past, bring to mind another wonderful feature of autumn, namely that it is undoubtedly the perfect season for the classic ghost story. The steadily darkening days and the unsettled weather, the increasingly stark landscapes, and the way in which each house becomes a small island of light in a great mass of darkness; they all combine to create the ideal atmosphere for settling down with M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu or Algernon Blackwood.

James is a particular favourite of mine. On those late November days where it barely seems to get light at all, I might find myself thinking of Dennistoun, the protagonist of Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, who uncovers a gruesome supernatural secret after poking round a church in a sleepy Pyrenean town one dark afternoon. Or Archdeacon Haynes from The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral, who undergoes a gruelling winter, alone and tormented by a guilty conscience, in in a large and poorly lit house.

There is a comfort in the unceasing cycle of the seasons. Like religious liturgies, these reliable transitions give a rhythm and pattern to our lives, providing a counterpoint in the natural world to the changes and chances of our human existence. Autumn is reassuring in this way; the obvious glories and delights of summer are gone, just as everything we know and cherish in this world is ultimately transient, but there is nobility and beauty in the change, and the sure and certain hope of renewal in the midst of decay and loss.

Have you ever worn a boater? I confess: I have. There is surely no more potent symbol of our nation’s class divide than this most singularly pointless and poorly designed piece of headwear.

I owned a boater for the one year I spent at a school called Croftdown, at the age of six. It is almost impossible to settle a boater comfortably on your head. They look ridiculous. Only a school confident its parents had enough money to disregard practicality in school uniform would ever inflict a boater on its pupils. And yet: these schools exist, and the boater manufacturers of the world remain, tragically, in business.

When I tried, in the coalition government, to ban state schools from including boaters in their school uniform, my interlocutor Jo Johnson MP accused me of “class warfare virtue signalling”. He had no idea I was simply acting out a 25-year-old vendetta.

More from this series

Lessons in landing a rich husband

By Tanya Gold

Most people who’ve been to public school understand their privilege. David Cameron – an old Etonian like Johnson – used to say he was passionate about education reform precisely because he wanted every child to have as great a schooling as he had experienced, at Eton. That instinct is to be admired. But my schooling convinces me that he and so many posh-boy reformers are on the wrong crusade: they’re missing half the point of what makes a private school education so valuable.

I went to a lot of schools: seven in total. The reasons would be too much of a distraction to bother you with them. (But if you’re worried: no, I was never expelled nor did I explode any school buildings). The seven include the full spectrum of all educational opportunities available on these British isles, from a prep school so ostentatiously privileged it had its own steam railway, to a comprehensive in rural Wales where a suspicious number of children disappeared during the lambing season, and only half made it to sixth form.

So I have experienced at first hand the extraordinary divides between our state and private school systems. And if those who’ve experienced a luxury education want to have even a chance of recreating it for those less privileged, they need to go beyond their usual areas of focus, which seem to be uniform and academic standards.

Suggested reading

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

There is zero evidence that uniform improves children’s attainment. The trend for blazers and ties at state schools is based around a set of flawed cultural assumptions that making people look like posh kids is good for them. There is no place at all in our state system for any of the ludicrous items I was forced into by my fee-paying schools (which include a magenta gym slip and matching gym knickers, a special blazer worn once a week for church on Sundays and peach-coloured shirts only available at vast expensive in the school’s own shop).

Academic standards, by contrast, are important. The expectations of children in our private schools are, indeed, usually higher than in our state schools. I learnt Latin at seven, quite absurdly. But public schools take a completely different group of children from state schools. Many are selective. It is easy to expel difficult children. They don’t have to trouble themselves with kids too hungry to learn, kids in foster care, kids with disabilities. It isn’t remarkable that they get good results; it’s remarkable they get any bad ones.

We have made real progress over the last decade at improving the academic standards of our state schools, and I’m glad of it. But even if our state schools churned out children with the same GCSEs as their private counterparts, we would not have closed the gap. Because the biggest difference of all between the state and public systems is that, the posher the school, the more parenting it does for its pupils.

This is counterintuitive. It’s so often the rich who condemn people who argue that schools should offer breakfast, for example. “It’s the parent’s responsibility,” they say. Meanwhile, their own children at boarding school get breakfast at school every day.

More from this author

The myth of meritocracy

By Polly Mackenzie

Between the ages of seven and 11, I was at school from 8.30am to 7pm every weekday, and from 8.30am to 4pm on Saturdays. I did homework at school. I was fed two meals a day at school. I learned hockey, and tennis, and competed against a league of other schools every week. I had music lessons at school, and learned the flute. The school had its own Brownie pack, and Cubs for the boys. When there was an outbreak of headlice, it was Matron who combed chemicals into every child’s hair. School organised exchange trips with France and Spain, and penpals, too. They took us skiing.

My daughter is now 7, attending our local state school. She is their responsibility from 8:50am until 3:30pm, and I can expect them to teach her the national curriculum and nothing more. The difference with my school experience at that age is not that she isn’t learning Latin. It’s that sports, homework, music, brownies, travel, health, food: it’s all for me to organise. And I have to pay for childcare from the end of school until the end of the working day, because our school system is chronically incompatible with working life.

I don’t mind. I can afford it. But millions can’t. And it’s what makes the gap between private and state schooling so vast.

The public school system makes life easy for parents. We should enable the state system to do the same.

When my wife suggested that we consider homeschooling our daughter, I was aghast. I had been to school. Everyone I knew had been to school. My only experience of home education was seeing Ruth Lawrence on the back of her dad’s tandem, cycling round Oxford. I knew that homeschooling was not for the likes of us. It was odd. It was possibly dangerous. It was certainly wholly other.

“But it’s what she needs,” my wife pointed out.

Like many adopted children, our daughter needed more individual attention than any school could give, even the excellent one she was attending at the time. So we decided to give homeschooling a go – hoping that it would be good for her, making it up as we went along.

More from this series

Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

We started by asking her what she wanted to study. “Greek,” she answered. (She was seven at the time.) “And can we have an assembly at the end of the week?”

Not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm, we found some resources for Ancient Greek and launched into an assembly on that first Friday afternoon. It was a reassuringly familiar ritual, so our daughter was happy. Doubly so because she was Star of the Week.

Without ever vocalising the thought in those early days, I assumed that my wife and I had an oracular position in our home school. With several degrees and decades of teaching experience between us, we could fairly claim to be experts. It was a good job I never expressed that view out loud because it’s nonsense. We were just as much amateurs as anyone else.

Suggested reading

The myth of the 'growth mindset'

By Tom Chivers

At first we tried to recreate school at home. We had bookcases full of resources. We had a beautifully constructed timetable. We had wall displays. Then it slowly dawned on us that not only could we not keep up – Greek soon fell by the wayside – we didn’t need to. Like Neil Postman before us, we discovered that “education is not the same thing as schooling, and that, in fact, not much of our education takes place in school”.

Gradually we came to understand that school is a continuation of education by other means, not the model to which home educators should aspire — so we stopped homeschooling and started home-educating instead. As we did so, we discovered what we had dimly known all along: that everything we do with our children is education. This meant that we could happily jettison the institutional detritus that was weighing us down. We didn’t need to follow a set curriculum. We ditched termly tests. We gave our children – two of them now – the time and freedom to learn.

Dredging our grotty garden pond into something approaching respectability was the first step on our new educational journey. As far as I was concerned, the plan was simply to tidy up an eyesore in the back garden but the unintended consequence was frogs. Dozens of them. My children were delighted.

Suggested reading

We don't need no secondary education

By Geoff Norcott

And then my schoolteacher instincts kicked in. We need to do a project on this, I thought. We need to write stuff down otherwise it won’t be properly educational. But we didn’t. We allowed the frogs to do their work. Awe and wonder and love rarely make it into Biology textbooks, as David W. Orr has pointed out. But awe, wonder, and a love of nature are surely necessary conditions for scientific enquiry.

So, as the seasons roll, we now give our children time to appreciate, assimilate and reflect. We no longer obey the diktats of the school bell, nor do we pay much attention to the shape of the school day or the length of school terms. Our children sing their history, sometimes in public, to the amusement and bemusement of passersby. They read for hours in whichever part of the house they find most comfortable. They learn while walking the dog or travelling in the car.

This may sound like a homely version of Summerhill but the reality is quite different. Our children can’t do whatever they like and they still have lessons – and, yes, they have friends and socialise perfectly well. But the education they receive is more tidal than industrial. And so is ours.

Home education has forced us to rethink education, but that hasn’t been its only gift to us. Having taken our children out of school, we were surprised to find that our own education resumed. I used to believe that education was something that had happened – an experience that existed only in the past tense. I went to school. Then I studied at university. Then I got on with life. Education ended when paying the mortgage began.

Except it didn’t. Home education hauled it out of the past and back into the present, which is why I don’t look back in anger at my schooldays. Or with nostalgia. In fact, I don’t look back at all. There’s no longer any need.

More from this series

The victims of a liberal education

By Helen Thompson

The moment we realised that everything we do with our children is education, we began to understand that home education is a reciprocal process. Our children teach us while we teach them. They have an inspiring curiosity about the world. They routinely surprise us with knowledge we have not explicitly taught them. They are the first encyclopedias I turn to when I need information about animals, countries or trees.

I still teach part-time in a school but I teach better now that I am a home educator. My 11-year old daughter has taught me the importance of re-reading books. My six-year old has taught me not to underestimate the importance of simply listening to children. As a schoolteacher, I thought I had education taped. I now realise I have hardly begun to understand it.

Taking our children out of school forced us to make hard decisions about careers, finances and priorities, but the benefits have been enormous. And there has been no greater benefit than spending time with them. Lots of time. So, at this time of year, as students head back to school, we continue where we hardly left off, living an education at home, homing in on education outside. We don’t need to go back to school: we’re already there. There really is no place like home.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act. Among other things, Rab Butler’s landmark legislation established universal access to secondary education. In the post-war years, the state system was made up of two unequal parts – the selective grammar schools for children who took and passed the 11 plus exam; and secondary moderns for the majority who didn’t. 1965 marked the start of a new phase – the introduction of comprehensives, which supposedly abolished the great divide.

Of course, that’s to massively over-simplify what really happened. Nothing in the world of UK education is straightforward. After all, this is a country where ‘public schools’ are in fact private. As for comprehensives, their introduction wasn’t comprehensive. There’s always been a degree of devolution in the state system, which is why the grammar schools survived in some parts of the country.

Suggested reading

Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

The biggest pocket of resistance was, and still is, the county of Kent – which is where I grew up. My secondary school was Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, which sounds posh, but wasn’t. In fact, it’s real name (i.e. the one that most people used most of the time) was the unposh-sounding ‘Tech’.

That’s because it didn’t start off as a grammar, but a ‘secondary technical’ or ‘technical high’ school – an all-but-forgotten experiment that exposes one of the great failures of British education policy.

*

The old bipartite system of grammars and secondary moderns was originally meant to be a tripartite system.

The grammars, modelled on the public (i.e. private) schools, were there to supply recruits to a broadened-out ruling class, which in the 20th century had become more meritocratic than aristocratic. The secondary moderns were all about schooling the workers, white collar as well as blue – and, ideally, both literate and numerate. To this updated version of the class system was added a third element, one that didn’t really fit in with the old categories of rulers and ruled.

Winston Churchill once said that scientists should be “on tap, but not on top”. He was certainly right that the country needed a lot of them – plus engineers and technologists too. Both commerce and industry would grind to a halt without the advanced application of the arts and sciences, so an army of highly skilled workers was required. But where would this new technical class come from?

Suggested reading

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

The grammars and the public (private) schools, with their traditional focus on the classics, were not seen as best suited to the purpose. It being the 20th century, scientific and technical subjects weren’t excluded from the curriculum, but their teaching was more a matter of abstract knowledge than applicable know-how. There was also a lingering hint of British intellectual snobbery – a sense that the kind of technical education demanded by the modern world was nevertheless unbefitting of gentlefolk.

Hence the logic of the technical schools – a place for bright kids who wouldn’t mind getting their hands dirty. The tripartite system of post-war secondary education was thus a class hierarchy – with the technical high schools making up the middle layer.

*

Well, that was the theory; in practice, the middle layer got squeezed out. Implementation of the 1944 Act was left to local authorities, and provision tended to polarise between the grammars and the secondary moderns. Even before the advent of the comprehensives, the technical schools never accounted for more than 3% of the secondary school population.

Once again, Kent was an outlier. The county made a serious attempt to make the tripartite system work, setting up all three types of school. This is how my school came into being – established in 1956 as Tunbridge Wells Technical High School for Boys (or ‘Tech’ for short). However, by the time I got there, in the early 80s, it had become a grammar in all but name. The subsequent name change was a mere formality.

Suggested reading

Do leaders bluff their way to the top?

By Peter Franklin

It was also symbolic of the erosion of class distinctions – especially those between the traditional and technical professions. The British have long had a tendency to associate the word ‘engineer’ with greasy overalls, but in the post-war years the penny began to drop – we would need more than Oxbridge-educated classicists to prosper in the modern world. With the UK losing ground to the resurgent German, Japanese and French economies, our leaders decided that we had to embrace the “white heat of technology“.

Of course, the way in which the establishment conferred esteem upon the relevant occupations was to drag more and more of them into the academic route of A levels followed by higher education. Thus instead of sending their alumni directly into employment or to technical colleges, the secondary technical schools were increasingly supplying the universities. Amid all that technological white heat, the distinction with the traditional grammars had evaporated.

*

In many ways, what I received at Tech was a conventional academic education. And yet the school’s origins set it apart from the older grammar schools. The architecture was post-war plate glass, not Victorian red brick. There was no Latin or Greek, but quite a lot of woodwork and metalwork. There was a school uniform, but no ‘houses’. Corporal punishment was still legal at the time, but seldom used – the theoretical possibility served as sufficient deterrent.

There were prefects, but without much power – and as younger boys we weren’t afraid of them. Bullying, if it happened at all, was almost always verbal, very rarely physical. If it did happen, the thing to do was fight back: the teachers would intervene, but not make a big thing about it. Overall there was about as much order as one could reasonably expect from 800 boys.

Looking back, I can see how Tech pulled off a balancing act – academic rigour without stuffiness, aspiration without pretension, discipline without terror.

Of course, it helped that we were in a prosperous part of the country – one that did well out of the Thatcher revolution. However, we weren’t, most of us, sons of privilege – at least not class privilege.

Suggested reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

As boys tend to do, we’d ask each other what our dads did for a living, and, as far as I can remember, it was jobs like postman, fire fighter, land surveyor, customs officer, sub postmaster. There weren’t many lawyers, doctors or even teachers among our folks.

If we ended up going to university, we were usually the first in our family to do so. And yet there was no particular fuss made about that fact. Nor was there much fuss made about not going to university – a degree was just one among many options to be taken as appropriate (and, it must be said, without loading our young shoulders with student debt). We weren’t burdened with overly pushy parents or teachers either. On the other hand, there was no hostility to academic achievement among the pupils. You could be picked on for many reasons – but not for being a swot.

*

In recent years, the grammar schools of Kent have become a political football. Various Right wingers promise to ‘bring back’ grammar schools (to places that don’t have them), while various Left wingers promise to abolish them. For my part, I’ll always be grateful to a school that pushed me when I needed it, but without ever crushing me. The unstuffy grammar school that Tech had become suited me well.

Still, I regret the disappearance of the old technical high schools. Not because setting children on a fixed route aged 11 or 13 was ever the right way forward, but because the techs represented a serious, systematic attempt to cater for the needs of intelligent, but practically-minded, children.

While other countries, notably Germany and Switzerland, have created impressive systems of technical education, Britain lags behind. The academically-minded benefit from the UK’s world-beating universities, but many parts of our country are held back by some of the lowest skill levels in western Europe.

To quote the words that often appeared on my school reports, we “must try harder”.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

It was not a school for Jewish Feminist social democrats, or really – if knowledge is your goal – a school at all. It was, rather, a hushed house for women in search of rich husbands. But we did not know this, being children.

It was very pretty because prettiness was the most important thing: a crenellated white Strawberry Hill Gothic house on Richmond Hill. The Good Schools Guide blithely calls is a castle. It isn’t. A castle is a defensive fortress, not a house with ornamental battlements and if I had stayed there I would probably not know that. It was merely decorative and useless for defensive purposes. As we were.

More from this series

The victims of a liberal education

By Helen Thompson

Even in the late 1970s it was a relic, dedicated to upholding – and infiltrating – the British class system and to creating a particular sort of woman: decorative, pleasing, and ambitious in the most pointless sense: the geishas of Twickenham. Even now I wonder how many of them actually have jobs.

It was a tiny world, which sought to be no bigger – quite the opposite of an education. My class contained the daughter of a marquess who is now a duke and a girl who is now a world famous “socialite”. I was there by mistake. My father was the dentist to the headmistress and, on the advice of my mother – a working class Jewish girl from south London, who wanted me to go to Oxford University, and thought this was the way – he secured our admission, probably when she was at his mercy in the chair.

There were only two Jewish families in the school. We learnt that on the first day. The other Jewish family was the only other one to arrive with grandparents. So my sister and I were oddities from the start, although she coped better than I did, being kind and calm. When my uncle delivered us one day in a motorcycle and sidecar – he was a biker – it caused a sensation.

More from this author

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

I remember the costume best, for obvious reasons. This school existed to create surfaces and, as far as I know, it never looked below them. We wore red and white gingham frocks in summer, and grey pinafore dresses with matching coat in winter. We had straw boaters with ribbons in summer, which was ludicrous, and felt bonnets in winter, which was worse.

We were supposed to be immaculate; and they were. I was always the dirtiest girl in the school photograph, an alien among placid English girls certain of their destiny, which was marriage and money. My clothes were grubby and torn because I was curious and accident-prone; once my hat flew out of a car window. Among the others, who seemed to me a rainbow of blonde, there was competitive plaiting of hair.

We were just out of infancy, but I could already sense hierarchies of beauty and status forming. There were no nerds, for what use are they? Some girls shifted to be invited to the tiny socialite’s mansion. (The marquess’s daughters had better manners, because the landed aristocracy, which is secretive, depends on not publicly acknowledging its power.) She spent winters in Barbados and we knew it, and we also knew that it was something to admire.

I would not call that an education. I would call it a trap; almost a hobbling. If you are not properly educated, and you do not find the rich husband your lack of education has prepared you for, what then?

More from this series

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

This world was filled with manners – not warmth, but manners. Each day at the end of school, we had to queue up to shake the hand of the headmistress, a fearsome woman with hair like a wax cauliflower. Once I attempted to queue twice to shake her hand twice – I have the disease of more – but was rebuffed. At lunch we sat at tables of six, presided over by a teacher whose job was to watch for, and root out, bad manners. We had linen napkins and a personalised napkin ring. It was on the school list! We passed bowls of vegetables from hand to hand. Once, my sister licked the communal mashed potato spoon. The shame followed her to the 11+.

We had to learn something, so we learnt French conversation, ballet, and flower arranging. The socialite won the flower arranging, but she had acreage to play with. Our French teacher was actually French. We called her “Mademoiselle” and she was talkative and dramatic, like a French woman from a Sunday night television drama. It was, I think, the ideal school for Mr Bingley’s sisters. It was intellectually empty but if we surrendered to the torpor they spoilt us.

More from this author

How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

My mother was distraught when she realised the truth of a school that she hoped would make us secure in a Britain filled with class: learning too much was forbidden and she could not tolerate that. One night my she and I were bored and, in a fit of mania, we finished all the questions in the maths textbook. It was a term’s work. I walked into school expecting praise. Instead, I was rebuked. Was I vulgar? Had I tried too hard, and that was not faux-aristocratic enough?

I left a term later. I thought at the time it was my choice, but it wasn’t. That is good manners for you. My mother was told, politely, that it was not the school for me: I was too curious, too talkative, too grubby. I think I was also, in retrospect, too Jewish.

I should feel lucky to have attended the fake castle, and in an awful way I was. But it was there that I first felt the alienation. I couldn’t do the things that they required of me; but I had other things. I know that houses with ornamental battlements aren’t defensible, for instance, except, perhaps, as metaphor.

I spent the sixth form in what was then a self-consciously radical comprehensive school in Milton Keynes. Stantonbury’s purported aim was to treat us like adults and to encourage us to believe we were part of an educational collective. The school was built, the teachers declaimed, on three Cs: Christian names, our own clothes, and carpets in every classroom. Once a month, on what was called Day 10, lessons were off and we did other activities, which we were supposed to initiate ourselves. Lower down the school, students – and we were all students not pupils – had hours each week of ‘Shared Time’, which was a strange hodgepodge of activities, with quite strong political undertones.

On my first day, I found my way to what a list on the wall said was my form class, only to be told that I wasn’t supposed to be there, because there was someone well established at the school who shared my name, and it was her class not mine. No-one, it seemed, knew I was starting, even though I had visited a few days before to meet the head of sixth form. By the afternoon, the form teacher had reluctantly accepted that she might have to accept me.

But then I discovered that one of the economics classes had been timetabled at the same time as subjects we had been informed, in the morning, that we could take alongside economics – because the economics teacher only wished to teach three lessons a week rather than the four offered for every other subject. What was supposed to be 12 teaching sessions a week was down to 10.

More from this series

Sink schools rob kids of their futures

By Julie Bindel

That day was, I think, the first time in my life that I acquired a palpable sense of what competence means. There was knowledge about how to organise practical things – at my old school in Nottingham, for instance – and there was an absence of it – embodied by Stantonbury. What I learned over the next two years was just what consequences could follow from this distinction that now loomed in my mind.

My friend’s geography class was entered for one exam board but taught another board’s very different syllabus. She worked harder than anyone I knew. She was the only person in the class who passed and her grade cost her a place at her first and reserve choice universities.

One history teacher regularly turned up seriously late, and then, when he finally arrived, set about dictating to us from a textbook we had all been given at the start of the year.

When the economics teacher left during the first term of the upper sixth, we had not started macro-economics, which was half the syllabus. The school could not find anyone inside the school willing to replace her, even though there was a teacher who could, and said the class wasn’t big enough to make it worth appointing a new teacher. Eventually, after weeks of being left largely to our own devices, they sent someone to our classes who we called our babysitter. By this time my friend Joe and I had bought a macro-economics textbook and were teaching ourselves.

More from this author

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

Attempts to complain about these problems were met with at best indifference and at worst resentment. We were supposed to consider ourselves fortunate that we attended Stantonbury. To expect the school to be competent about timetabling, exam boards, or even teaching us at all when there was Shared Time to worry about, was implicitly deemed unreasonable and reactionary.

Yet Stantonbury’s idealism was not all hollow. My English teachers were brilliant. The two Pauls were the school’s ideals in action, and there were others like them. Without courting a cult of personality, they gave passionately of themselves in imparting their knowledge, and cultivated in us a desire and ability to think for ourselves. They taught us about the set novels, then expected us to go away and read the rest of the major work by those authors so we could come back with thoughts to discuss as their equals. Their classes were the most intellectually exhilarating educational experience I ever had.

When I left in the summer of 1985, I was more angered by the results carnage around me than grateful for what I had learned. I could in retrospect say that concentrating on what had gone wrong for others paradoxically represented an idealism that Stantonbury had, if not inculcated, probably sharpened. But it seemed more a simple matter of daily observation.

I knew my comprehensive school in Nottingham, for all its faults and with no ideological pretension about what it was doing, gave more to more children across the class spectrum than Stantonbury did or could. I also knew that where I lived many parents, for well-intentioned reasons, did not want to see how bad the worst of Stantonbury actually was. They wanted to believe, and I did not want my success to be another rationalisation for them, averting their eyes.

More from this series

Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

During the 1990s, Stantonbury turned away from its radicalism, although for a long time there was still no uniform and I presume the carpets remained in place. In large part, I thought the changes were the inevitable consequence of realities from which the school had run. I hoped it would let fewer people down.

Some part of me now looks back with sadness. I was better equipped for university education than the great majority of the students I now teach, because I had both been taught to think for myself and been forced to take responsibility for spending a lot of time learning by myself. A few years ago, I asked one of my first years – who I knew was struggling in ways I have come to recognise as common – whether “school felt a million miles away”. “No,” he instantly responded, “much farther than that.”

Yet I also cannot see the contrast as a vindication of the Stantonbury way. My student’s time at university eventually turned out well. Stantonbury, by contrast, would not have served him in the slightest. I have come to realise and accept that I am indebted both to the school’s ideals and the failures that dwarfed them. But I was fortunate; many of my schoolmates were not. And educational ideals should not yield such haphazard outcomes.

My secondary school didn’t so much serve its pupils, but rather humiliated, discouraged and neglected them. As far as most of the teachers there were concerned, it was more a holding pen for the dregs of society than a place of education and improvement. I was once invited back to open a new wing of the school – given that I have a public profile and media career.  I told the person on the other end of the phone to shove their invitation right into detention.

Branksome Comprehensive served the 1,200 children on the council estate where I lived in Darlington. Though ‘served’ is perhaps an overstatement. Finding themselves teaching in a sink school, the teachers there subjected my schoolfellows and I to humiliation and violence at worst, and prejudice and indifference at best. Essentially, we were set up to fail.

In 2007, I wrote an article about someone whom I had known at Branksome; he ended up homeless and later in prison for murdering his ex-girlfriend. It prompted me to look into what happened to some of the other kids who had been there with me. I discovered that a number of them were serving life sentences for serious crime. Others had experienced different kinds of hardship. A mere handful had gone on to further education.

I started in Branksome in 1973, aged 11. My older brother Paul had already been there for a year, and, being a bit of a naughty child, had earned a reputation as a ‘troublemaker’. He didn’t do anything terrible, he just refused to be shoved around by a group of teachers who could not care less about his past, present or future. He did tell me he was caned 18 times one day as the teachers were ‘testing out’ three new canes recently acquired. Often, they would run at the kids to ensure they could lash them harder.

I remember my first day there, feeling shy and self-conscious, sitting in the school assembly as the Head Teacher addressed us all. I wasn’t particularly listening to him waxing lyrical, until I heard my name. He was pointing at me, shouting, “There we have one pupil to look out for. Julie, stand up.” He then began to tell the entire school that I would very likely be disruptive, because my brother was. It was an appalling start.

I had been a well-behaved and studious child in my primary school, which was set back behind the estate. That school was not purpose-built to contain ‘feral children’ as Branksome was. When I started secondary school, I was good at all the basic subjects, and even top of my maths class. And then the rot set in.

Something like 98% of my fellow students were from fairly poor, working-class backgrounds; there were one or two middle-class kids who had somehow ended up there. I soon made friends with a spirited girl who had moved from Newcastle and couldn’t find a school place in the middle-class area where she lived. She joined mid-term, and we soon became close. The English teacher, who seemed to dislike me, took umbrage at the fact that a posh girl wanted to hang out with a rough lass. The pair of us soon became demoralised, acted up, and were regularly sent to be caned, on the back of the legs and on the palms of our hands.

My mother used to say that the best education system was the grammar school. She had grown up in a traditional working-class family, and, as an extremely bright child, had sat the entrance exam for the local grammar. She passed. But when it became clear how much her parents would have to pay for her uniform, her books, and the regular field trips, they told her she couldn’t go, so she was sent to the local sink school.

Suggested reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

When I would come home and tell my mum how horrible Branksome was, and how the teachers didn’t care about us, she would put it down to the fact that it wasn’t a grammar school – its standards just weren’t particularly high. But I gradually became aware that the teachers simply thought we were ignorant and useless; they believed we would never usefully contribute to society. They had a vision for us that did not involve sixth form college, let alone university. As far as they were concerned, we were headed for the factory or a cleaning job, and there was no point giving us anything other than the most basic education.

But grammar schools aren’t the answer that so many, including my mum, think they are. They would not solve the problem of bad comprehensives. On the contrary, they would, as the evidence shows, widen the gulf between the poorest, most disadvantaged children and those who are given a leg up into the grammar school system. What we need to do is to improve comprehensive schools – and find a way to stop thinking of them as dumpsters for society’s forgotten kids.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Children denied access to a decent quality education are also being denied the opportunity to reach their potential. The chasm between middle and working-class kids in terms of social status, earning power, confidence and the ability to interact across different communities – and even to raise the next generation – is well established within the first 18 months of secondary school. A culture of low expectation for children translates into underachieving children.

I should know. I underachieved throughout my time at Branksome. I swiftly dropped to the bottom of the class in every subject except for English literature. I only persevered at that because my escapism was imagining myself as a writer; I can’t give any credit to the teacher, who once said to me, “You won’t want to read Shakespeare, you won’t understand the message.” I had as much chance of understanding the ‘message’ as anyone else. I was bright. But I was not from the ‘right sort of family’.

It was a vicious circle. The more the teachers put me down, the more I rebelled and refused to interact. I fell behind in all of my subjects, and on the first day of my final year, after a liberating six weeks of summer holiday, I turned up – only to turn abruptly on my heel and walk away from the school.

I returned only on the odd occasion, to sign the register so that my parents wouldn’t get a visit from a school inspector. I missed my mock exams and took no O-levels. No one thought to ask where I was. On the day I went to collect my National Insurance Card, the head teacher, who suddenly seemed to remember me, told me: “You will amount to nothing.”

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

We all know that the quality of teaching makes the most difference to the progress of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Often, the teachers simply have to show an interest in the student – and take five minutes to get to grips with what the barriers to their learning are.

Improving the chances of kids in schools like Branksome might not even require more funding. It may be down, in part, to recognising that our state school system is riddled with class prejudice.

This week, children across the country will be heading back to school; we asked our contributors to do the same. In this series, our writers share some lessons they learned at school – and how it shaped the way they think about education today.

I went to Eton. I am – here, he cringes in anticipation of a blow – an Old Etonian. Given the visibility of Old Etonians in our public life, and the widespread and understandable view that their influence has not been entirely for the good, I make this confession hesitantly when I make it at all.

Nobody wants to admit to “privilege” – but privileged we all, without any doubt, were. Had I not gone to Eton (I make, here, the disclaimer that I was a scholarship boy, in the hopes of claiming that I at least in part earned the privilege), I would not have had access to the cascade of educational wonderments I did enjoy.

You could not, not in a million years, claim plausibly that this was just another school – still less that it does not confer a vast and unfair advantage to its alumni, over the alumni of even the best schools in the state system. Yes, we all dressed like penguins and tourists pointed at us. But it was a small price to pay.

Suggested reading

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

Suggested reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

More from this author

What's the point of political fiction?

By Sam Leith

The craziest day?

I would choose the one that began with an assembly during which the chemistry master waved what he claimed was a loaded pistol. Lessons were suspended and fifth formers smoked cannabis and snogged in their hide-out overlooking the playground. The afternoon before had seen a concerted attack on a female biology teacher with Bunsen burners attached to taps and used as water cannon. I had not witnessed it because I had been suspended from the subject for suggesting insolently, in a mock O level, that the alimentary canal went from London to Liverpool and had recently been upgraded by the London to Liverpool Alimentary Canal Society.

Mr Hope, with his pistol, restored some order but Sidcot School in the summer of 1976 was not a place for the faint-hearted or the academically ambitious.

Suggested reading

We don't need no secondary education

By Geoff Norcott

Idiots online sometimes discover that I went to a fee-paying boarding school and write triumphant messages suggesting that I have no ability to question Tory Privilege or American Imperialism and so on, because I had such a privileged upbringing myself. The better-read of them genuinely imagine the earlier chapters of A Dance To the Music of Time: tuck boxes and wall games and fags fixing your toast.

We didn’t even have hot water. There were cockroaches in the showers that we’d douse with lighter fluid and set alight. The latrines were unheated. At meals older, stronger children took the best food. Best being a relative term: I became a vegetarian to avoid the poisonous semi-cooked sausages on which most of the school lived. When I try now to make my kids eat food marginally beyond the sell-by date they raise their eyes to the sky and mouth ‘Daddy went to boarding school’.

And yes, I did yearn for privilege: for a home that hadn’t been poisoned by mental illness, for tea and telly with Mum and Dad and a bed that wasn’t metal in a dormitory with dozens of other boys. For a life in a nice comprehensive like my wife’s former school, where all the children of the teachers at the local university formed their own cosy group and holidayed in a camper van before gliding effortlessly off to top universities. But it wasn’t to be.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Lessons learned? Well, not the formal ones, as I have hinted. But oh so many more, so various, and so lacking from other more conventional establishments.

The first is the importance of camaraderie. At Sidcot, 360 pupils of both sexes jammed together in a collection of sheds by the A38 just south of Bristol; we cared deeply about each other. Often it was hatred. I still remember the names of some tormentors – like the psychopathic brothers whose home was rumoured to be in the Ascension Islands, who attacked younger boys with impunity for most of the decade.

But I remember, too, the intensity of the bonding – friendship is too weak a word – of kids thrown together parentless at 11, staying cooped up in the Cotswolds through thick and thin ’til leaving at 18. I remember the tears I shed the night I took a call to say my granny had died. I remember going back into prep. Carrying on. Boarding school is total immersion. There is nowhere to hide.  And when things go well, they’re intensified too: the speech competition that I would win every summer (nobody else cared) made me feel like, well, world king – a master manipulator of men, a cross between Lawrence Oliver and JFK.

More from this author

How Trump makes suckers of the libs

By Justin Webb

You find your place in that world and although it doesn’t have to be your place in future worlds, it helps that you know how society works and how you can fit in. Jonathan Aitken boasted that prison would be no problem for him after boarding school and he was right – not because of the hardship but because of the camaraderie and the ability of anyone who goes to boarding school to find their place, their level, their role in the organism.

It changes you. Or more precisely, it changes your brain. A growing body of neuroscience research suggests that differences in what psychologists call ‘cultural self-construal’ can result in differences in brain activation. As Bruce Hood puts it in his enthralling book Possessed: “Brain activation differs between individuals from independent and collectivist cultures when it comes to a number of tasks.”

Bingo! This is why I don’t care when other family members steal my stuff. Hood’s book doesn’t mention school but hey: Sidcot in the 1970s was the epitome of collectivism. We were all in it together. We owned nothing. So Hood would say our brains were more attuned to the collective. This absolutely allows for vertical competition – boarding schools are full of tall poppies. But their success is geared to, mixed with, the functioning of the whole body; the sense of community is not just foisted on you by lusty singing of the school song, it is actually in your head, in your brain.

This is a good thing, on balance. It allows you to understand intuitively that society does, actually, exist. And however accomplished you are, nothing of you is outside the whole.

Suggested reading

Why is Ofsted doing the secularists' bidding?

By Giles Fraser

Silence laced with boredom was another gift. Every week the whole school would troop into Quaker meeting. An entire hour would be spent alone with your thoughts. Even when some elderly Quaker (it was the village meeting too) took to her feet and revealed that she had been shopping that week and lost the butter before getting it home and you were waiting for the line ‘life’s a lot like that’ – even then the boredom was only marginally assuaged. It hung in the air like the dust revealed in sunlight that streamed through the windows. Nowhere to hide from the intensity of it all. The impact of this on me has been wholly positive. I am at home in silence. I have never listened to a podcast. Not even the life changing work of Giles Fraser. I seek no soundtrack, no clutter. I am self-contained. It began in Meeting.

Another lesson from the Quakers of 1970s Sidcot: when a school talks the talk about inclusion, how about walking the walk too? Sidcot took a proportion of pupils (and paid for them as they did for me) who had been expelled from all other schools. Some of them were genuinely troubled. Sometimes disruptive. But we lived with it. We lived with them. In fact, it was only in later life that I realised who they were, why their name tags were scrawled with sharpie rather than daintily printed, why they seemed to have nowhere to go in the holidays, why they left suddenly.

Social inclusion is actually that: it must mean inclusion of all of us with each other and a realisation that (when it’s done properly and funded well) all will benefit. How many modern private schools, how many state schools, desperate for results, bullied by parents wanting calm classrooms, properly cater for troubled pupils? We know the answer. It is in the news. The Quakers, for all the ghastly faults of Sidcot, knew what was right.

I suppose we have to talk about exams. And actually here I owe the Quakers a grudging vote of thanks. I was allowed to be useless. For much of my life I resented this. I wished I had been pushed. I did nothing but play table tennis and smoke Players No6 in my O level year. But the school stuck with me and when I announced that I wanted to take three A levels and go to university they rallied round.

This flexibility is the privilege of which those correspondents I mentioned at the start like to object and in that one area they have a point. All schools need to be places where we grow up. Not places where we achieve qualifications.

Suggested reading

The myth of the 'growth mindset'

By Tom Chivers

My daughter is taking GCSEs this year and is being told that the difference between a 9 and an 8 matters because Michael Gove, who changed the system, thinks it reveals a truth about ability. Seriously? I admire the American system (in which my children started school while I was based there for the BBC), where you learn nothing much until you go to college. Nor are you judged and graded in public exams until you leave school. Grow up I say. Then think about other stuff. It worked (just about) for me.

I should say in fairness (and in case the Quakers employ lawyers) that nothing I have said about my school is true of the establishment in the modern age. Sidcot is by all accounts a thriving place, with good results and cheerful pupils.

The past is another country etc, and there is no country farther away (thank God) than that inhabited by children in the 1970s – at Quaker schools or any other school. I would love to say it didn’t do me any harm but, frankly, it did. And some good as well. That’s school. That’s life.