As young parents in London all those years ago, we faced that familiar middle-class cliché: do we stick with a failing state system and risk the consequences, or ask the bank manager for a loan and go private?
I remember visiting Islington Green School, described at the time as “the worst sink school in London”, and walking round its turbulent classrooms. How could we risk our little darlings being subjected to such mayhem?
I remember, too, talking to its ambitious head teacher, Margaret Maden, now Professor Maden, doyenne of educationists.
She was determined to turn the school round. “What is your ideal?” I asked her. The answer was a surprise: “Elgin Academy,” she said. “I remember watching the boys and girls walking out in file, dressed in their perfect uniforms, and thinking ‘I want our pupils to behave like that.’”
She succeeded. Within six years she had transformed the school, its ethos and its exam record to the point where it was oversubscribed. People started to move into the catchment area just so they could get the Islington Green experience. Maden went on to found a new sixth form centre for the brightest pupils.
That kind of ambition — to give the brightest and the best the chance to realise their potential — used to lie at the heart of the Scottish education system.
The great Education Act 1872, way ahead of its time, prescribed “the means of procuring efficient education for their children [which] may be furnished and made available to the whole people of Scotland”.
There may be some mythology here: those reforms were not quite as transformative as we sometimes think, and most surveys suggest that middle-class families tended to do best out of the system. But, whatever their background, pupils were always encouraged to aim high.
