How to set up a Free School

Toby Young helped to set up one of the UK’s first free schools. In an exclusive extract from his new book, he sets out the Machiavellian skills he picked up on the way

By Toby Young
7:00AM GMT 25 Nov 2011


Two years ago, if you asked me to predict the subject of my next book I wouldn’t have guessed it would be about setting up a free school. My first two books were both comic memoirs, one dealing with my adventures at Vanity Fair in New York, the other with my brief stint as a Hollywood screenwriter. Nothing about my career up to that point indicated I’d become a passionate advocate of education reform.

It was having four kids that did it. I began to worry about the local secondary schools. I wanted them to be educated in the state sector, as I had been, but also to receive an academically rigorous education where they’d be taught Latin and History and introduced to the best that had been thought and said. The few comprehensives in my part of London that offer a good old-fashioned liberal education are either faith schools or so over-subscribed you need to live within a few hundred yards to stand a chance of getting in.

The pivotal moment was when my wife Caroline sat me down and said we’d have to move to the country. At first, I grudgingly accepted this, but then I thought, “Hang on a minute. This is ridiculous. Why should we have to turn our lives upside down to get our children into a decent comprehensive? If the state won’t provide one, we should bloody well start one ourselves.”

I can’t pretend it’s been easy. I managed to assemble a group of 15 volunteers, most of them local parents and teachers, but even with all of us mucking in it’s been a huge amount of work. Luckily, our decision to do this coincided with Michael Gove becoming Education Secretary and making it possible for groups of volunteers to set up schools. With the help of his officials, we managed to get the West London Free School open in September.

I didn’t get paid anything to write this book. What started out as a project has become a crusade – I think Free Schools and Academies are Britain’s best hope of reversing the decline of state education. How to Set Up A Free School is intended to be an entertaining piece of narrative non-fiction, but it’s also supposed to encourage people to follow in our footsteps and tell them how to do it.

Ironically, the West London Free School has become such an instant hit – over 1,000 children have applied for our 120 places next year – that my own children might not get in. I hope they do, but it will have been worth it no matter what. I’ve written an international bestseller, performed in a one-man show in the West End and co-produced a Hollywood movie, but nothing I’ve ever done has come close to producing the sense of satisfaction I feel about having started this school. I thoroughly recommend it.

The Chicago Way

The only way to win the propaganda war is to be every bit as energetic and relentless as your opponents. In some cases, more so. Every time a damaging story about your proposed new school appears in a newspaper or on the internet, you need to respond immediately. Create a Google alert with the name of your school so you know about any story the moment it appears.

I remember sitting down one Sunday lunchtime to tuck into a roast with my wife and children when I discovered that Fiona Millar, ex-adviser to Cherie Blair, had just written a post for an anti-free-schools website accusing my group of trying to throw some handicapped children out of their special school so we could move into the building. Not true, obviously, but I had to get up from the dinner table that second, go to my garden office and spend the next two hours composing a “comment” to leave beneath her piece that rebutted every element of the story. If I hadn’t done that – and if I hadn’t used the phrase “false and malicious”, indicating that the piece in question gave me ample ammunition to bring a libel suit against anyone repeating the allegations – the story could have ended up in the following day’s Mirror.

Whenever I talk to free-school proposer groups on this topic, I like to quote a bit of dialogue from The Untouchables: “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way – and that’s how you get Capone.”

The Elevator Pitch

As soon as you go public with your proposal to set up a free school, you need a pithy one-sentence description of your school that captures its essence. The Reach Academy in Feltham, due to open in 2012, announces itself on its website as follows: “Our vision is that all children, regardless of background, benefit from a first-class education and realise their full potential.” The Free School being set up in Newham by Peter Hyman, a former strategy adviser for Tony Blair, goes with: “School 21: For success in the 21st century.”

These are good examples of what’s known in the business world as the elevator pitch: a brief, punchy description of your idea that conveys its essence in 30 seconds or less, as if you were a post boy who found himself in the lift with the CEO and had that long to present him with your career-changing idea.

Once you’ve decided on your elevator pitch, get it out there. Make sure that all the members of your group memorise it and trot it out at every available opportunity.

This is how you win a political argument: you repeat the same thing over and over again. It’s boring – it’s one of the reasons politicians often give the impression of being robotic – but you’ve got to do it. Your enemies know this and they’re good at it.

On Message

Often you’ll find that your opponents come from some well-oiled political machine – a union, a local authority – where orders are given and discipline is imposed. Most Free School groups, by contrast, are reluctant to organise themselves too hierarchically. Plus, no one’s being paid. You can’t ring up a voluntary worker in the middle of the night and order him or her to have a piece of work on your desk first thing tomorrow morning. He – or she – will tell you to get lost.

Nevertheless, your group will need to respond immediately to a negative publicity hit and there won’t be time to convene a meeting of the Steering Committee. Not only that, but you need to make sure that the lines going out to the media are consistent – that everyone stays “on message”. The best thing is that just one person be responsible for communications – and no one apart from that person ever give a quote to a newspaper, talks on the radio or makes any media appearance in connection with your school.

The Adonis Encounter

From the outset, I decided to make the campaign for the West London Free School as public as possible. I wrote about it whenever I could and never hesitated to appear on radio or television to talk about it, often engaging in heated debates with Fiona Millar. The upshot was that our group, and I in particular, became the focus of national opposition to the free-schools policy, with the leaders of all the main teaching unions singling me out for criticism – not to mention Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and God knows who else. Whenever I bumped into other free-school proposers during the set-up process, they would often thank me for being their “human shield”.

Not everyone on my steering group thought this was the right approach and they weren’t afraid to tell me so. They worried that people might think the West London Free School was just one big ego trip for its publicity-crazed founder or, worse, a Tory school. Often the Labour and Lib Dem voters on the steering group were just freaked out by being under attack from people they thought of as being on the same side as them. When I hit back, branding our opponents “loony lefties”, they were embarrassed. They thought this Punch-and-Judy style of debate would mean our school wouldn’t be taken seriously.

I began to doubt whether I’d made the right call myself, and when I appeared on Any Questions? with former education minister Lord Adonis, I decided to seek his advice. This was just after the last general election.

At bottom, I said to him in the car afterwards, the anti-free-schoolers and I all wanted the same thing – good local schools for everyone – so couldn’t we engage in a constructive dialogue about how best to achieve that?

Adonis gave me a look of withering contempt, much like the look Prospero gives his naive daughter in The Tempest when she expresses admiration for the rogues that have washed up on his island.

“They’re not interested in 'constructive dialogue’,” he said. “Don’t you get it? If you extend any sort of olive branch to them they’ll see it as a sign of weakness and move in for the kill. I dealt with exactly the same people – the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Anti-Academies Alliance, the NUT – for most of my ministerial career and, believe me, they would rather stick pins in their eyes than admit they have common ground with someone like you.

“Their attitude to Free Schools is the same as their attitude to Academies: they won’t rest until every last one has been razed to the ground.”

I decided to stick to my guns and I’m convinced it was the right strategy. The acid test was when we advertised for staff in the Times Educational Supplement. Would any teachers want to work at “the Toby Young school”? The answer was yes. We had more than 600 applicants for our eight full-time teaching positions. We’ve never had any problem attracting pupils, either. At the time of writing, the West London Free School has approximately 10 applicants for every place.

The War Room

If you want to know how to mount an effective political campaign, rent The War Room on DVD. It’s a documentary that takes a behind-the-scenes look at Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. The star of the film is James Carville, Clinton’s campaign manager and a supreme master of the dark political arts.

Among Carville’s litany of pithy phrases, one of my favourites is the battle cry he always utters at the beginning of a campaign: “Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.”

I’m afraid that’s the kind of martial attitude you’ve got to take when it comes to dealing with your opponents. By all means try to give the impression that you are reasonable people who would gladly engage in “constructive dialogue” with them if only they were a little less ideologically hidebound – but only as a tactic to discredit them. In reality, don’t give an inch. No retreat, no surrender. It’s a battle to the death and there can only be one winner.

Free school facts and figures

24
Number of free schools that opened this September, most of them primary (for now)

87
Number of free school applications approved by Government for opening 2012 and beyond (plus 8 already at planning stage)

1,400
Number of Academies (operationally the same as free schools but either created from existing state schools or set up by organisations rather than volunteer/parent groups) as of now

1,463
Number of existing schools seeking academy status

70% of free schools... are in the 50% most deprived areas in the country
Michael Gove to Parliament, October 10


How to Set Up A Free School by Toby Young is a Penguin Shorts e-book, pub. Dec 1, price £1.99