再Greenwich Free School, July 20th 2013 P51. グリニッジ フリー スクール
As the summer holiday approached, the Greenwich Free School (GFS) recently celebrated the end of its first year with a trip to the seaside at Broadstairs. Everyone enjoyed it：London is blistering and GFS, which was launched under a scheme to liberate schools from local-authority control, has only a small patch of grass outside its huddle of temporary classrooms. But for a dozen of its 11-year-old pupils the trip was especially wonderful, because they had not seen the sea before. The school in a tough quarter. In the grounds of a derelict nurses' dormitory - which will be converted into classrooms over the holidays - it is close to the Shooter's Hill housing estate, one of London's grimmest. The name is an old one, perhaps referring to the 17th-century highwayman who once haunted the area；but some residents have kept it topical. A vast acreage of mean streets and tower blocks, the estate is crime-ridden. Over a third of GFS's 100 pupils receive free school meals because their parents are poor. Many came from such ゛chaotic backgrounds゛, in the careful phrase of Lee Faith, the 35-year-old headmaster, that they barely knew how to eat, talk or otherwise behave in public. Bagehot will have to take his word for that：there was no evidence of it during his recent visit to the school. Between classes, the kids scuffled quietly into line, wearing grey trousers, skirts and blazers stamped with the school crest - a silver compass to denote the nearby Greenwich observatory. The uniform is compulsory, as is the orderliness, and rule-breaking is not tolerated. The pupils carry green cardboard detention cards, on which they accure points for even small misdemeanours. If they accrue too many, they face a ten-minute detention after lunch. if they accrue a lot, they are hauled in on a Saturday morning for extra tuition. Remarkably, given that the school a place to every pupil who wanted one, including some pretty troubled children, this has only happened twice. No pupil has been expelled and, even with the riot of adolescence approaching, Mr Faith does not expect any to be. Most pupils see the sense of the discipline. It distinguishes them from the wastrelr outside their gates and means they don't lose valuable learning time. And it is valuable. Bagehot watched a lesson on the end of slavery in America become a sophisticated discussion of historiography；a science lesson, on gravity and pressure, morphed into a design class - the children had to design a contraption to stop an egg breaking on impact with the floor. Every child was involved and cajoled, to form judgements and ask questions - even if these were sometimes, as on a noticeboard in the science classroom, rather lavatories：゛Why is bird poo white?゛Why do you throw up sometimes?゛GFS is too young to be inspected by the government watchdog, Ofsted - so it arranged an extraordinary inspection. The inspector said he had seen more ゛awe and wonder゛in two days at GFS than during two years of inspecting schools. If only every local child could experience that. But GFS is now six times oversubscribed. No wonder advisers to Michael Gove, the dynamic Conservative education secretary, rave about this. His academies programme, which has given autonomy to over half of England's 2,000 secondary schools, is one of the government's most touted reforms. And start-up free schools such as GFS are where the innovations it is designed to encourage are most evident. Assured, in effect, of all the freedoms of a private school save over admissions, GFS's originators, a trio of concerned Londoners, selected Shooter's Hill as an area of great need, then set about designing the perfect school. For this they visited schools in Sweden and America, where similar reforms are long-standing, and across Britain. They then rewrote the national curriculum. A class on computer skills was dropped in favour of computer programming；citizenship was replaced by politics, philosophy and economics - a course associated with Oxford University, which is where many of GFS's pupils say they intend to study. They also lengthened the school day by fully three hours. In their seven years at the school, Mr Faith estimates, his pupils will therefore have the equivalent of two extra years of teaching. When Mr Gove claims the principle behind his landmark reform is a good one, he must be applauded. When his opponents in the Labour Party - though they launched a precursor scheme - pour scorn on that, they must be derided. This reform is a brave, and quite possibly brilliant, effort to shape up one of Britain's most important and too often feeble sectors. There is little doubt that GFS will remain an excellent school. Yet how scalable - for this is the big uncertainty over Mr Gove's reform - is its success? It cannot be replicated everywhere. Inner-city London are deceptive；though poor, many are highly-motivated immigrants. The school's founders are also outstanding. One, Tom Shinner, is a 28-year-old former management consultant who gave up a career at Mckinsey to teach in tough schools. Why? ゛Err, maybe something to do with idealism,゛he mumbles. It is thick on the ground among GFS's highly-qualified staff - even the school secretary has an Oxford degree. Yet GFS is providing a useful example for other schools. Emissaries from several have inquired about the longer school day. If its governors wish to, they could also create more schools on the same line. It will take a while, but the competition this engenders could eventually help raise standards everywhere. Meanwhile, it is important not to lose sight of quite why GFS is such a good school. It is because of the pride, in their school and in themselves, that has persuaded a crowd of unruly 11-year-olds to put up with a lot of fussy strictures and work hard. And that has roots in a determined belief, manifest in everything they do：that all of them can, and should, achieve excellence, no matter who is paying for their meals.
