Mulberries

Haileybury of course has much longer holidays than the primary schools and tomorrow is the last day of term for them. I have been looking back as I finish tomorrow after nine years as Chair of Governors of the Mulberry Primary School in Tottenham. It is a non-church school in my former parish and I have been a community governor there since 1995. All three of my sons were there before going to Haileybury and my wife teaches there.

The Mulberry serves a wonderful community which has extraordinary challenges. The population mobility is very high and more than a third of the children leave and come each year. About three quarters have English as an Additional Language; over half qualify for free school meals; the 650 pupils speak upwards of 60 languages. Everyone has the experience of being in a minority. At the Year 6 leavers' assembly this morning a child who entered the school just over a year ago with no previous experience of formal education and no English spoke - with good grammar - of his memories. The nationally recognised provision for children on the Autistic Spectrum is also on site. It is a school well below national levels in attainment: but the progress the children make from their starting point is extraordinary, and much better than most schools in the country.

I know it is blue, but Allenby hooded tops are blue! Green and black remain the colours!

My boys have not been the only Haileyburians educated at the Mulberry; an Allenby hoodie was to be seen in the school today as the teenagers come to help out in their old school in the last week of term. There was a chap now at S Edmund's Ware in school yesterday. it is wonderful that the Attlee Fund at Haileybury and similar schemes in other schools helps children from Tottenham to come to Haileybury. if you have contributed thank you for helping our Mulberries and others like them.

Commonplace

In the Lent Mission of 1982 Bishop Frank Cocks (BFr 1927) suggested to us that we should start commonplace books. He did not use that phrase, and his suggestion was for rather more specifically devotional or theological notes than many commonplace books.

I still use mine - it is a hard backed exercise book I bought in the bookroom. I find I use it in fits and starts. Sometimes I will not make an entry for years, and then I take it up again and use it rather a lot. I remain grateful to Bishop Cocks for the suggestion. I wonder if others also keep commonplace books following that mission?

In his published Commonplace Book (1993) Mgr Alfred Gilbey commented acerbically that "The Indian Empire was lost on the playing fields of Haileybury." A bit unfair, but he would have ben no supporter of Mr Attlee's government.

Gilbey's family came from Harlow. A contemporary of mine from seminary served there and tells a story of conducing a family funeral and being rewarded with a fine bottle of gin. Despite the near geography, I do not know whether Mgr Gilbey ever came to Haileybury or walked across XX Acre.

Frank and Benedict

It was, he said, when he received a delegation of pensioners whose lives were blighted by youths running over the roofs of their bungalows, breaking windows and perpetrating fear, that he changed his mind. He moved form the politics of class to the politics of relationships. Frank Field has been a prominent member of the General Synod of the Church of England, but he noted with rather too much zest, I thought, Attlee's rejection of what the former PM called the "mumbo jumbo" of religious belief while retaining the Christian Ethic. I think the Pope is right: without the "mumbo jumbo," the apparatus of faith and belief, the ethic is simply arbitrary. If the ethic is arbitrary then it is easy to challenge and overthrow its power actually to change behaviour and establish morality.

Frank Field gave the nineteenth Attlee lecture tonight in Big School and congratulations to the Politics society and to Michael Perrins, Head of Politics for all the organization.

Mr Field divided his lecture into two. In the first half he spoke of his current work as an advisor to the Government on poverty. He described how his view has changed over the years, moving from the conclusion that poverty can be cured by money to a conviction that what is needed is a development of society, specifically in education. Children who are read to by an adult with whom they bond before the age of five are likely to do well; those who are not read to almost always fall back. Whether it is the reading itself or whether this is the symptom of a much wider range of things that are supporting the young child he did not say. When you hear the Pope talk about the need to up hold the family he is not speaking of reactionary shackles to individual freedom, but is there with Frank Field at the cutting edge of the response to poverty. Field argued that if you come out of school able to get a job that 'brings a wage to the table' you will be able to rise out of poverty.

He noted that in his constituency of Birkenhead  40 years ago there were thousands of jobs for unskilled workers. Today there are just seven hundred. But the overall number of jobs has grown. So to come out of school with no qualifications condemns you now not to a life in industry but to long term unemployment. Mr. Field linked this with the refusal of young women to "shack up" (his phrase) with the fathers of their children and to the dislocation of society. When the Pope speaks of the sanctity of marriage and the need for sexual continence he is not far from this.

There was more - suggestions for an end to the long summer vac (but when will schools get building work done?) and for finding a way to stagger entry to school so that summer babies (like me!) are not disadvantaged. Then he spoke about Attlee as a leader. More about these things maybe tomorrow -it is late now.

At dinner in Common Room afterwards I had Ostrich for the first time and much enjoyed it. How the other half live.

Most Successful PM

Over the last couple of days there has been a media flurry about a survey of academic historians rating the success of Prime Ministers since 1945. Clement Attllee (L 1896.2) was rated as 'most successful.' It seems the criterion was an assessment of how much of a mark the various PMs left on British society and politics, and how much of their programme they managed to impliment. The establishment of the welfare state is viewed as defining the modern political landscape. This is the second time the survey has been undertaken by Professor Kenneth Theakston of the University of Leeds and Mark Gill of Woodnewton Associates, and on the  previous occasion as well Attlee came out top.

The survey was done for the Financial Times, but as they have a paywall you may prefer to follow the story on free sites here, here and here

If anyone has had time to read Niklaus Thomas-Symonds' new biography of Attlee, Attlee - A Life in Politics do post a comment. Philip Zeigler reviews it in the Spectator here and says that it is a useful corrective to what he views as the over sympathetic work of Kenneth Harris but that Thomas-Symonds fails to bring in any new material beyond some things about his time at Haileybury. Zeigler remarks that this is covered in less than a page. There may be some room for more there in that Attlee was such a supporter of the school and of Haileyburians. I seem to remember being told that Attlee remarked once that "all other things being equal I would rather have a Haileyburian with me than another man." One assumes that he actually meant "all other things being equal" at face value!

Over the next couple of days I shall try and dig out a link to a recording of Attlee giving an interview to Sir Robin Day. It shows how much things have changed as the by then former PM gives basically monosyllabic answers.