‘Mr Carpetright’ transformed British education. Now, his legacy is under threat from Labour

The carpet magnate Lord Harris had not had any involvement in education until he was summoned to a meeting in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher. Harris had come to know the then PM through serving on an informal advisory council she had formed of businessmen, who convened at Downing Street every few months. “Philip,” Thatcher told Harris, “I want you to run a school.”

The command took Harris completely by surprise. His own schooling had not exactly been stellar: born in Peckham, he attended Streatham Grammar but was forced to leave at 15, with a single O-level to his name, after his father died of cancer aged 39. To keep the wolf from the door, Harris joined the family carpet business – then just a market stall and three small shops – and proved very good at it, expanding the business to hundreds of stores and later naming his empire Carpetright.

At the time of Harris and Thatcher’s meeting, most of England’s failing schools were controlled by local authorities. Thatcher had been won over by the academic-turned-special adviser Cyril Taylor, who believed that struggling schools might improve if they were made independent of local authorities and sponsored by the private sector – an idea that went on to underpin the modern academy system as we know it.

When Harris protested that he knew nothing about schools, Thatcher was undeterred. “But you know what business and success look like,” she insisted. “And schools should be run more along business lines.”

Harris was assigned Sylvan High School in Crystal Palace and visited the comp a few weeks later with Taylor in tow. Aware that what was planned for the school would be highly controversial, Harris and Taylor arrived incognito, pretending to be quantity surveyors. What they found, as the author Ivan Fallon describes in his engrossing new book All Can Achieve, was a school evidently on its knees.

Teachers, who stayed for an average of just six months, were unable to keep order. Pupils were unkempt, if they were there at all (on any given day, up to 40 per cent were absent). The school was not just emanating an aura of failure but producing dire results too, with a GCSE pass rate of 9 per cent. “I had tackled many challenges in my business life,” Harris recalls in All Can Achieve, “but nothing as daunting as this one.”

As soon as it was announced that a carpet tycoon was taking over the school, there was uproar – and repeated protests. One lobby group accused Harris of being a “rich capitalist b-----d and Thatcherite only in it for personal greed”. At a public meeting to discuss the takeover, a woman stood up and howled: “I don’t want my child turned into a yuppie!”

But Harris threw himself into the challenge, appointing a visionary headmaster, clearing out underperforming staff, introducing a smart new uniform and imposing strict standards on teachers and pupils alike. Dyslexic himself, he was particularly moved by one girl’s plea: “Please, sir, can you help me read?”

Improvements began to show almost immediately. By 1996, by which time the school had become a city technology college – a precursor to today’s academies – it was barely recognisable, with average daily attendance of more than 90 per cent and a GCSE pass rate of 54 per cent. It had also gone from being a school pupils seldom chose to one that was highly sought after, with 650 applicants competing for just 180 places.

The road to revolution

In an era in which many institutions seem to be getting worse rather than better, England’s schools are a rare success story. Over the past couple of decades, the country has climbed the international Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings: in 2009, England was placed 27th in maths and 25th in reading; by the 2022 Pisa cycle, published in 2023, it ranked 11th and 13th respectively. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have not shown similar improvements.

Much of the success of English schools has been attributed to academisation, which was explored by the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s, set in motion by New Labour in the 2000s and then rolled out at scale in the 2010s during Michael Gove’s tenure as education secretary. Today, more than 80 per cent of English state secondary schools are academies, as are nearly half of primary schools. Of the top 50 state-funded schools, 84 per cent are academies or free schools (academies set up from scratch rather than converted from existing schools).

The success Harris had in Crystal Palace was key to this revolution. When Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair’s education guru Andrew Adonis started hunting for examples of failing schools that had been turned around. He came across Harris’s college, visited it and was so inspired that he asked Harris to set up a chain of similar schools.

Now, though, it’s a Labour Government that is putting these extraordinary gains in jeopardy. Academy leaders, including those at the Harris Federation, have warned that many of the freedoms that helped these schools to thrive are being stripped away thanks to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which was passed in April.

Currently, the Harris Federation runs 55 primary and secondary schools in London and Essex, three quarters of which are rated Outstanding by Ofsted (compared to 19 per cent nationally). Though about one in three Harris pupils are eligible for free school meals, they consistently outperform national benchmarks: 74 per cent of Year 6 pupils meet expected standards in reading, writing and maths (compared to 61 per cent nationally), while 24 per cent of Harris secondary pupils go on to Russell Group universities (compared to 13 per cent nationally).

It was the freedom granted to academies that proved so transformative for English education, argues Katharine Birbalsingh, headteacher of Michaela Community School in Wembley. “It meant that schools could be in charge of their own destiny, instead of being told what to do by the local authority.”

Schools that became academies were also granted other freedoms, such as the ability to diverge from the national curriculum, set teacher pay as they chose and employ teachers without qualified teacher status (something private schools had long done in a bid to lure starry new graduates into the classroom). These liberties “gave headteachers more power to do what was right for their intakes”, says Birbalsingh.

Role models

Over the years, academisation has also meant that successful approaches have been allowed to flow from thriving academies to schools that are doing less well, Birbalsingh says. “What that does is start a revolution in schools generally – in terms of different teaching methods, discipline methods and so on.”

It’s no different, she explains, from what happens in the private sector all the time. “You’ll have an innovator like Apple bringing out the iPhone, and it’s such a success that suddenly all phones work like an iPhone. They all have apps – even though, once, the idea of a phone having apps and a touchscreen was bizarre.”

Birbalsingh’s school – which she set up in 2014 and is so strict that its pupils famously walk between lessons in silence – is a case in point, she says. It attracts more than 1,000 visitors a year: “Mainly teachers from Britain. And those teachers take the ideas from my school and implement them in their own schools.” Meanwhile, her school and her methods have themselves been influenced by the Harris Federation, which is run by former headteacher Sir Daniel Moynihan. “He is amazing, but he got it in the neck a million and one times,” Birbalsingh says. “I’m standing on his shoulders.”

Important though freedom was to the academy revolution, for it to succeed this freedom had to be balanced with accountability, says Nick Gibb, the former minister who pushed through many of the reforms of the 2010s. Rather than simply grant schools the ability to run themselves – and risk them becoming even more entrenched in their failing ways – the Conservatives also introduced measures to flag schools that were failing their pupils.

Gibb was shadow education minister from 2005 to 2010 and “spent every Monday visiting schools to try to work out what the problem was”, he recalls. “What I saw was an ideological approach to education – low expectations, a lot of project-based work, learning through inquiry rather than actually being taught.”

Instead of learning how the Battle of Hastings unfolded, for instance, history pupils might be taught “where sources of history come from”, Gibb says. This meant that chunks of important history – the 18th century, the 19th century – were being missed. For privileged children, this approach was not always such a problem, as they had a cultural hinterland imparted to them by their parents. But for poorer children, it could be critical. The idea is set out well, Gibb says, by the American educator Ed Hirsch, who compares knowledge to Velcro.

“The idea is, the more you have, the more you can acquire,” Gibb explains. “There were kids coming to school without much knowledge, then they were being taught skills rather than the knowledge they badly needed. What happens in that situation is that the gap between kids widens, because the kids with knowledge will be able to gain something from those lessons, but the kids without knowledge won’t.” In many cases, the skills schools were concentrating on – critical thinking, an understanding of how history gets hammered out and so on – were not being mastered by pupils either, leaving poorer children with very little to show for their education.

At Harris schools, by contrast, teachers seemed to grasp the importance of “an academic, knowledge-rich curriculum, high expectations of all their students, strict behaviour policies and a strong work ethic,” Gibb says. “What Harris showed is that neither the background of the children nor the challenges of the area need be barriers to academic success.”

Parents whose children have been educated at the Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane in Tottenham, north London, know this well. Previously called Downhills Primary, the school failed an inspection in 2012, with Ofsted pointing to poor teaching, low expectations and no capacity to turn things around. Gove then ordered it to be taken over by an academy trust, a move that was ferociously opposed by the Labour-run Haringey Council, the National Union of Teachers and local MP David Lammy, now the Deputy Prime Minister. Now, though, the school is unrecognisable. An Ofsted report in 2024 judged it Outstanding in all areas, highlighting excellent teaching, “impeccable” behaviour and how “pupils have a real zest for learning the school’s curriculum”.

Under threat

The concern now is that many of the improvements made in English schools are at risk. Among the measures introduced by the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act is a requirement for all new teachers at academies to hold qualified teacher status or be actively working towards it, and an end to the rule that failing schools are automatically forced to become academies. Schools’ freedom to set their own uniforms has also been clipped. Giving evidence to MPs last year, Moynihan said: “It is not clear what problem this is solving. I have seen no evidence to suggest that academy freedoms are creating an issue anywhere. Why are we doing this?”

There is a specific ideology driving these changes, Birbalsingh believes: “The Leftists are saying, ‘We need everybody to have the same schools, and we’d rather have worse schools that everybody can go to than have it so that some schools are good and some schools are not as good’.”

Birbalsingh herself used to be Left-wing, she points out, so she believes she can understand the perspective. What Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is motivated by, Birbalsingh believes, “is fairness and equality, that is more important to her than anything else”. But what the Left fails to grasp, when it comes to education, “is that when you pursue equality and fairness in that kind of way, it means everything is bad”.

Ian Mansfield, head of education at the think tank Policy Exchange, fears the changes to education policy will “cause a general drift into mediocrity”. “The academy system has delivered a tried-and-tested method of turning failing schools around. Yet rather than learning from this success to transform other public services, such as hospitals and prisons, the Government has taken a step backwards by ending forced academisation orders, diluting accountability via Ofsted and ending academy freedoms.”

Meanwhile, the Harris schools – and schools modelled on them – continue to thrive. Now 83, it is likely that Harris himself will be remembered more for his contributions to education than to soft furnishings. He seems perfectly happy with that. “Every year, more than 6,000 bright young people leave a Harris school, and it gives me great pleasure to see them go off into the world destined for a better life than the one in which many of them grew up,” he writes in All Can Achieve. “My decision to take on the schools project all those years ago was one of the best I ever made. It changed the lives of many, many children. It also changed my life in the process.”

All Can Achieve (Biteback, £18.99) is out now

[Source: Daily Telegraph]