While most teachers express frustration about the education system in England, with its focus on Sats, GCSEs and league tables, what they don’t usually do is set up their own school instead. But that is exactly what Lucy Stephens did.
Stephens had been a primary teacher for six years but grew disillusioned and left. “I was just shoehorning kids through test papers,” she says. “Everything was so competitive. You’d find the headteacher in your room, looking through your books, checking on you. Behaviour managers can rule by fear, the staff as well as pupils. I’ve seen them scream at kids in front of the whole school, humiliating them.”
Stephens, 31, decided to resign and work for The Prince’s Trust charity, helping vulnerable young people. But now she is back teaching – this time in her very own school, where she writes the rules and sets the pace.
The New School, based in Croydon, south London, opened its doors in September. It has no Sats and no behaviour policy, and operates on a “democratic” decision-making model for pupils and staff. It can escape statutory testing because it is a private school – but one with no fees. It is funded by philanthropic company donations – £1m of seed funding this year – although Stephens hopes to move to a completely different funding model involving her local authority, believing she can offer a social partnership approach which could be copied by other schools that want to innovate.
The main aim is to create a mini democracy. Many schools have become focused on maintaining a hierarchy to control children’s behaviour, rather than listening to them or building meaningful relationships with them, she says. “We live in a democracy, but we don’t practise that model in schools. And then we expect young people to come out aged 18 and operate democratically in society.” The idea is for “self-determination within a community of equals”.
“It’s important not to just say that children are adults in the making,” she says. “Why would we just ignore them now? They have such valid opinions, such interesting takes on things.”
The school opened with 46 primary pupils, a high proportion from disadvantaged backgrounds – 34% of pupils are eligible for free school meals, one-fifth have special educational needs and 65% were previously homeschooled (an issue of increasing concern to the government). There were 115 applications for the 46 places this year and, if all goes to plan, the New School will eventually become a small all-through institution up to year 11.
The idea of opening her own school came to Stephens when she had her first child. “I thought, what should I do now? I don’t want them in this system. I don’t want them to have to stand on a traffic light or a rain cloud if they disobey an instruction,” she says, referring to the sort of behaviour policies in place in some schools.
UK children report the lowest life satisfaction across Europe, the Children’s Society found last year – with school pressures and “fear of failure” scoring high. But when Stephens began researching other models, such as Steiner and Montessori schools, she hit the catch: fees. She could not set up a free school, because then Sats would be obligatory, and “it would likely have taken four to five years”.
“So I called everybody I’d ever worked with in fundraising, impact, in marketing, and said, ‘can I buy you a coffee?’. You get a lot of people looking at you like you’re mad,” she says. “They think, ‘that’s a nice idea’, or ‘she seems sweet’.” But eventually she secured £1m to open her small school, going entirely against the “economies of scale” drive behind the government’s preferred academy trust model.
She is not telling who the current financial backers are, describing them as “generous philanthropic individuals and a corporate foundation”. But she says none of the funders has political connections or a political agenda, and the corporate foundation supports other projects in education and healthcare that tackle disadvantage. “They’re like maverick funders in the system.”
In some ways, the school is not all that radical, she says. “We emphasise good teaching and we still recognise there’s a qualification system in the UK and we can work around that.” Pupils get about three to four hours of English and maths teaching each week. But an “interdisciplinary, concept-based curriculum” as found in Finland, in which topics rather than distinct subjects are taught, is being introduced, along with “self-directed” learning for a couple of hours each day. Classes have mixed age groups. None of these ideas is new, but they have been looked on with suspicion by the most powerful voices in education for the past decade.
Instead of a behaviour policy, the school operates “community accountability”. That means there is no system of punishment, only “restorative justice” circles in which actions are discussed and apologies given, a deliberate inversion of the hierarchy-driven, “untrusting” system Stephens found so disheartening.
“The aim is that young people leave with a strong sense of personal agency,” she says. Research published in 2018 found private schools increase pupils’ “locus of control”, a psychology term for a sense of control over one’s life, compared with similarly qualified state schoolchildren. Even lunch at the New School is modelled around this principle, with bowls of food on the table so staff and pupils can serve themselves “to support autonomy with eating”. The school has partnered with the University of Nottingham to assess its outcomes, with findings to be published in October.
The funding this year equates to £17,000 a pupil, equivalent to an average boarding school place, which she expects to reduce to £11,000 when the school is at capacity (compare that with the minimum 2021-22 funding of £4,180 per pupil in English primary schools).
Parents know they have taken a risk in sending their children here, and were asked to sign a form to say they were aware that just one year’s funding had been secured. Stephens says she is on the brink of getting the second year agreed, but after that is hoping to adopt a model called “social outcomes commissioning”. Under this agreement, a private funding organisation stumps up the cash for an organisation to reach a particular set of “social outcomes” required by a body with statutory funding, such as a local authority. Once those outcomes are reached, the public body pays back the original funder, plus a small fee.
A school in Doncaster is already operating such a model, and Stephens believes such contracts could offer other schools the chance to innovate and avoid the current accountability structures. Nevertheless, the New School will still have to face the state inspectorate, Ofsted.
Can she succeed in disrupting the system? Jonathan Simons, from the consultants Public First, says that for the model to work, Stephens will have to convince her local authority it can save money and reach specific goals, such as reducing exclusions. “It has to be a set-up where the council is saving money directly and getting outcomes in a shorter timeframe than it otherwise would,” he says. “If it’s a very small institution, the savings might not be enough.”
The school has been deluged with job applications from frustrated state school teachers and the staff have high hopes. “There is a problem in the system, and we can solve it,” Stephens says.
