Corporate Vivisection: The End of Quintin Kynaston
Slash-and-burn corporate rebranding fells a St. John’s Wood institution.
They say you die twice; the first time when you stop breathing, and the second when someone says your name for the last time — by that phrase, we have reached Quintin Kynaston’s second — and final — death.
Having been demolished and rebuilt in 2015 (the first ‘death’), we now find the signs taken down, and the announcement made — after going into special measures earlier this year, Quintin Kynaston has been folded into the Harris Federation of academies. As of Sept 1st it will be named ‘Harris Academy St John’s Wood’.
There’s an old question, that of ‘Theseus’ Ship’, popularised through ‘Trigger’s Broom’, which asks how much of something can you replace before it stops being the same ‘thing’ as the original. With the building and now the name gone, Quintin Kynaston ceases to exist. A local institution has been turned into a sterile corporate branch, with the community losing a part of itself in the process.
For those unfamiliar, Quintin Kynaston (QK) was one of the few non-private schools that regularly made national news; Madness’ Baggy Trousers was written about pupil Suggs’ time as a pupil, and it is where Tony Blair announced the timetable for his resignation, using the school as the exemplar of his ‘education, education, education’ election-winning mantra — his choice of QK showing his intention to frame his legacy around domestic rather than foreign policy.
The turning of QK into that paragon of Blairite corporate-structure education policy earned its headteacher Jo Shuter a BBC documentary [controversial as her sister was the documentary maker], a Headteacher of the Year award in 2007, and a CBE [above an MBE & OBE but below a damehood] in 2010.
QK as an institution mirrored its community, and as a result, there were public lows to go with the lauded highs. In the 90s it was the ‘school from hell’ which produced Learco Chindamo, the murderer of Philip Lawrence, respected headteacher of local secondary St. George’s, who was stabbed to death while protecting a pupil in 1995.
Fast-forward to the 2010s, and you find a school which has multiple jihadis for alumni, among them Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’ [who I have written about previously]. In 2013 the school spent a year as headline fodder when award-laden head Jo Shuter had a very public fall from grace, with her expenses dissected in the press, followed by her resignation and suspension from teaching.
Without a shadow of doubt, these recent national news frenzies played their part alongside slipping standards in this decision to kill off the school’s name and ‘start anew’ with the hopes of a ‘clean slate’ for a ‘new era’ — the simple private sector solution to a ‘failing’ brand is to rebrand and hope the consumer forgets.
The problem with this is that QK isn’t a kitchen cleaner to change from Jif to Cif, and it has as an institution a depth of heritage broader and grander than its headline lows — or even its government approved ‘highs’. Its identity and history we find on the ash heap, and its responsibilities now ill-defined behind corporate smokescreen.
Quintin Kynaston had a legacy going back to the 19th Century, as a successor to Quintin Hogg’s Polytechnic Secondary School. It had been on its site since the 1950s — in those 60+ years it became an integral part of the local community.
Traditionally, QK had for a crest St George slaying the dragon. Then ‘QK’ as the base of a tree, illustrating its location in St John’s Wood. In the 00s, as an IT specialising school it was QK stylised with a technological ‘wifi’ motif. When an academy, a simple interlocking Quintin and Kynaston.
Despite a wealth of options at its fingertips — St John’s Wood? A tree, perhaps? — Harris Academy St John’s Wood will have a meaningless, contextless spiral as the school’s ‘identity’. This is no slip-up, as we can see from the above assortment of clipart, there is no inherent meaning to Harris-brand identity beyond being a Harris school.
In fact the M.O. of Harris academies seems to be to ‘Year Zero’ whatever school they take over. If a school has a bad reputation, obliterate any connection between what stood there in mid-July and what stands there now six weeks later in early-September.
That process is of course smoke and mirrors, nothing material changes overnight, but when you invite corporate culture into the public sector, you have to be prepared for all aspects of corporate culture, including the (in all practical senses) meaningless rebrand to dupe customers that you’re not that old bad brand.
Schools are, however, not products or companies, but local social institutions — the ‘Harris’ brand means nothing to locals, nor to the school itself. Harris swallows up ‘failing’ schools with the promise of assured mediocrity — a guarantee of at least a ‘good’ come Ofsted inspection, with a homogenised, corporate ‘brand’ as part of the deal. Schools become branches, not institutions in their own right.
In replacing part of the social fabric — a long-established local school — with absolutely meaningless corporate branding, the school’s role as social institution in the public sector morphs into one of private sector. Accountability evaporates when the school severs its connection to its past, and becomes something uncanny in the same location.
Locals may have gone to and sent kids to QK, and been welcome themselves at the school office — now they find something totally unfamiliar, which they are almost certainly not welcome in — another stretch of neighbourhood is transferred from public to private, from ‘ours’ to shareholders’.
This isn’t just about the sometimes abstract politics of private and public, it has real repercussions. The problem with this action is that communities know ‘their’ schools — their badges, their reputations, and where they are. That knowledge that they’re not ‘anonymous’ keeps kids in check when outside of school, as well as keeping them safe as the uniform makes them ‘known’ to adults.
Running away from QK’s past gives management an unearned (and unnecessary) clean slate, but leaves the pupils they are supposedly serving strangers in their own community.
We’ve seen this break in tradition happen before. My mum went to Maida Vale High, and when it merged with North Paddington Comprehensive and then folded into North Westminster, that unbroken institutional link was severed. She didn’t, nor did anyone else, look at North Westminster (as well as Westminster or Paddington Academy which followed it) as fellow alumni, because they weren’t and aren’t. Nor will ‘Harris Academy St John’s Wood’ pupils be fellow alumni of those who attended Quintin Kynaston.
Institutions, whether schools, universities, or businesses, have subcultures, in this case ‘the school spirit’, that ethos and culture unique to a school, and QK’s has died because figures within the school did not value it. That is only compounded by the fact this ‘transformation’ sinks the school even deeper into a private-sector framework.
Stripping meaningful identity away like this is wrong. In many cases the core of self-esteem for poor kids is identity. And while school identity will rank lower that others, it is real, meaningful, and part of the social fabric. It is being part of a wider community, and sharing an alumni status with those in the community of different ages and backgrounds. That alumni status is inter-generational, inter-community ‘glue’, sticking thousands in an area together.
Of course, as we see communities across London torn to bits by gentrification, property speculation, and ‘social cleansing’, it becomes clear that such ‘glue’ is not reckoned necessary to communities in an enforced perpetual flux. We are in an era where living in the community you were raised in is presented as luxury, not a right.
Part of the shame around this situation is that it was not so long ago that Quintin Kynaston was writing up a 25-page history of the school; whatever can be said of Shuter’s demise, it is clear that she respected the school’s legacy and its long-established role in the community [if only perhaps to fashion QK into a highly polished surface to better illuminate herself]. Now we find an abrupt reversal.
While the school may have published a formal history, QK has a rich informal history — and impact — as well. One event in particular stands out.
The 1972 pupil strike which saw schools across Westminster empty into the streets over weeks, with pupils in the thousands marching for an end to caning and improvements to school standards, started at QK, which then led to students from Rutherford, Sarah Siddons Girls’ School, and Maida Vale High leaving in solidarity.
That was an event which made it to government, with PM Ted Heath asking Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher to keep an eye on the situation, lest it turn into the sort of student movement which brought down the French government in 1968. They went so far as to get the intelligence services involved.
In the end, not much came of the situation (no governments overthrown), but it was one which took place over weeks and had a possible high of 8,000 London students out in force. It was no small thing. The fact that it is not particularly known says more about how some narratives are suppressed, than it does about the value of the situation as an event within the school and community.
The strike is, however, the sort of thing that we can’t imagine happening today. Students being out of school over weeks protesting in the thousands, to the new management-class of headteachers, would be mortifying, and goes against the modern interpretation of schooling [keep in mind that the strike took place in the era of Summerhill and Risinghill, the original ‘free schools’ which by today’s standards were prep anarchic free love communes].
Now, all schools are semi-correctional facilities, penning kids in and adhering to strict rules, shuffling the child’s relevant paperwork [and cooking the books — ‘value added progress’ being an absolute nonsense that QK made strides in. Predict a B student an E for GCSE, when they get a B —congratulations, you ‘added value’, whizz your way up the school rankings] until they are out the door and ‘not their problem’. Not very pastoral.
For supposedly liberal, democratic times, the idea of the politically active citizen-student, who can strike for their rights, is dead, and worse — absurd.
On the topic of the management class, we can see a streak of that in how the current head of QK (Alex Atherton) dealt with a more recent part of QK’s history, the news of ‘Jihadi John’ being unmasked as Mohammed Emwazi.
When asked about the situation, Atherton stated “It’s a long time ago, I haven’t been made aware by anybody that that is a concern.” It was in fact ten years before, which you would assume in a school which handles students for around seven years, in a supposedly pastoral environment, isn’t very long at all. But it’s a certainly a long time in management time — a week is a long time in management time if it means the buck doesn’t stop with you.
As a quote it’s also quite a piece of misdirection, considering Emwazi wasn’t the only student to travel to fight or die abroad, and other students left the school much later than Emwazi. Is five years a long time in a school? A moot point, as it is clear that the intention is unilateral withdrawal from responsibility and the time-frame is really quite irrelevant. What is truly meant is ‘not my problem’, which is an attitude totally removed from the fact a community is suffering the repercussions of an ex-student’s televised executions.
What accountability is there in a school if even five years means the buck doesn’t stop here? Moreover, where does the buck stop in a Harris school? With the tutor? Head of year? Deputy Head? Head? The Regional Director? Does it go to HQ? The beauty of private sector management is that the buck stops nowhere, and managers — from small-time biscuit makers to major pharmaceuticals — can sit back comfortably knowing that so much management structure insulates them from meaningful responsibility, you all share it out until it’s immaterial and nobody is to blame. Homeopathic responsibility, in a sense — dilute the poison among a dozen cups and you can all sip contently. That’s one thing for the aforementioned industries, but what happens when your ‘business’ is the well-being of children? What happens when your ‘product’ goes off to kill?
What this sort of private-sector management-class trick displays is not a dedication to pupils, but a dedication to passing the buck. Truly, New Labour policy of introducing ‘management excellence’ to public sector schooling has reached its apex. We’re in the era of rebranding when the times get tough, the results slip, and the buck looks like it may finally stop somewhere — the solution? New layers of bureaucracy, even less accountability, and a new Head Office to supersede the head’s office. For a minute there it looked like six figure salaries might come with responsibilities regarding a lack of managerial achievement.
The mistake ex-head Jo Shuter made was in being told to run QK like the private sector, she went ahead and treated herself like a private sector manager. She got the results that were expected of her and like any private sector manager expected the little luxuries that come with it — that is to say, the corporate credit card is your credit card.
However, the real deal, as with all corners of the public sector, was for public sector managers to restructure along private sector lines, to allow the private sector to move in and profit. Shuter’s ‘little’ profligacies — £5,855 on taxis outside of school business, £6,292 on her 50th birthday party held at the school — pale in comparison to the new order, where the chief executive of Harris Federation, Sir Daniel Moynihan, gets £425,000 as the ‘head of heads’ [we can imagine here a four-tiered mortarboard a la Suleiman the Magnificent to go with such an office]. Shuter buttered her bread with QK funds, but ‘Harris Academy St. John’s Wood’ will be a cash-cow among 40-odd others for the Harris Federation.
Ultimately, Shuter misunderstood the situation, she wasn’t a private sector manager, she was prepping the ground, in a guinea pig school, for the private sector managers. If she had played her cards right, it would likely be [or down the line] Dame Jo in an equivalent position to Sir Daniel’s. Her fall from grace was a little too far and far too political, it was a flogging of the public sector for what is small potatoes in the private sector.
Shuter tried for a ‘third way’ between the traditional model and academies, but much like the rest of Blair’s New Labour policy, no such ‘third way’ materialised. When doubling-up on her responsibilities, becoming head of Pimlico as well as QK, she’d hoped to form a small federation, with heads in both schools, and herself as the head of heads. The council’s decision to scupper that hope by turning Pimlico into an academy, foreshadowed the swallowing up of QK into the academy system as other options evaporated, and the chewing up and spitting out of herself in the process.
The scourging of QK was in that sense a political act, where headteachers [for Shuter was not alone in this] who had been given loose definitions and responsibilities were firmly reminded they were public civil servants — while at the same time mushrooming academies were given carte blanche and a pat on the back.
“School success is about leadership, I’m a maverick and a risk-taker” sadly for Jo, she was in no small part the midwife for a teaching world the complete opposite of that vision she had of herself. The local area attracted maverick heads — Michael Marland whose brilliance at North Westminster has to be quickly squeezed in — and the aforementioned Philip Lawrence were a rare breed, desperately well-educated ‘first class minds’, who threw themselves into rough, thankless secondary education at the very point such heroics were at their least fashionable — no longer the experimental ground of the 60s/70s, nor the Blairite landscape of the 00s where a head like Shuter could make national headlines. Lawrence died for his values in a profession where many of his supposed peers can no longer take even basic responsibility for their schools, giving said responsibility up hand over fist — all the while the salaries grow.
Two quotes nestled together in The Destruction of Memory by Robert Bevan, feel appropriate here:
Arendt: ‘The reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced.’
Lefebvre: ‘Monumental space offered each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage… it thus constituted a collective mirror more faithful than any personal one.’
Why aren’t the working class entitled to continuity and heritage — to a sense of self tied to the environment? The school has history, the area has history, and we have a history. This sort of wanton rebranding says everything about corporate-culture cowardice to own up to complicated histories and nothing about what a community has produced under a name. Eton could fall on the hardest imaginable times and it would not change its name, because it would be seen to have worth. There’s value in its name and history. We have history — it’s just not valued, and it’s not valued because working-class history is never valued and seldom recorded. With the private sector in all corners of our lives now, such things are simply business opportunities for a corporation to swoop in and milk.
There was nothing inherently irredeemable about QK. The idea therefore that the QK brand was exceptionally tarnished is nonsense, case-in-point being that QK was able to go from the ‘school from hell’ in the 90s, to one that was ranked outstanding by Ofsted in the 00s, that served as an example to the rest of the country’s schools. Equally, hundreds of British men and women have left to join ISIS but only one headteacher has ever been stabbed to death by a student — QK overcame that unique black mark against its name but apparently cannot overcome one that dozens of other schools have next to theirs.
QK — or whatever school on that site taking students from that area — will cycle between good times and bad, because the area cycles between good times and bad. The inability to build a path from the bad times to new good ones is a weakness in management, as well as a lack of vision and understanding of the area served — not the death spiral of a school.
The argument of standards is false, the argument of irredeemability is false. QK’s folding into the Harris Federation was not necessary, but profitable.
Perhaps, however, this is being approached from the wrong angle. QK may once again be leading the way in being a teaching environment. Pupils have learned a valuable lesson from this debacle that will serve them well in this private sector landscape; you have no responsibilities, you need no principles — you’re barely a citizen, just keep passing the buck. ‘Harris Academy St John’s Wood’ should lead the way in the production of spineless low-level corporate administrators — perhaps there’s some of QK left in the place after all, visionaries to the last.
