After many months in limbo, the Fulham Boys School (FBS), a “free” secondary championed by Boris Johnson and soulmate west London Tories, has been found a permanent home. Johnson has declared that the police station presently standing in Fulham Road is “underutilised” to the tune of 65% of the building’s space and that the site can therefore be redeveloped to house the FBS, although there will continue to be a police “front counter” there.
The sealing of the deal enabling the school to move from its present, temporary location in an old school building at the edge of the Gibbs Green housing estate – one of the two lined up for demolition as part of the dreadful Earls Court Project – is a triumph for a Tory cause celebre. With its proud Church of England status, and espousal of the values of team sport, “firm discipline” and “enterprise”, the FBS gives every appearance of trying to revive the ethos of Muscular Christianity that guided the English public school system in the 19th century. No wonder Johnson is such a fan – the Etonisiation of state schooling would be his idea of paradise.
Regular readers may recall that H&F Conservatives championed the FBS, whose chair of governors Alex Wade, one of the school’s founding forces, is party member. Local MP Greg Hands, recently elevated to the powerful post of chief secretary to the Treasury, supported it from the start. His Tory colleagues running the council at the time thought it would be nice if the FBS could set up in the space near Parsons Green occupied by the Sulivan primary school, which they wanted to merge with another primary. Some people wondered if Tory zeal for the FBS approach to education was the true motivation for the closure plan.
Either way, that plan went out of the window in May 2014 when Labour swept back into power and Sulivan – which Mayor Johnson had previously made a member of his London schools Gold Club – was saved. The mayor promised to work to find an alternative permanent location for FBS and now he has obliged. Should we be delighted or appalled?
The decision will come as a joy and a relief to the school’s founders, pupils and parents. Johnson and local Tories will regard it as an efficient and creative use of public land to meet strong local demand whilst maintaining a local police base. Others may find the FBS philosophy unappealing, resent the shrinking of a cop shop to make room for it and maybe wrinkle their noses over some of the deeper Tory connections involved.
After all, Hands, who is the FBS patron, is a long standing close ally of Stephen Greenhalgh, who led Tory H&F from May 2006 until May 2012, when it was David Cameron’s favourite local authority and an intellectual crucible for his party’s approach to housing, spending cuts and welfare reform.
Greenhalgh stepped down in order to become head of Johnson’s office for policing and crime (Mopac). A big part of his Mopac job is selling off parts of the Met estate deemed surplus to requirements in order to help the police service bridge its giant funding gap. This estate includes police stations, several of which have been put up for sale and, in one case close to my home, bought by the government’s Education Funding Agency for conversion into a school, just as the Fulham station will be.
Greenhalgh recently ran (unsuccessfully) to become Conservative mayoral candidate for 2016. At the first Tory candidate hustings, held at the Institute of Directors at the beginning of last month, he joked that he was the contender best placed to secure favourable funding for the capital, thank to the elevation of Hands to George Osborne’s second in command: “He is the patron of my campaign…and he was the best man at my wedding!”
None of this means, of course, that the FBS won’t be popular and successful and prove over time, to be a vindicating test case of Tory philosophy in action. Hands, Johnson and education secretary Nicky Morgan are very confident of this, and have been letting the world know. There has, though, been no sign of Stephen Greenhalgh amid this public rejoicing. Surely he deserves a little credit?
Source:Fulham Boys School: a continuing test of Tory philosophy in London