Eleanor Doughty | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Eleanor Doughty

School houses provide camaraderie, challenges – and a healthy dose of ruthless competition

Eleanor Doughty

School houses provide camaraderie, challenges – and a healthy dose of ruthless competition

‘Come on Burghley! That’s it Porter, you can do it!’ It was sports day 2008, and we were winning. Of course we were winning — weeks of tactical diagrams had gone into making sure of it. The runners crossed over the line and a cheer went up from the blue side. ‘YESSSSSSSSSS!’ screamed a gaggle of teenagers, their faces painted blue. An hour later, the house cup was ours, paraded back to school by triumphant sixth formers. They say your school days are the best of your life, but I’d go one further: the days you spent competing for house points — those are the best of your life. I’ve yet to encounter anything more deliciously bonding than those 11 years spent cheering for my house at school, and plotting, like the good house captain I was, precisely how to win.

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: Roedean’s Oliver Blond on etiquette lessons and luxury boarding houses

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: Roedean’s Oliver Blond on etiquette lessons and luxury boarding houses

Eleanor Doughty

Open access

Open access

Eleanor Doughty

Open access

Rugby was immortalised in Tom Brown’s School Days, but its headmaster, Peter Green, is brandishing another book — a Christie’s catalogue with the school’s name on it. During an attic clear-out items were discovered in an archive room and were put up for sale. They had been given to the school in around 1880 by the Old Rugbeian Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, and included Chinese ceramics and British watercolours. The highlight was a rare drawing by Dutch Old Master Lucas van Leyden, which sold for £10 million. If the decision to sell that seems crass, it isn’t, says Green. ‘Why would we keep it? It has no intrinsic value to Rugby School. If we were able to build a massive museum, then perhaps. But to insure it we would have had to charge our parents, who are paying fees for an education, for a museum, which doesn’t seem right.

Open access

Eleanor Doughty

The millennial poster campaign worked - but the army still has serious problems with recruitment

The millennial poster campaign worked - but the army still has serious problems with recruitment

Eleanor Doughty

The millennial poster campaign worked - but the army still has serious problems with recruitment

They say there’s no recruiting sergeant like a war, but in the absence of any fresh conflict, last week the Army launched its new recruitment campaign. A batch of posters dressed up in the style of the Lord Kitchener first world war ads popped up with modern-day phrases such as ‘Snowflakes’, ‘Me me me millennials’, and ‘phone zombies’, in an attempt to lure young people. In a moment of extreme irony, one Scots Guardsman, whose face appeared on one of the posters with the slogan ‘Snowflakes - the Army needs you and your compassion’, has told friends that he would submit his resignation at the earliest possible opportunity, after being mocked about it. Snowflakes, indeed. Reactions elsewhere have been divisive. One Twitter user suggested that the Army ought to get its facts right, having apparently confused Generation Z (those born from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, whom it is presumably targeting), and Millennials (those born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, whom are accused of snowflake-like behaviour).

The millennial poster campaign worked - but the army still has serious problems with recruitment

Eleanor Doughty

Summertime blues

Summertime blues

Eleanor Doughty

Summertime blues

Every year, like clockwork it comes, the traditional concern that the younger generation don’t do summer jobs like they used to. As the school holidays approach a politician is wheeled out to write a nostalgia piece about part-time jobs, and the ‘essential skills’ these offer. Holiday and Saturday jobs, you see, are the foundations of a successful career, with their promise of resilience-building and priority-juggling. Some statistics will be cited about businesses being desperate for applicants with ‘soft skills’, and on cue, media-friendly CEOs are trotted out to support whichever wayward minister has been handed the keys to the Workshy Teenagers wagon. And so it was that in late July, Esther McVey, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, wrote a comment piece for the Telegraph about the ‘cultural shift’ that has taken place — ‘young people’ are eschewing part-time jobs in favour of studying.

Summertime blues

Eleanor Doughty

Why pay for the privilege?

Why pay for the privilege?

Eleanor Doughty

Why pay for the privilege?

In downstairs loos of houses of a certain sort, the old school photograph is a constant. When you’ve seen a few of these slightly yellowing portraits, you’ve seen them all. But this trend might soon reach its end. If you listen carefully in particular enclaves, you’ll hear faint whisperings about a new way of doing things. Maybe, just maybe, public school isn’t quite for everyone any more. Say goodbye to the old school pictures; the toffs are going native. Last year, in a Viscount’s kitchen, I spotted an invitation to a school fair — at the local primary. A few weeks later, an Old Harrovian whose family has a 300-year history with the school remarked that he’d be preparing his children for the 11-plus, rather than common entrance.

Why pay for the privilege?

Eleanor Doughty

Living the dream

Living the dream

Eleanor Doughty

Living the dream

To enter Wellington College, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, is as if to arrive at a stately home that’s open to the public. There are the smart signposts, the security box, the manicured lawns (with the requisite ‘keep off the grass’ signs). When I visit, it is the summer holidays, so there are no children littering the playing fields. Instead, the mower keeps on mowing, and the buildings enjoy their last bit of peace and quiet before term starts. But that is where the stately similarities end. Wellington’s headmaster, Julian Thomas, is not of that ilk, he is proud to say. Thomas, 50, the former head of Caterham School in Surrey, was appointed the 14th Master of Wellington in 2015, after the departure of Sir Anthony Seldon.

Living the dream

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: The best of schools, the worst of schools

Talking heads: The best of schools, the worst of schools

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: The best of schools, the worst of schools

As careers for Oxford Union-debating PPE graduates go, Shaun Fenton’s has not been wholly orthodox. Leaving Keble College in 1992, he took up a job with what is now Deloitte and trained as a chartered accountant. So far, so ordinary. But it was on a trip back to his old school, Haberdashers’ Askes’ in Elstree, to see his former mentor David Lindsay that he had his epiphany: ‘I told him that I felt I was helping companies, but I wasn’t being me.’ He thought of teaching as an option, and decided to move from a job about ‘effective economics’ to one about ‘authentic relationships’. He adds: ‘I loved it, and never looked back.’ A few years into teaching at a comprehensive in west London, Fenton spotted his vocation on BBC Panorama.

Talking heads: The best of schools, the worst of schools

Eleanor Doughty

Diamond schools: the best of both worlds

Diamond schools: the best of both worlds

Eleanor Doughty

Diamond schools: the best of both worlds

Imagine a school that you could send your son and daughter to. A single school that fitted your ideal for both single-sex and co-ed education, operating from nursery to sixth form, covering all bases. One school — not three or four. A school that, for the final two years, allowed young adults of both genders to share lessons and facilities. But imagine no more, for these schools exist, and they’re called diamond schools. (So-called because of the shape of the structure: genders together at the beginning and end, but apart in the middle.) There are just 13 of them in the country. Blending single-sex and co-ed teaching in the same institution makes them stand out as shining beacons in a fairly conservative landscape.

Diamond schools: the best of both worlds