The Holland Park parent who won the schools lottery

Reopened last week for £80m, Holland Park is London’s most expensive state school — and it cost the taxpayer nothing
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Jackie Annesley29 November 2012

The loos made me laugh out loud. They are doorless (to combat bullying), and you sweep into the unisex “Student Welfare Areas” straight from the main corridors, with their five red stalls and their long trough-like basin with infrared automatic sensor taps. Slate-grey ceramic tiles clad the walls and if you must know, they’ve gone for a stainless steel paper towel dispenser — no noisy, useless blow-dryers here.

For the first time in 40 years I had a flashback to the “bogs” at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Primary school, St Annes, Lancashire, circa early Seventies, which also had stalls. Wooden, if I recall. Unheated. And more memorably, outside.

On Monday night, Holland Park School, founded in 1958, reopened its £80 million building to parents of its 1,350 students, and for anyone whose educational experience lay in the Seventies and Eighties and knows only about today’s primary schools, it was a revelation. Forget the snipey missives from the architectural press, this was Google offices meets the Apple Store, a six-storey glass and metal edifice crammed with today’s best- designed equipment.

“This can’t be Vitsoe,” I murmured to my husband as we wandered through the first floor library, with a shelving system that looked exactly like Dieter Rams’s iconic design. “Oh yes it is,” said a parent over my shoulder. “We’ve got some at home — but it does last a lifetime.” I once saw it covering a whole wall of architect Richard Rogers’s Chelsea home, but he’s got nothing on this place.

Rams, the veteran German industrial designer, once said good design should be “unobtrusive” and “long-lasting”. In equipping its new school, Holland Park has embraced both principles.

The poolside showers turn on instantly when you move close to them (recently soaking a besuited member of the Leadership Team, much to the students’ amusement), a video clip of the double height sports hall elicited a “that’s better than Harrow’s” from my incredulous Old Harrovian brother-in-law, while the fitness suite pulled in the biggest crowd of parents around its treadmills, bikes and weight machines by the American fitness company TechnoGym.

Make a cake in the nearby “food technology” room and you’ll be using a KitchenAid food processor. Cut a piece of wood upstairs in one of four design technology (DT) rooms and it will be a DeWalt you’ll be handling.

Apart from the Apple computers that fill the six ICT suites, many of the students understandably wouldn’t know their Ercol from their elbow, but they’ll mistreat these design classics at their peril. Take the Holland Park Chair, manufactured by the aforementioned British furniture makers Ercol and designed by Pinch Design. Widely claimed to cost more than £300, they actually cost the school £83 and I couldn’t wait to test one out when our son showed me his English classroom. Great looking, lovely dovetail joints, perfectly comfortable, I got up and shoved it back in its place against an equally beautiful solid beech table. George looked aghast. “You can’t do that!” and gave me a demonstration of how to put the chair back. “You have to lift it mum — don’t scrape it along the floor”. If a fraction of this concern rubs off on his treatment of our home furniture, I’ll be eternally grateful.

The big myth about the new Holland Park is that even £83 chairs are a huge waste of public money at a time of austerity. Untrue. It actually hasn’t cost the taxpayer a penny. Kensington and Chelsea council — one of the richest in western Europe — simply sold off a slice of the school’s highly valuable grounds for

£105 million to pay for the new one. Granted, it’s not an option for those in Brent or Southwark or almost anywhere else, but the deal was done in happier, pre-2007 times and if you have the money, why not do something truly extraordinary with it? Why shouldn’t a state school be able to provide the facilities of a private school, or better, if it can afford to?

Ah, but it’s surely style over substance, I hear all you Schadenfreude-sters say.

Actually Holland Park’s head teacher Colin Hall and his team have spent the past 10 years turning a failing school, whose students I used to see in the Nineties smoking weed at 8am, into an “outstanding” school by implementing a zero tolerance approach to anything other than exacting standards.

The school has a massive range of abilities to educate. In Ms Hutchison’s English class on the first floor I spotted a picture of a fish trying to climb a tree that seemed to sum up its philosophy. Underneath it read: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” Albert Einstein.

While strong on developing personal strengths, the teachers also mark in red pen, hand out copious detentions and are ruthless at correcting spelling and grammar. Bring it on. George’s first teacher couldn’t even spell tomato.

When I recently met the new head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, he agreed great teaching was the key to improving the state of education in London. As a case in point, last Friday I got a call from a Mr Danby, George’s DT teacher, who wanted to tell us he’d done some good homework during the extended half term. As a parent who has only ever received a call from school when I’m needed to accompany year 2/3/4 on a school trip to the Science Museum/Kew Gardens/Physic Garden, or to remove some ill child, it was utterly refreshing.

So yes, due to many variants including luck, timing and location, I think I have won London’s schools lottery. I am a smug parent.

Or at least I was until my second child informed me, after the October 31 cut-off for state school applications, that she didn’t want to be overshadowed by her brother and really wanted to go to an all-girls secondary school next year.

Anyone know any affordable independent girls’ schools?

Lol.

THE WAY WE WERE... FORMER STUDENTS ON THEIR HOLLAND PARK DAYS

John-Paul Flintoff
1979-1986, broadcaster
There was a separate house for the sixth form common room that was previously owned by Montague Norman, ex-Governor of the Bank of England. It was wood-panelled and we sat and discussed Shakespeare — it felt rather like being at Oxford.

Peter Dazeley
1959-1963, photographer
It was awesome — there was a pool, two gymnasiums, linguistics and technical drawing studios. But most importantly for me there was a photo studio and a dark room. I still keep in touch with Mr Ron Smith, my photography master, who helped me so much.

Other Holland Parkers
Writer Polly Toynbee, musician Angus Gaye (Aswad), broadcaster Jenny Abramsky, former Labour Cabinet minister Hilary Benn, actor Omid Djalili, singer Yazz, designer Tom Dixon, and TV presenter Miquita Oliver and actor Anjelica Huston (right and far right).

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