Please come to our launch event Wednesday 29th February 6pm

We are holding an open evening for prospective teachers where you will have a chance to meet our executive Headteacher Peter, discuss our plans and have your questions answered.

The event will be held at Bates Wells and Braithwaite, 2-6 Cannon Street, London, EC4M 6YH.

Places are allocated on a first come first served basis and are filling up quickly!

Please RSVP to careers@school21.org

We look forward to meeting you,

Peter, Ed, Oli and Helen

We are in discussions with regard to an excellent site in Stratford, we will keep you posted on our progress!

“Seven years ago I left running the strategic communications unit at 10 Downing Street to become a teaching assistant in a tough inner London comprehensive. What was some people’s idea of hell — being surrounded by a thousand teenagers — I found exhilarating. I enjoyed it so much, I trained as a teacher.Learning lesson by lesson, not just how to survive in the classroom (consistency, clear boundaries, exciting lessons), but how to get children to think — it was without doubt the biggest challenge of my life. I have worked my way up to become a deputy head today at an excellent, diverse comprehensive school in Southall.On the way I have been a one-to-one tutor to a troubled 14-year-old, whose twin passions were snooker and getting into trouble, and who, with a reading age of 7, had four weeks to understand Macbeth. I’ve asked a class of black and Asian working-class kids if they thought they could ever become MPs and had them laugh at the impossibility: “It’s for rich, white people.” I’ve had a diffident A-level history student phone me from his Oxford interview saying that he had been made to feel like a “commoner” by the private school students he was up against. In every case what is clear is how much the odds are still stacked against the poorest students: limited aspirations, lack of self-belief, low levels of literacy, problems at home.I’ve learnt what it takes to raise results in inner-city schools: relentlessly high expectations, tracking the progress of every student, high-quality teaching. I have joined the ground-breaking Future Leaders programme, which is headship training with a difference. It comes with a belief system: that every child, no matter how disadvantaged, can succeed; and it trains up heads to work in the most challenging schools.

Watching great teachers in action, learning from inspiring heads, teaching students of all abilities in a range of schools, I have formed some clear views about what needs to change: schools are too big; children in need of frequent support get lost; an artificial transition at 11 means students often make inadequate progress in Years 5, 6, 7 and 8; too little focus on the character of students: their resilience, motivation, self-discipline, creativity; an assessment system that measures one narrow set of skills — the ability to take written exams — and not the range of a student’s talents and abilities; a pedagogy that takes insufficient account of neuroscience and so teaches in ways we know lead to ineffective learning; a lack of confidence and opportunities that mean too few state school children from inner cities, particularly those on free school meals, go to top universities.

Schools have to change if they are to prepare children for success in the 21st century. And there are people, many people, in the education system who want to do something about it.

Some school leaders in Britain have successfully adapted the best parts of the American charter schools: strong values and strict discipline, relentless focus on the basics, high expectations. But I believe we must go farther. We need to think more carefully about the range of skills and knowledge that students will need in the future if they are to be successful not just academically but as creative thinkers, citizens with integrity and confident leaders.

That is why I have been planning with a team of great teachers and education policy experts to set up a new school in one of the most deprived but exciting parts of the country, Newham, East London.

The free-school policy will allow us to do this. If focused on disadvantage, in a similar manner to Labour’s academy programme, and if promoting new thinking, free schools could be an effective way to add even greater urgency and firepower to the task of raising standards in inner-city schools.

Our school will do several things differently. It will be an all-through school from ages 4 to 18, broken down into four smaller schools. That way the upheaval at 11 will be gone and children will have the benefits of specialist teaching earlier in their school career.

The school will have no more than three classes in each year group so that every child will get a personal plan and a lot of individual attention.

English language will be the main specialism, with a mission that every child leaves with great communication skills: an avid reader, a fluent writer and a confident speaker.

We will introduce inquiry-based learning, rigorous projects that combine knowledge and skills to ensure that students make connections between subjects, work well as a team and produce results of real quality at the end. A new leadership award (like the Duke of Edinburgh’s) with bronze, silver and gold levels will give students the chance to develop important traits such as resilience, creativity, service to the community, ingenuity and integrity.

For teachers this is an opportunity to teach in different ways. It would no longer be just one kind of teaching, with one teacher to 25 or 30 students; instead there would be a range of teaching settings and relationships: one-to-one tutorials with the teacher as mentor, lectures with 50 or more students in a class and small group work practising skills.

Already we have many teachers from Teach First and other programmes keen to be part of our plans. There are some who are hostile to the free-school policy and believe that all teachers should steer well clear of it. I share some of their concerns. There are still several issues to do with governance, accountability and funding that need to be sorted out if the policy is to gain wider support.

But what the parents I meet in Newham and the teachers who want to do something new care most about is helping those students, many on free school meals, who are battling against the odds and who need the best possible education.

There is no cause greater in our country today, no mission more important, than giving all children an education that inspires them to do great things. And I, along with many like-minded teachers, will do whatever it takes to see that they get it.”

Peter Hyman worked for Tony Blair for ten years, including roles as chief speechwriter and strategist.