What is Eton? OK, fine, a school. What else? To some, it is a refuge. Prince William said he felt like ‘just another student’ there. To others, it is a chore. Ian Fleming left a year early, removed over an illicit dalliance with a woman. To a few people, some more fictional than others, Eton means everything. Captain Hook’s last words were ‘Floreat Etona’, ‘May Eton flourish’, the school’s motto. And in many, it provokes envy. Etonians are ‘completely detached, deliberately detached’ from reality, LBC’s James O’Brien said recently. He only went to Ampleforth.
Eton has long been defined by other people: by its alumni and their reputations, and by its critics. Now the school wants to tell its own story. ‘Eton is an educational charity from the 15th century,’ Tom Arbuthnott, Eton’s deputy head, tells me. ‘When Henry VI set us up, it was to support what he called “poor scholars”.’ In 2020, headmaster Simon Henderson called for a ‘new social vision’ for Eton, and named it ‘Eton2020’. It sounds daft, but there’s something to it. Eton is opening sixth-form colleges in Dudley and Oldham, two of the most deprived areas of Britain. Arbuthnott is in charge of building them.
Arbuthnott is an OE himself. He left school, went to Oxford, worked in the European parliament, then at a thinktank, before becoming a teacher aged 30. In 2016 he returned to Eton, after working in difficult state schools in Birmingham, Solihull and Surrey. He now runs Eton’s partnership with Star Academies, a trust of 36 free schools. The sixth forms in Dudley and Oldham are joint projects with Star.
Work on the sixth forms began on a spreadsheet in 2021. ‘We plugged in the numbers for every local authority outside London and the south-east looking at GCSE results, A-level results, population density, transport links, demographics, the educational ecosystem, political elements, all of those kinds of questions,’ Arbuthnott says. ‘We sat down and we tried to work out what the factors are that make a project like this successful. Out of that emerged seven or eight places where a project of this kind – a selective, academic sixth form focused on disadvantaged kids and outstanding outcomes – could make a genuine difference.’
They whittled the shortlist of locations down to three, and Arbuthnott approached them. Dear Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham, would you like an Eton?
At this point, summer 2021, Oldham Council was run by Labour’s Arooj Shah. She’s from Glodwick, in the middle of town. When Arbuthnott contacted her, Shah had just taken over leadership of the council from her colleague Sean Fielding, who had lost his seat in that year’s May local elections to the Failsworth Independent party.
Prior to May 2021, the Failsworth Independents had only one councillor, Brian Hobin. He was the landlord of The Mare and Foal, in the majority-white, particularly working-class ward of Failsworth in south-west Oldham. In the council chamber, Hobin hounded Fielding about Oldham’s grooming gangs. In November 2020, he proposed a motion which criticised the ongoing local inquiry into the gangs, and said that the council acknowledged allegations that some of its members ‘were aware of child grooming gangs’, and had sought ‘to prevent this [alleged fact] from the public’.
In that regard, Hobin was correct: Shabir Ahmed, the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang (who has recently been released from prison) had worked for Oldham Council between 1988 and 2006. He was a member of the local Labour party. Fielding led Labour in voting down Hobin’s motion, and six months later, he was voted out for Hobin’s crew. Three candidates from the Failsworth Independents were elected that year.
I don’t think Arbuthnott knew it, but he had chosen to build an outpost of the world’s most famous school in Britain’s most dysfunctional local authority. Many people in Oldham say the town’s politics is corrupt. Wards are divided along racial lines and lots of council seats are unofficially handed out through the South Asian biradari clan system. Political violence is common. In November 2019, a pig’s head was put through a former councillor’s house window, and in July 2021, Shah’s car was petrol-bombed in what she said was a racially motivated attack. In December last year another councillor’s car was fire-bombed. It happened to a third councillor this January.
Amid all the local ruckus – Shah, the project’s biggest backer, lost her seat of Chadderton South in a set of 2022 council elections, and was then re-elected in St Mary’s in 2023 – the work towards Eton Star Oldham has continued. In August 2023, Whitehall approved the plans for the three Eton Star schools in Oldham, Dudley and Middlesbrough, along with 12 other free schools in England. Eton Star Middlesbrough was eventually canned by then education secretary Bridget Phillipson in December last year. Local MP Andy McDonald applauded the decision. Eton carried the ‘hallmark of stifling elitism’, he had said.
Soon after the government accepted the proposals, Shah offered Arbuthnott the site of the Tommyfield market, in the centre of Oldham. The market has existed since the 18th century, and at its height housed around 500 stalls. Shah wanted to move the market to a redeveloped Spindles centre next-door and bring in Eton Star to Tommyfield. ‘Heads of terms’ were agreed on the contract in March this year.
‘There are still some people and some institutions… who have a degree of suspicion about the project’
‘We’re getting there,’ says Arbuthnott. ‘There are still some people and some institutions… who have a degree of suspicion about the project. I understand that.’ Arbuthnott is putting it lightly. In recent months, the project in Oldham has come under attack, mainly from Liberal Democrat councillors. In May, Helen Bishop, who represents the Lib Dems in Saddleworth South, a large ward in east Oldham, told the Mill newspaper that the project was ‘a PR stunt’ and ‘bullshit’. On the phone to me, Bishop says that Oldham is ‘being duped’.
Bishop thinks that the issue with education in Oldham is with GCSEs, not A-levels. ‘It’s not going to resolve the main problem that we have educationally in Oldham,’ she says, ‘which is that not enough of our young people at a secondary age are getting the requisite grades at GCSE in order to get them into sixth form.’ Bishop also claims there has not been ‘any form of scrutiny or consultation whatsoever’. Shah, who was deposed as council leader a second time in this year’s locals, and is now back to being a regular councillor, says this is obscene: ‘Oh my God. There’s been public consultations, public meetings, endless meetings.’
The harshest critic of the project, however, argues that Eton just isn’t a very good school. Dominic Wall, who is chair of the trustees at the organisation that runs Hathershaw College (a co-ed secondary in the town centre) and Oldham Sixth Form (the largest in the area, with more than 2,000 pupils), has said that there ‘isn’t a fag paper of difference between Eton and Oldham Sixth Form in terms of their performance on the government’s progress measures’.
Indeed, on the Department for Education’s ‘progress score’ (‘how much progress students who studied A-levels at this school or college made between the end of Key Stage 4 and the end of their A-level studies’), Eton is marked 0.09, while Oldham Sixth Form gets 0.08. (It’s worth noting that if a school already gets very good GCSE results, its progress score won’t be overly impressive.)
Arbuthnott says he’d rather not get into that. In fact, he doesn’t have a bad word to say about any of the existing facilities in Oldham. ‘There are some amazing providers already in those places,’ he says, ‘some of whom have anxieties about our project, and we understand that… They’re amazing… What we’re trying to do is add something different and special.’ As part of his charm offensive, Arbuthnott is quitting teaching at Eton and, from September, will spend two weeks of the month in Windsor, one week in Oldham and one in Dudley. This summer, students from Oldham were hosted at an Eton summer school in Windsor. Arbuthnott is, at least personally, almost winning Bishop over. ‘There’s no ill will,’ she tells me.
It comes down to what sort of place Oldham wants to be. Shah believes that every barrier should be removed from the ways of the smartest kids – that there is something special about a working-class child from Oldham being able to go to a school with Eton in its name. ‘Why is it wrong for somebody to be so aspirational?’ she says. Bishop, meanwhile, thinks that Shah’s priorities are confused. Raise the floor, she says, not the ceiling. One education source points to the fact that Lucy Powell, the new Education Secretary, and Paul Waugh, the relevant education minister, both represent Greater Manchester constituencies. They will take an outsized interest in Eton Star Oldham. It will go ahead, for now.
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