Eleanor Doughty

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.