Why my old school ties no longer bind

What? A female headmistress at my alma mater?
    • The Observer,
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Last week, I received the following email from my old school: "The governors of Abingdon School have today, 24 November 2009, announced the appointment of the new head of Abingdon from September 2010. Please follow this link for more information." Then there was a weblink on which, I'm afraid to say, I didn't click.

"If they won't put the bloody name of the bloody headmaster in an email, then they can't expect me to take an interest!" I thought. I was having a bad day. "Exactly how interesting do they expect me to find the name of some, doubtless highly thought of, but to me almost certainly anonymous, private sector academic? I get emails promising to double the size of my cock and introduce me to Russian girls and I don't follow those links, so why should I waste valuable clicking seconds just to find out that 'Arthur P Geography is excited by the challenge of Abingdon after a very successful three years as deputy head in charge of pastoral hockey at St Hufflepuff College, Hampshire'?"

"That's told them – in my head," I thought and went off in search of a cat to kick. But it turns out the name would indeed have meant something to me, for it was none other than Miss Felicity Lusk. "Old flame, is she?" you might be thinking, if you don't know me. "You know you're getting old when the head of the school you went to is someone you've had sex with, eh?" Well, I suppose that's true of legal sex.

No, I don't know Felicity Lusk, but her name is only unremarkable if you consider Joan an unremarkable name. For a pope. The new headmaster of my old school, an all-boys' school, without even girls in the sixth form like some public schools have for the older boys to practise on, is a woman! What do you think about that, eh? Pretty interesting! Pretty radical!

It's probably more of a big deal for me, having spent five years there brimming with testosterone and self-doubt and finding the female sex so alluring and terrifying as to make the prospect of living in a world populated by three billion of them utterly exhausting. They say that power is a great aphrodisiac. For teenage boys, so is oxygen. It could get messy.

But it's an appointment that's almost certainly been made for the right reasons. All of the tell-tale signs of cowardly, defensive, anti-meritocratic decisions – and I work in TV and so witness those every day – are in this case absent. There are bound to have been gifted male candidates, and the governors would have had a quieter life if they'd appointed one of them, so I'm forced to the conclusion that Lusk was picked because they thought she was the best person for the job and institutional sexism be damned.

Hooray for that, basically. That makes me proud of the old place. It's not usually a pioneering school – it's middle of the road, middle of the price range, middle of the country, not that academic, not that sporty, its most famous alumnus is Francis Maude, you get the general idea – so its reasons for this departure from the norm, I'm pretty sure, will have been based on talent.

It's beguiling, that feeling of pride in an institution one used to be part of. It gives a fleeting sense of belonging, like a supportive message on Twitter or a maitre d' saying: "Good to see you again, sir." It momentarily makes me think about going to an old boys' reunion and consider the possibility that there's something more to a school than certain people and a certain time.

It's an illusion. I was probably as happy at Abingdon as I would have been anywhere at that hormonal point in my life, but since then the institution has had all of its constituent parts replaced more than once; it's not really my grandfather's axe any more. All that is meaningfully left of my experience there are the friends from that time with whom I'm still in touch.

Nothing shatters this illusion of community more quickly than the fees that my alma mater is now charging. For a dayboy, which is what I was, it's £13,380 a year – for a boarder twice that. That's nearly five times what it cost when I started there just over 20 years ago. And I'm not just being a curmudgeon, mourning the passing of the penny chew, because this hike is way ahead of inflation. Mars Bars, for example, do not now cost £1.50.

I realise this is true not just of Abingdon, but of all private schools and has been for a while – but I still don't understand it. Have their costs escalated? The only other commodities to have gone up at that rate are property and cigarettes and I can't imagine public schools needing to buy much of either. If teachers' salaries have quintupled, I missed it. Is there a sudden global shortage of drawing pins and chalk?

This price rise neutralises any affection I might have for the school because, quite simply, it's not for the likes of me any more. My parents were polytechnic lecturers in 1987 and could just about manage the fees. There is no way that the same is true of their modern equivalents. My old school is now accessible only to a fraction of the income groups that it used to be.

It's pretty dismal, I know, that it takes the exclusion of families like my own to bring home to me the iniquities that have always existed in the private education system and there's no reason why the state educated should give a damn about any of this. It's a quantitative, not a qualitative, change – but still surely a regrettable one.

Provincial minor public schools like Abingdon have stopped making the educational equivalent of a high-end but affordable family estate car and started turning out Bentleys. There must be a market for these more luxurious teaching services, as most private schools seem to be doing OK from their new business plan, but there's no escaping the fact that they've followed the market, not the need.

That's not how charities are supposed to behave.

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