3 Head Honcho

The Guardian carried an extended interview with Peter Lampl, founder and leader of the Sutton Trust, http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2043290,00.html . The Brightside Trust could be seen as aspiring to become a similar organisation. However, I think we are already evolving in a slightly different way; and, to continue the Darwinian theme, we will not be competing for the same feeding grounds.

Peter Lampl is one of those people who regrets the closure, in most areas of the UK, of the state grammar school system. He links this change to the reduction of social mobility seen in the UK in recent years because, although the grammar schools were mostly populated with middle class pupils, they did provide a stretching academic education for those brighter working class students who passed the 11+ exam. These students then went on to become socially mobile. He worries that the apparently more egalitarian comprehensive school system, which replaced the old system, merely sentences brighter socially disadvantaged pupils to languish in low quality schools where their talents are not drawn out.

As Sir Peter says in the interview "I totally agree that the bottom 40% are a bigger problem. But I can't do everything, I've got to specialise.’ Although Bright Journals, with its medical school aspirations for very bright socially disadvantaged students, might seem similar to a Sutton Trust type of initiative, I think that in our more recent ventures we are beginning to reorient towards that bottom 40%.

This process of target selection involves defining priorities, and this is in part linked to hard questions about a vision of a good society. I think Sir Peter is clear on this, he is a genuine meritocrat: he sees a good society as being one where people’s social mobility is decided by an individual’s talent and work, not by inherited or structural privilege. However, the Sutton Trust adopts a strategic orientation to facilitate this admirable aspiration, it focuses on the most talented; I don’t think The Brightside Trust should follow this lead. I think we can make a significant contribution by targeting those disadvantaged students who are perhaps not marked out for greatness, but given half a chance, could make a perfectly good contribution to a future society. Is this how you see it?