Lord Harris: 'I don’t care where our pupils come from... it’s where they’re going that counts'
Three years ago, the Harris Academy in Battersea was a failing school, bottom of its local league table, mired in defeat and neglect. That seems hard to imagine today as I watch a stream of lively students in neat uniforms arrive to a cheery “Good morning” from staff.
The school still has its challenges – students speak 53 first languages between them – but in terms of pupil progress, it now ranks among the best in the country.
The change has been wrought thanks to an unlikely benefactor. Tory party donor Philip (now Lord) Harris and one of Britain’s most successful businessmen, left school at 15 with one O-level. Though many would think he had tough start in life – he was forced to leave school because his father died suddenly – he has always considered himself lucky: “I was fortunate to inherit a small business started by my father in a stall in Peckham market. He got me off to a great start.”
We took on so many children who could not read and write at 11, it was absolutely disgusting
Lord Harris
There were three Harris Carpets shops when he took over. Within 20 years, he had built a chain of nearly 100 shops. That business was sold and he went on to create Carpetright. Now 75, with a fortune of more than £100m, his passion is education.
In 1989, Margaret Thatcher asked him to sponsor one of her government’s City Technology Colleges, a new breed of school that was to be state-funded but run independent of the local authority. He was reluctant at first – “I knew nothing about schools” – but she was adamant that failing schools could be improved by being managed on business lines.
To his surprise, Harris found education utterly compelling. The Harris Federation, his not-for-profit charity, now runs 41 schools, educating more than 32,000 children. “We were taking so many children who could not read and write at 11, it was absolutely disgusting,” Harris says. His charity is taking on around ten new schools every year and some 67 per cent of its secondary schools are rated outstanding, compared to 20 per cent nationally.
Though Harris grew up in an area which would be now seen as deprived, he has been shocked by the conditions in some of today’s sink schools.
“You should have seen the rubbish out here,” he says, leading the way into Battersea’s playground. “Some of these failing schools, they’re unbelievable. I took my grandson to one in Greenwich and the first thing he said was: ‘It looks like a prison.'”
Three years ago, when the government asked Harris to take the reins at Battersea, there were just 69 takers for 180 places. Local parents did everything possible to avoid sending their children to the school (known then as Battersea Park). In Battersea, the gulf between haves and have-nots could not be more stark. Earlier this month, Prince George joined Thomas’s, just a short walk from the academy’s gate. At the £20,000-a-year prep school, pupils in red-trimmed sweaters and Bermuda shorts follow a curriculum that includes philosophy, ballet, fencing and Mandarin, the school owns a ski chalet and puy lentils are served for lunch.
Battersea can’t compete on luxuries, admits Harris “but we can give our children the best education possible. We don’t care where our pupils come from, it’s where they’re going that counts.” In its first year, the federation took the pass rate (five GSCEs at grade C and above) from 45 per cent to 68 per cent.
I treated my first school as I would a new and troublesome acquisition - with a mixture of disciplines and incentives
Harris recalls in Magic Carpet Ride how he was initially denounced by furious parents and teaching unions as "a rich capitalist bastard and asset-stripper” whose real aim was to close the school and open a carpet store.
His first allotted school in Crystal Palace, The Sylvan High School, as it was then, was a depressing place, the buildings shabby and the pass rate was at just 9 per cent. “I decided to treat it as I would a new and troublesome acquisition and apply the same mixture of disciplines and incentives,” he writes.
That was the beginning of what managers at his federation now call “Harris in a Box”, the basic principles for turning around a failing school: improve the buildings, hire the best head available (regardless of cost), bring in a new uniform (Harris uniforms are given to poor families for free), get rid of jaded teachers, instil a sense of pride and purpose and work like fury with pupils getting ready to sit their GCSEs. Thirty years on, the pass rate at Crystal Palace – Harris’s pride and joy – is now a steady 77 per cent.
The academy programme has not been an unalloyed success, other trusts have failed to raise standards, but Harris’s personal commitment comes across loud and clear.
He believes it was that lack of personal involvement that let the rot set into British education in the first place. “Having local authorities in charge was the problem,” he says. “Some are good but a lot did weren’t interested in those at the bottom.”
He has been a Conservative party donor for many years, but the figures he admires come from both sides of politics: “We’d never have had academies without Kenneth Baker, but David Blunkett kept them going Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis were good, then Michael Gove, he did a fantastic job.”
Ideally, Harris would like to see education taken out of politics altogether. “Over the years, we’ve had 22 secretaries of state to deal with, all with their own ideas. Education and health should both come out of party politics and be run by specialists, not local authorities.”
He recently spoke of his disappointment with Theresa May, saying she was “hopeless” during the election campaign. He admires Boris’s Johnson’s intellect, but thinks he is to lazy and unpredictable to make a good prime minister.
So he will presumably be pleased to see that Boris has stepped back from a veiled threat to resign (prompting speculation that he might challenge May) after setting out his vision for Brexit last week: “I want her to be successful because I want the country to be successful. I don’t think the Conservatives are ready for a change of leadership.”
All is not quite forgiven and forgotten, though. He was also profoundly irritated by May’s assertion, as soon as she became prime minister, that she would bring back grammar schools.
“There was no talking to anybody, it was just announced,” he says. “If she and her team had spent any time talking to people they’d have learned that grammar schools don’t work. I’m not totally against them, but I wouldn’t want all our schools to become grammars because you just cream off the top, then what happens to all the other schools?”
In the introduction to Magic Carpet Ride, former prime minister John Major, writes that “in 50 years’ time, there will be many successful men and women who will owe their success to the education Phil Harris has made possible for them.” That’s what spurs him on, though he still faces opposition at every new takeover.
“It’s murder,” he says. “There’s only one meeting I can think of where we haven’t been booed. But in a way, that motivating. It makes me want to do it even more.”
Magic Carpet Ride by Philip Harris with Ivan Fallon is published on September 28 (Biteback, £25). To order your copy for £19.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
