“How can you not have insurance?”
“Because I spent my money on the Clapco D29, the most impenetrable lock on the market today. It has only one design flaw, the door must be closed!”
Anthony Seldon: Teaching Wellington College New Tricks
He’s the super-head who put positive thinking on the curriculum of a traditional public school and helped personal happiness. But is the ‘Master of Wellbeing College’ really as confident and carefree as he would have us believe?
The first time I went to see the “Master of Wellbeing College” I was humming down the highway when I happened to flick on the car radio and hear this: “There’s been a steady erosion of confidence and trust in the media… in science… in sport… And I think, really worryingly, there’s the loss of trust in each other, which is a potent cause of unhappiness in society.”
Hey, that’s Anthony Seldon, I thought, and he’s in a BBC studio in London on Start the Week. Which was kind of spooky since I was supposed to be meeting him that morning in Berkshire.
Seldon is the most famous head teacher in the country — and a pioneer. In a world that’s in thrall to property prices and banking, he wants an end to “exam factories” geared to material success, and the creation of an educational philosophy with happiness at its core.
The radio voice continued: “We are educating consumers, not citizens. If you want to be a happy person then you do good, you don’t try and feel good by bunging yourself up with lots of consumer goods… We have to get back to human scale… slow things down… spend five minutes every day being still.”
Slow down? Not Seldon. By the time I caught up with him at Wellington College (to give it its proper name), he’d zipped down from London, held a meeting with a former head of the Downing Street policy unit, and discussed architectural plans for an offshoot of the college being built in China. In the first 10 minutes of our conversation, he covered The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Buddhism, Confucius, Gordon Brown’s leadership qualities, and the possibility of staging Othello in Chinese.
The second time I meet Seldon is just after half term. “Relaxing break?” I ask.
“Um, the week before half term, 15 of us went to Switzerland to look at schools… then I went off to see the boys play rugby in Dublin… then went from there to Sarawak in Borneo, where we are looking at opening a school. That was seeing the chief minister. Then on to Singapore — then up to Kuala Lumpur, where we are also looking at starting a school. Then Bangkok, which was about seeing schools and fundraising, and then on to Vietnam. That was a five-day trip.”
Five minutes’ rest? I don’t think so. Never mind school work, he’s also writing a biography of Gordon Brown and a think-tank booklet called 21st Century Education and an End to Factory Schools. When he gets the chance he holds cosy chats with Michael Gove, who could be the next Tory secretary of state for education, meets business leaders and — just as a sideline, you understand — is preparing a paper on why the church needs a new reformation. “Yes, it is ambitious,” Seldon admits, “but it’s right.”
If Seldon the author, historian and headmaster is so driven, why should we listen when he proselytises about a slower, happier life? Is this polymath performer truly leading the way to a better education? In short, can we trust him?
Seldon, 56, made his name as a head at Brighton College, which he propelled from backwater into beacon. Under his leadership, A-level results shot up from 55% of students achieving A and B grades at A-level to 81%; the college also became highly respected for its arts and creativity.
At Wellington, which epitomised a public-school image of rugby, cold showers and mangled Latin subjunctives, he faced a tougher task after being appointed 13th Master in 2005.When he first addressed the boys (girls were only allowed in the sixth form then), they laughed. He is a man of remarkably modest, hobbity stature with the wayward hair of a distracted professor. The rugger-muggers of old Wellington thought they’d have no trouble sorting him out and carrying on as before.
“We laughed at his funny voice,” recalls Fred Ide, now a sixth-former keen on sport. “We thought, ‘This is a little man we can mess around’.”
Founded in memory of the Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo, the college has always had strong links to the military, and still subsidises a few places for the children of servicemen killed in action. In the scholars’ common room is a roll of honour for those old boys who achieved the exalted rank of field marshal, including Claude Auchinleck whose portrait stares sternly at all who enter. Self-reliance and toughness rather than academic excellence were college hallmarks.
Ed Caesar, a former pupil and Sunday Times journalist, recalls: “They used to do this thing that when the new boys came in, they would be stuck in a trunk. They would be told they were going to be pushed out of a window. But actually they were just pushed off a table.
“Seriously, that stuff went on. There was one guy who was hung out of a second-floor window by his ankles. He had irritated a sixth-former. There was a hard core in every year who were boorish and ran the show. I was really unhappy in my first year.”
Nor did the girls have it much easier. “It was very macho and sports-oriented,” says the author and traveller Alexandra Tolstoy, who joined the sixth form in the early 1990s. “The ethos of the school had become overtaken by a reverence for rugby. There were about 50 girls and hundreds of boys. It was very difficult being a girl.”
Apparently the boys used to give them marks out of 10 as they walked into the common room.
Despite such tribulations, however, former pupils still remember the old Wellington with fondness as well as a shudder. Caesar says: “It did have its advantages. There was great spirit, and I was 6ft 5in by the time I was in the sixth form and good at things. If you were a small, weaselly boy in the third form it could be pretty horrific. But by the end I loved it.”
The writer Sebastian Faulks, another Old Wellingtonian, takes a similar view. He recalls a school of “bread and marge, fagging, brass-rubbing punishments, runs up wet hills, corps drills, Blanco — a school whose ideal boy seemed to be one who was not much good at anything but didn’t make a fuss”. Yet like others he retains a loyalty to the place: “Stories of the harshness of the old regime are probably exaggerated.”
It is almost impossible to imagine Seldon being macho or even discourteous, let alone hanging anyone out of the window by the ankles. So, faced with the mockery of the boys, what did he do? He kept talking and laid down some simple rules. Any drugs, you’re out. Any bullying, you’re out. Stealing, you’re out. They listened.
In light of that it might be tempting to see Seldon as the diminutive Napoleon who finally conquered Wellington — which would be wrong. There’s much more to his transformation than imperious rules or pupil selection or bringing in better teachers. Instead, beyond his basic strictures, he offered the staff and children a new philosophy — and then gave them his trust.
In many ways the new Wellington is the culmination of a struggle within Seldon himself, a culmination that began in earnest when he addressed parents about his vision for the school. “One of the parents said to me, ‘What’s the most important thing to you?’ ” recalls Seldon. “I said ‘That the children are happy’.”
Another parent in the audience asked whether he was aware of the growing literature on happiness and positive psychology. He wasn’t, but he immediately set about discovering it. He found the works of Martin Seligman, an American guru of positive psychology; Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence; and Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), who had just published Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Such works “provided a framework for what I’d been feeling and thinking for a long time”, says Seldon.
An intellectual magpie, he also drew on the investigations of Howard Gardner, a US academic, into different types of intelligence. Gardner opposes the idea of a single intelligence, proposing instead that people have several, including linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial and interpersonal intelligences.
People vary in all these capacities, and their ability in any of them is not set in stone. The brain has a certain plasticity, says Seldon. Given the right encouragement and environment, children will develop the intelligences that most suit them, rather than the stereotype often forced upon them. Such freedom of self-expression is, he says, a better route to long-term happiness than mere material gain: “It’s better to be a happy crofter than an unhappy merchant banker.” So convinced of the creed is Seldon that in his study he prominently displays several key texts on happiness for all to admire.
However, he’s also clear that it’s not an either/or choice of academic rigour versus contentment. It’s finding a way to balance both. So first Seldon set about driving up academic standards at Wellington — they have leapt from 69% with A and B grades four years ago to 92% now — and making it properly coeducational.
A third of the school is now female; mixing girls and boys is, he says, “the best way to educate the young, academically and holistically”. Another innovation has been to make lessons longer — which apparently forces teachers to prepare properly because, while you can wing it over 35 minutes, you can’t over an hour.
Then he embarked on a series of measures to “teach happiness”. Or rather, he explains, what you do is provide students with tools with which to nurture happiness themselves. Some of it is practical, from teaching how to prioritise, or advising on diet and exercise; some of it may be more abstract: teaching techniques for positive thinking. Seldon also brought in Harkness tables for some classrooms — oval tables around which teachers and students sit together. The aim is to foster discussion and engagement, rather than simply have the teacher at the front spoon-feeding bored students.
The programme is still rolling out. Recently Seldon appointed Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, as Wellington’s philosopher-in-residence, and Tony Buzan, author and inventor of “mind mapping”, as thinker-in-residence. Both will be visiting the college and giving talks.
Playing to the idea that children should be given opportunities to develop their many intelligences, the college already offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) alongside A-levels. It’s now keen to introduce the IB Middle Years Programme, a broader and more flexible system than GCSEs, which encourages students to understand the connections between traditional subjects and the real world, and to become critical and reflective thinkers.
Through it all runs the theme of trust. If you have high expectations and treat children well, they will respond, says Seldon. Trite? Simplistic? It seems to work. Dr Justin Garrick, his director of studies, says: “If there has been one key lever of change it is focusing on effort grades.” Alongside exam results, the school has promoted a system of awards for effort, again accentuating the positive rather than the negative. “We give them gold, silver, bronze, and so on,” says Garrick. “And they want to get gold. They work much harder. It was one of those miraculous small things that just focused minds.”
Isn’t it all a bit happy-clappy-wishy-washy for the 21st century jungle where you may well have to fight — if not for survival, at least for the ability to pay the mortgage? It’s the sort of question that fires up a rare anger in Seldon.
“Not everyone is going to be a rugby star like Jonny Wilkinson. It has to be grounded in what you can achieve. But what you can achieve is often far more than teachers think,” he says. “Teachers often think, ‘This is a C-grade kid.’ Bullshit. These pernicious notions that IQ is the only way to validate a kid: it’s wrong. A kid is a soul because of their consciousness. It’s wrong because one’s ability can grow. You give children the right opportunities and they will flower in some of their aptitudes. If it is not done at school where on earth is it going to be done? A lot about being happy is to help a child discover who they are and take their own decisions. A lot of unhappiness comes when people feel they are doing something because their parents want them to or because their teachers do.”
He mentions Rudyard Kipling, who sent his son, Jack, to Wellington. “Rudyard forced his son into the British Army. He was killed on the first or second day in battle. Rudyard spent the rest of his life grieving, sometimes trying to contact his son with a ouija board.” As he recounts this, curled up on the sofa in his study, fingers in his hair, grappling with thoughts, it’s not just Seldon the head and historian speaking. This is also the past shaping the man, it’s Seldon the boy who, like many students at Wellington, like many middle-class children everywhere, grew up in the shadow of a successful, influential parent.
Seldon’s father, Arthur, was the son of Russian-Jewish refugees who settled in London in the early part of the last century. When Arthur was a young child both his parents died in the Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918. He was adopted by a cobbler, who died, and he was adopted again, went to an elementary school and later won a state scholarship to the LSE. From poverty he rose to acquire a first-class degree. He co-founded the Institute for Economic Affairs and became a prophet for the policies later known as Thatcherism. Did his father’s achievements make Seldon feel that he had to succeed in material terms? There’s a lengthy silence. “Well, I think [they] did. He was brought up in genuine poverty. He had two different stepfathers, they were cobblers. He very much thought that… I certainly felt a burden to succeed in my own life.” Thanks to his father’s brilliance and graft, Seldon went to Tonbridge, an independent school in Kent, and despite bungling his A-levels first time round, he went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. He got what he describes as a “poor” degree. In fact, it was a second-class degree and he went on to get a doctorate at the LSE. “I was bitterly disappointed and so were my parents,” he says.
Beyond such pressures, however, he gave free rein to his passion for theatre. “The first play I directed was Playboy of the Western World [set in County Mayo] and we took everyone to Ireland and went for a total-immersion experience. It was so incredibly moving and powerful doing that.” Other plays followed and he found he was “good at bringing people together and enthusing everyone and making things happen”. He had discovered a métier.
What did his father think? Was their relationship warm? There’s an even longer silence as Seldon sits, head in hands — which is odd, because he must have considered such a question before.
“Well, because he had no father, I think he had no real model for how to be a father. He tried very hard to be loving and he was, but he was primarily an intellectual. His friends were almost exclusively free-market economists. His life was dominated by market economics. That was the test against which everything was measured. He came to the plays I directed. They were probably the only plays he ever went to. I don’t think he quite understood what on earth I was on about.”
The experience seems to underlie all his efforts now. Although Seldon loved, and still loves, the theatre, nobody had helped to open up that seam of his life. No encouragement, no eight-aptitude allowances for him. He says that he “didn’t feel confident enough” in his ability to go into theatre or television as a career. You can tell that that yearning still lives within him.
Instead he applied for an academic post at Oxford and was turned down. Then, perhaps further trying to emulate his father, he co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History. Finally, teaching beckoned.
“I think my father was disappointed at the idea that I was just becoming a teacher, rather than a writer or an academic or whatever,” he says.
Parents have an innate desire to want their children to do well, he believes, and children instinctively seek approval. How to reconcile that with our individual strengths and desires? Seldon quotes the advice of Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet: “Your children are not your children.” In other words: guide, but let go. He recoils from straitjacketing children with exams, presumably a philosophy that he has applied to his two daughters and a son from his marriage to Joanna, also a teacher. Britain is probably the most examined country in the developed world, he points out, and our children are some of the most unhappy. In February 2007 a Unicef report on “child wellbeing in rich countries” ranked Britain the worst out of 21 countries. It made a few headlines and was then largely ignored because people didn’t believe it, or couldn’t bear to believe it. The UK was found to have high levels of children with no parent in employment; high numbers of stepfamilies and single-parent families; and high levels of households with fewer than 10 books.
Children in the UK were consistently found to have very high levels of risky behaviour in drinking, smoking, sex and drugs. The report also found low levels of children who eat the main meal of the day with their parents or who spend time “just talking to them”. And, using children’s own judgment of their health, school life and “life satisfaction”, the UK came bottom of the league for “wellbeing”.
So it didn’t take long for Seldon to ask Ian Morris to teach wellbeing at Wellington. “Traditionally, PHSE [personal, health and social education] has been about telling kids all the bad things to avoid — promiscuity, drugs, etc — instead of trying to get them to think about how they can make their lives better,” says Morris. “So we teach them interventions, and see if they work for them.” Some interventions may seem basic — “auditing your diet or exercise. Others could be practising a random act of kindness to a stranger or learning how to put things into perspective”. Children are at liberty not to practise interventions if they don’t want to, says Morris. “But a lot will come back in and say it really worked for them.”
A raft of state schools are also starting to teach wellbeing and happiness. “We’ve been running classes in wellbeing resilience for about 4,000 pupils,” says Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation, a centre for social change. “But they are in state schools so don’t get any attention.
“We’ve been doing that in Tyneside, Manchester and Hertfordshire. It’s probably the biggest thing in this area. It’s having a formal evaluation by the LSE to see the impact on exam results, behaviour, depression. We’ve trained a large number of teachers in a set of methods for helping children handle life and be emotionally robust. The first-year evaluation was very good.”
Critics of Seldon’s happiness project have objected that it’s all very well at Wellington, with its manicured grounds and well-tended pupils and yearly fees of around £21,000 (minimum), but it would be another matter in a tough inner-city comprehensive. Mulgan’s projects seem to counter such defeatism. Seldon argues that his methods are applicable anywhere.
“With really good heads who value their kids, value their staff — you’re off. You can do it with great leadership, using the techniques of positive psychology, making people believe in themselves, making people feel affirmed.”
In many ways, he admits, its merely stating the “blindingly obvious” — but the obvious has become lost in the race for league-table results. If so, he may find himself, like his father in another era, driving forward social change. After years of central government diktat and obsession with testing, there’s a strong desire for more freedom.
One example is the academy Wellington is setting up in Wiltshire as part of its own transformation. The college is devoting considerable staff time and resources to the academy, though admittedly it must in part be to prove its charitable credentials, at a time when public schools are under increasing pressure to be seen to be doing wider good, and to up the number of scholarships and bursaries for deserving children whose parents can’t afford the high fees. The academy will have the same ethos as the independent school but be state-funded and free to all. Lucy Pearson, deputy head at the college, spends one day a week working there, and the two institutions aim to co-operate closely. She says: “We wanted to make the academy a proper commitment. I go over there and teach, and I’m putting together a long-term strategy of how the college and academy will work together. There’s enormous interest on both sides.”
Other schools are pursuing similar links — Eton is to share some of its facilities with Langley Academy, a state school near Slough. As Seldon says: “It’s very patronising and de-skilling to have the government breathing down your neck, telling you what to teach, how to run your school and what’s to be examined. We all do much better if we are allowed to stand on our own two feet. You have to start with a presumption of trust.” Ah, that trust thing again.
What do the students think of the wellbeing lessons? Something innate or taught gave Fred the gangly sixth-former the confidence to speak his mind. “I have to be honest, I’m a little sceptical about them,” he says as we stroll across the playing fields. “Some people saw it as a free lesson where you didn’t have to do anything.”
Some people are born lucky, with confidence in their genes and happiness as their default setting. Fred seemed to be one of those, and doubtless such people have little need of lessons in positive psychology. Others are different. Alice Chau had come to Wellington after getting all A-stars in her GCSEs at a state school and winning a scholarship.
“I found my first weeks at the college intense and I think the head’s programme will help students cope,” she says. Joe Bamsey thinks the wellbeing classes are “very good”, and Tom Garvey uses the meditation techniques to help him to de-stress before exams. Alex Sanina, whose parents live in Russia, says that the college “pushes every student to achieve their potential” and the wellbeing courses help “to prioritise, to work smarter, not just harder”.
One telling indication of its effect is in the “honour code” for behaviour that the students draw up themselves. Once packed with prohibitions — thou shalt not do this or that — it is now full of positives. You will give 100%, be kind, be honest. You will be positive.
Among parents views differ more on generational lines. “He’s not everyone’s cup of tea,” says one who attended the school and has children there now. “Lots of conservative types have voted with their feet.” Another says some parents felt the college had lost the “robustness” for which it was famed. Rival heads, perhaps jealous of his media profile, decline to comment, but mutter of “strong views”. And a senior figure at the University of Winchester, after hearing Seldon give a lecture, told him: “What amazes me is that Wellington ever appointed you.”
Nor has the new positive school been without incident. This year there were allegations of a sexual assault at a dance — though the incident has led to no police action. But in general parents who have had children at the college and stuck with it during the changes appear overwhelmingly positive. “I’ve had two boys at the school, one pre-Seldon, one after Seldon,” says one parent. “The older one was very bright but came out with three Bs at A-level. He later got a first in economics at university, which says something about the school. In contrast, the younger one, who is mildly dyslexic, came out with two As and a B. I think the change has been dramatically good.”
Another parent says of Seldon: “Everyone thinks he’s quite a self-promoter. And he’s odd for a head: small, sometimes looks awkward. But he’s efficient and engaging. He’s like a CEO. I’m pretty sold on it — you have to be for that money.”
As the pieces fall into place, Seldon claims that “in 2010 Wellington will become Britain’s first ‘positive school’, with the wellbeing approach embedded in all aspects of school life”. He adds: “It’s the philosophy much more than the happiness lessons that really counts.”
After such progress and accolades, you’d have thought he had every reason to be content. On the face of it, he is rushing here and there, indefatigably charming the media for his own ends, embracing the future. He has transformed the school, the academy is up and running, and there will be at least one Wellington College in China. Sarawak, Vietnam and elsewhere — who knows? “It’s fantastic being in a school where you can look back and feel that you and the team have made a difference. But we are also making a difference, I think, not just to children’s lives here, but to education as a whole.”
Yet under the ambition and grandiloquence lies a mournfulness about him. “Are you happy with what you have done in your life?” I ask. There’s another silence of Seldonian length. Then he stumbles for words.
“Um, last night I taught some Oxbridge kids for a couple of hours — I just loved that. I’ve been very lucky… I’ve no idea how I’ve managed… ” he meanders, then gathers his thoughts. “I’m very self-critical, which is not a good happiness thing. Happiness is about being grateful for what you have got.
“I’m trying to say to everybody else ‘accept yourself, accept other people’. Yet I do find it very hard to accept anything that I’ve ever done is any good. I feel a kind of despair when I look back and think, well, I should have done much better.”
Is that the actor-manqué in him, another fine performance for the media? Or is it heartfelt, his complex intelligence still feeling the weight of parental expectation? We should give him the benefit of trust — even if it may be unhappiness that has driven him to travel so far and to achieve so much.
WELLINGTON COLLEGE
• 935 pupils
• 628 boys, 307 girls
• 5% day pupils
Foundation
• The college, which is located in the Berkshire village of Crowthorne, was founded by Queen Victoria and the prime minister the Earl of Derby in 1859 as a national monument to Britain’s greatest military figure, the Duke of Wellington (above), who also served the country twice as prime minister.
Famous Old Wellingtonians
• Gavin Ewart, Jack Kipling, Rory Bremner, Sebastian Faulks, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Lord Harries, Sir Michael Rake, James Hunt, Christopher Lee, Peter Snow and Will Young. Young, 30, who won the first Pop Idol contest and now has a successful international singing and acting career under his belt, says of his time at Wellington: “I had a great time there… We got to do a lot of [sports] activities. We were taught the importance of manners, and that is something that’s never left me (hopefully)… Traditional values and basic decency were promoted — and that’s been invaluable to me as an adult.”
Term fees
• £9,235 for boarders; £7,845 for day pupils in boarding houses; £6,920 for day pupils
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