Struggling school gets help from a class master

The following article, by Gabriel Rozenberg and Glen Owen, appeared in The Times on 19 October 2002.

THE familiar Hollywood story of an inspirational teacher being parachuted in to transform the fortunes of deprived pupils is being lived out on an estate in East London.

At the Hackney Free and Parochial Church of England School, one of the lowest-achieving schools in the country, a pinstriped mathematics teacher from an independent school has effected greatly improved results.

Since Gerald Cort arrived in January from the City of London School, the proportion of 14-year-old pupils achieving the expected level in national mathematics tests has jumped from 42 to 53 per cent, the highest increase in the borough, and one of the sharpest rises in the country.

The partnership between schools from the two ends of the academic spectrum comes as the Government places increased pressure on independent schools to share more of their facilities with the state sector. Earlier this month David Miliband, the Schools Minister, told independent school heads that they were in a position to make a serious contribution to public education. His comments followed a Cabinet Office report last month which argued that such schools should do more to justify their charitable status, worth more than £80 million a year in tax benefits.

The differences between the two schools are stark. Hackney Free, which sits on an unlovely site surrounded by tower blocks and is wrapped in barbed wire, was third from bottom of the borough’s league table last year, with only 21 per cent of pupils securing five or more GCSE passes at A* to C.

At the £8,900-a-year City of London School, the alma mater of Herbert Asquith and the writer Julian Barnes, 96 per cent of boys hit the target, with two thirds of entries achieving A* or A grades.

Signs plastered across the walls of Hackney Free bear slogans such as ‘disruptive behaviour steals learning’ and ‘all teachers have a right to teach’.

Mr Cort, donnish and softly spoken, has engaged the interest of pupils by devising ‘Powermaths’, a computer program that drums the core principles of the subject into pupils. He is also training other teachers at the school how to use the equipment.

‘I love doing this. I have learnt so much from observing teachers here that I feel I am a far better teacher than when I started at this school,’ said Mr Cort, who spends two days a week at the school and the rest of the time engaged on other projects in Hackney. The Corporation of London, which has funded the scheme, expects him to stay until the end of the academic year at least.

Aged 60, with four grown-up children, Mr Cort has spent his life teaching, joining the City of London School in 1981 after a stint in Kenya.

He believes his own teaching methods are better suited to less gifted pupils. ‘These kids really appreciate what I have done and it’s given me so much energy to continue. The ‘Hello, Sir’ from the other side of Hackney High Street – it fills me with a sense of warmth. This is what teaching is all about.’

Mr Cort’s new students appear largely unfazed by his arrival. ‘When there’s a teacher from a new school, because he doesn’t know what none of us are like, we all get the same treatment,’ said Gemma Lock, 15. ‘I just see it as him coming here to give us extra help. He could be from any school.’

Darren Rees, 13, had assumed he was from a private school because he seemed to have ‘a better standard of learning – he teaches us better, he explains things better’.

Joan Barnes, the Principal of Hackney Free, described Mr Cort as a breath of fresh air for both staff and pupils.

David Levin, Headmaster of City of London School, said he hoped to extend the scheme significantly. ‘If more independent schools were to adopt this method of approach we could make a real difference to standards in this country.’