Queen Victoria said Gladstone addressed her as though she were a public meeting. Heaven knows what she would have made of Sir William Atkinson, head of Phoenix high school, west London, who addresses you in the manner of a revivalist preacher. It is not what he says - he never mentions the Lord and his sentiments are mostly unobjectionable, even banal - but the shuddering emphasis he puts on almost every third word and the mesmerically lilting delivery. He booms at me from behind a desk, making expansive hand gestures, while I sit in front of him at a slightly lower level.
No wonder Atkinson is widely rated as the country's most successful headteacher. If he told you to run the width of greater London and get back before afternoon break, you'd probably do it. "A formidable force, which will brook no denial," is how Tim Brighouse, the former London schools commissioner, describes him.
Phoenix, which serves the grimly deprived White City estate in west London, was rated by Ofsted last year as "a remarkable school", which "continues to transform the life chances of both students and their families". About two-thirds of the pupils have learning difficulties or disabilities, a tenth are refugees or asylum seekers, and about half speak English as an additional language. The area is the seventh poorest in England.
Yet the pupils' exam results are around the national average and, Ofsted says, "because of their exceptionally low starting points, this is outstanding progress". Its contextual value added (CVA) score, which takes account of prior attainment and home background, is 1065.4, very nearly the highest in England.
If there's a magic formula, Atkinson isn't letting on. "What can work in one failing school may not work in another. It's like medicine: doctors don't prescribe the same treatment for a broken leg as they prescribe for influenza. One-size-fits-all just doesn't work. Some schools can be fixed very quickly, others take more time."
He's quite cross about the way the government has gone about the "national challenge", naming the schools that need extra help because their results are too low. "There's absolutely no need for a public declaration. There's Ofsted reports and exam results, so there's enough data in the public domain, it's not as if anything is being swept under the carpet. It's very, very damaging to do it that way, undermining the confidence of the local community."
Atkinson has been head of Phoenix since 1995, and it's always quoted as an example of how even the most hopeless school in the most unpromising circumstances can be "turned round". The stories about Hammersmith comprehensive (as Phoenix was called before Atkinson took over) are legion: pupils throwing furniture out of the windows and setting fire to the buildings, graffiti on every surface, five heads and acting heads in two years, teachers threatened with rape, the police having their handcuffs stolen when they paid a visit. Atkinson doesn't lose any opportunity to tell you how bad it was. He gets out a laminated folder that contains a much-cited Mail on Sunday article describing Hammersmith as "a school in despair". This is neatly typed, perhaps because the original became dog-eared from overuse. There's also a real cutting from the Mirror headlined "I bought school drugs in just FIVE minutes".
Atkinson next produces a folder of notes he made when he visited the school to write a report at the local council's request. He reads them out. "The pupils: out of control, poor self-esteem, insolent and aggressive. Teachers: ineffective. Senior staff: little evidence they do more than crisis management. Conclusion: the school is actively disabling pupils and consigning them to the growing underclass. Should close immediately."
Atkinson was then head of a comprehensive in a neighbouring borough, and had been there eight years. Local authorities, he says, were headhunting him for senior jobs. But after his report, Hammersmith and Fulham's then education director, Christine Whatford, asked if he would take charge of what was called the worst school in Britain.
"I said of course not. I was at a big school with 25 acres of playing fields, indoor squash courts and palatial buildings. Hammersmith was a school of 500." He continues - like all the great preachers, he observes "the rule of three" - "Christine visited me, the chair of governors visited me, the chair of the education committee visited me". Eventually, despite the opposition of his wife - they have four children and have been married 35 years - he agreed.
Atkinson set two conditions. First, there would not be a competitive interview; he would be the sole shortlisted candidate. Second, he would do the job without interference. "I made it clear they would certainly disagree with some things I did. But they'd had their chance to do it their way and it hadn't worked."
Atkinson still talks with a slight Jamaican accent, dropping his hs in what is otherwise a fluent flow of standard English. His mother's accent was far stronger when, in 1957, aged seven, he came with her and his two young brothers to Battersea in south London from rural Jamaica to join his father, who was already working here. So there was an extraordinary mix-up whereby the ages of William and his brother, aged nine, were confused. Put in a class of nine-year-olds, seven-year-old William, who had never been to school before, was thought to be stupid. Two years later, with the mistake still undiscovered, he sat the 11-plus and predictably failed. Shortly afterwards, his real age was at last revealed and, after another two years, he took the 11-plus again and failed again. This makes him, he says with great delight, the only teacher in the country to have failed the 11-plus twice.
I raise a sceptical eyebrow, but I suppose if you wanted to make up a story about your origins, you'd think of something more plausible than that. Didn't he or his brother ever tell them how old they were? "You have to understand. I'd come out of the bush, I didn't know how the system worked, I was in an alien world. My parents were too busy working. My mother had to get up at 4.30 in the morning and catch a minibus with other black people to a factory in Surrey. They had to earn enough to buy a house because, in those days, it was very difficult for blacks to rent accommodation. They had to let most of the rooms so, at one time, we all five lived in one room. The idea that my parents could have intervened - forget it!"
Atkinson went to the local comprehensive and, by 16, had managed just one O-level but, after he repeated them, went into the sixth-form. There he came under the wing of a teacher who "challenged me", "challenge" being one of Atkinson's favourite words, which gets so much emphasis his desk almost shakes. That teacher, he says, was the inspiration for his career, and he took on Phoenix because "I knew how much I had benefited from somebody taking an interest in me at school and felt I had a lot in common with these children, and they deserved the same".
He went on to teacher training in Portsmouth, did his probationary year there and, after a brief interlude as a drayman (delivering beer) while he did the 60s thing of pondering the meaning of life, he decided he really did want to teach. He began a career that would take him to seven London schools, all of them in multi-ethnic areas. He started at Islington Green, where a pupil was murdered one evening on school premises, and later taught down the road from Brixton during the riots of the early 80s.
For a late developer, he seems to have been remarkably ambitious, applying for deputy headships in his 20s and being turned down more than 40 times. He mentions racism as a factor in his youth - his brother, he says, left school with a string of O-levels and got numerous job interviews, but always left empty-handed once employers set eyes on him - but says it hasn't been important in his teaching career, from parents, children or colleagues. "I'm as black as they come, and if that's an issue for you, that's your business. But it's not an issue for me and I just get on with my business." He's never been involved with political parties or black movements and says he sees himself as a civil servant who should remain above the fray.
Aspirational
He says he was always aspirational; at 13, he told a careers adviser he wanted to be a pilot and was informed that joining the army or delivering post were more realistic options. "He sees himself as a leader in any group in which he happens to find himself," says a former colleague. "Some people have leadership thrust upon them. William always sought it." He eventually became a deputy head at 31 and a head five years later. His first headship lasted only 18 months because, he says, the chair of the education committee didn't deliver on promises about resources.
Clearly, Atkinson is not a man to cross, as the teachers at Phoenix soon discovered. On arrival, he decreed they must produce detailed plans for every lesson, with a beginning, middle and end. Senior staff would observe lessons. The teachers threatened to walk out and the dispute went to the arbitration service, Acas. Atkinson largely got his way, though he agreed to give notice of when lessons would be observed.
After the lesson planning regime was introduced, he says, "a number of staff left". He doesn't sound sorry. His assessment of the staff he found on arrival is: "A small number of very good teachers, but so few their impact was limited. A large number of very ordinary teachers. Another large number of temporary or supply teachers." He started competency proceedings against several, but all but two jumped before they were pushed.
Atkinson has no patience with the ordinary, or even with the merely above-average. "Only the very best will thrive in this school," he says. "Here, good isn't good enough. We have to be outstanding, because only the outstanding will make enough of a difference to transform the life chances of these young people." A former colleague observed: "He's a good person to work for, in the sense that many staff under him do very well in their careers. But to benefit, you have to be good in the first place. He's not very interested in helping or improving those who are struggling."
That may explain why the Phoenix story isn't one of uninterrupted success. Though Atkinson got it out of special measures in a couple of years and exam results improved, the school was almost back where it started in 1999, with only 5% getting five or more higher-grade GCSEs. He blames difficulties in staff recruitment, created partly by general shortages, partly by "naming and shaming", which, he says, put staff on a hiding to nothing if they went to work in a struggling school. But as Brighouse says: "He didn't buckle at all. Many people would have." The proportion getting five "good" GCSEs (including English and maths) is now 44%.
By any standards, his is an extraordinary story, an inspiration for those who believe schools with a preponderance of disadvantaged children aren't inevitably doomed to failure. The intake at Phoenix hasn't changed significantly, it's still an 11-16 school (though a sixth-form opens next year) under local authority control, it isn't a church school or academy and, while it has specialist status for science, it hasn't had anything lavish in the way of extra resources, and, until now, no new buildings at all. The difference, it seems, has been made by Atkinson and the staff he recruited. I'm not sure I'd want to work for him (and I suspect many teachers would share that view), but the children of Phoenix are very lucky to have him as head.