Through the glass ceiling: from Newham to Eton on a scholarship

www.simplesharebuttons.com Share this post...

Fifteen-year-old Ishak Ayiris grew up in one of the country’s poorest boroughs, but now he’s off to Eton. [Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for The Guardian]

Ishak Ayiris didn’t really know much about Eton when his headteacher suggested he apply for a scholarship. He vaguely knew it was a public school that David Cameron had been to, but that was about it. For around a month, Ayiris and Simon Elliott, the headteacher of Forest Gate Community School in Newham, east London, had been having discussions at lunchtime that had started when Ayiris had asked him about the Iraq war, but soon moved on to politics more widely. A few weeks later, won over by his student’s interest and intelligence, Elliott suggested he try for a scholarship to Eton College. I see what his headteacher must have seen – soon after meeting Ayiris, 15 and articulate and inquisitive, at a cafe near where he lives in Newham, he has mentioned government foreign policy, the suffragette movement, Islamophobia, quoted Malcolm X and asked about the state of the newspaper industry, all in a charming, not remotely arrogant, manner. His parents, father Abate and mother Bekelech, are with him, and look on with a mix of extreme pride and bemusement – both are from Ethopia and neither received a formal education as children.

“I told him it would be a good idea but if he didn’t get in, I was afraid he would be disappointed,” says his father. “We knew he was a special boy,” says his mother. “He liked reading, he talked too much.” Ayriris plays down his gifts: “It wasn’t like I was a sort of genius. I was an average kid and I liked to read. Once the headteacher told me about Eton I started to read many more non-fiction books, about history, current affairs, politics, the Iraq war for example. It was an overall process.” He enjoyed school and enjoyed getting high grades, though he felt, he says, that “I didn’t fit in – it wasn’t as if I was someone who could sit with the other kids and have a laugh. Even today, I only have a few close friends. Other than that, school was just fine.”

Ishak was singled out last year while he was in year 10, and the school also identified two other boys who had the potential to win scholarships to the top public schools: Irfan Badshah (who is going to Winchester) and Alexis Marinou (City of London School). “Like a lot of schools, certainly in the East End, we’ve got a lot of children who are aspirational, but I don’t think that they ever think they can go on to be part of these elite institutions,” says Simon Elliott when I speak to him on the phone. At his school, in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, nearly 40% of children claim free school meals. “Myself and my deputy resolved to work with a select group of students to open their minds.” The plan, he says, is to identify three or four students each year and try to win them scholarships. They have tended to be boys so far, because they are aiming for places at boys’ schools.

For more than a year, Ayiris, Badshah and Marinou were nurtured. The teachers used the pupil premium, an extra funding scheme for poorer students, to buy them books – such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, and others by John Pilger and Robert Fisk – and would spend lunchtimes discussing and debating with them. The boys were encouraged to attend public lectures and go to political rallies, and encouraged to talk to their teachers about what they had learned and thought. As much as anything, says Elliott, it was about developing their confidence and getting them to engage with adults.

When I ask Ayiris if he thinks the education he has received so far will put him behind his new Eton peers, he says the only difference between them he can tell is one of confidence. “From a young age, they are told they can have whatever they want and succeed in whatever way they want, and by going to these schools they understand they can, because the schools have history. So they do have that innate sense of success. Whereas in Newham, it’s not really given to you – you’re not really told you can succeed. My headteacher gave me hope and that’s what I clung onto and it pushed me.”

* Eton College, alma mater of the ­current prime minister, London mayor and Archbishop of Canterbury.
Ayiris’s parents came to the UK, separately, in the early 90s, and met and married here. At 17, his father had moved to Egypt where, on his third try, he won a scholarship to a school in Cairo, having had barely any formal education before. His mother who, like her husband, grew up in the countryside, lived two hours’ walk away from the nearest school – besides which, it was only for boys. She worked in a bakery before making her way to the UK. In press reports this week about Ayiris’s achievement, much has been made of the fact his parents are immigrants who live in a council house and claim benefits, and the family seem stung by the negative tones. Bekelech, who has a hearing impairment and is still learning English, stayed at home to raise their children, and Abate had a job as a care worker until he was forced out by ill health. “Some newspapers have said, ‘Son of Ethiopian immigrants on benefits gets into Eton’,” says Ayiris. “I don’t think [I got the place] because I was on benefits. It was based on how I did during the interviews and exams.”

Still, does it make him a little uneasy that he has been given an opportunity that many other children from deprived areas, perhaps just as clever as he is, don’t get? He nods. “I still wonder why, across the UK, there can’t be equal education. Some people would say, ‘If you want equal education, why are you applying to these schools?’ But I have to better myself if I want to improve other areas.” His hope, he says, is to go on to Oxford to read politics or history, before coming back to Newham and getting involved in politics, particularly on a local level, and perhaps as an independent candidate (“I see Labour and the Conservatives as two cheeks of the same backside”). “I don’t want to be a career politician in the sense that you get into Oxford and then become a politician. I want to change my area, and live here for the rest of my life.”

For Eton, of course, success stories such as Ayiris’s reflect well on them. In the last few years the school has become a kind of shorthand for Britain’s declining social mobility – with the current prime minister, London mayor, Archbishop of Canterbury and numerous successful actors, journalists and cultural figures all Old Etonians, the exclusive school is seen as dominating large parts of public life.

Like other independent schools, it is supposed to offer bursaries to gifted but disadvantaged children, among other public benefits, in order to justify its charitable status and associated tax breaks. Eton’s aim, it has said, is to admit a quarter of its students on reduced fees, with 70 boys paying nothing, though they are still a way off that – and even then, 70 is a tiny proportion of its 1,300 students. Around 50 boys currently pay no fees.

Even if the school’s motives are sincere, rather than cynical – Eton’s headmaster, Tony Little, is himself a bursary boy, whose father was a Heathrow security guard – giving a chance to a handful of non-privileged boys each year can hardly do much to reverse the trends in social mobility. “As far as this young lad’s concerned, good luck to him,” says Michael Pyke, spokesperson for the Campaign for State Education. “But the idea that this can be replicated to a large enough extent to make a significant difference is completely fatuous. If Eton started offering free places to a significant percentage of people, that would different, but they can’t do that because they would then find that people who are paying £33,000 a year for their children will be wondering why their fees are going on this sort of thing.”

A “significant percentage”, he thinks, would be what Anthony Seldon, the headteacher at Wellington College, proposed in January – around 25% of places at independent schools to be reserved for disadvantaged children. “But of course it’s pie in the sky.”

Ayiris’s place at Eton, to study A levels in English, history, politics and maths, still depends on getting good grades at GCSE, though he seems quietly confident. Is he worried about not fitting in there? “At the start I was thinking that, but later on, speaking to the students [at the open day he attended], I realised they weren’t too different. The first question they asked was, ‘What team do you support?’, and I thought they’d ask me about politics or something. I think that once you get in, they don’t really care about your background. You’re just another student there. I’d have to find out once I get in how it’s going to be, but I have spoken to other students who got scholarships and they said it was fine, they just got on like normal students.”

Being exposed to people with money may take some getting used to, he says, though adds that his has “been a normal life for me. You don’t understand that your parents don’t have a lot of money, because I had everything I wanted.” This, he says, amounted to books, games consoles, access to the local library and playing tennis in the nearby local park. “There’s nothing I could complain about.” Eton, he says, “will change my life but it won’t change my values.”

Will he become another old Etonian, though one a bit more in touch with ordinary people, to make it to prime minister? “Who knows?” says his father, smiling.

Source: Emine Saner, The Guardian