ABSTRACT
All schools have a history. Few, however, have attained the iconic status of Highbury Grove, associated forever in the media’s eye with its first head, Rhodes Boyson, who launched a national political career during his final year at the school. Boyson’s model, with its reverence for the minutiae of public school organization, was never that of a school focused primarily on achievement or quality of teaching and learning. With its semi-autonomous houses, this was a school much more interested in the pastoral than the curricular. When the ex-grammar school boys who had comprised a significant proportion of the original intake left, at about the time of Boyson’s election to Parliament, they and their academic achievements were never entirely replicated.
