Interviews with Sir Peter Ogden

Sir Peter Ogden
Catalytic Converter
An interview with Sir Peter Ogden by Louise Simpson, February 2005.
 
It’s five years since I first sat down with Peter Ogden – Sir Peter, I should say, the knighthood for services to education came this year – to learn about his desire to divert £22.5 million pounds of his own wealth into a new trust fund to help very able students from less well-off families go to independent schools. This self-made man from Rochdale was determined that good schooling should not be denied to bright kids simply because their parents couldn’t afford it. The Ogden Trust was born.  So on a dull day in February this year I meet with Peter in the Ogden family kitchen in London (light, modern, minimalist, overlooking a manicured city garden). But before we talk, he has to work out his schedule so that he wastes not a moment – an hour with me, then his car is picking him up to catch his helicopter to Bristol Grammar School for a fundraising event that evening. More appointments follow. This is a man who uses his wealth to extend every second of his life to get the most out of it – and usually for other people's benefit.

He looks as young as he did five years ago, and his accent is still noticeably more Rochdale than Chelsea. He's still sailing – having just come sixth in his class in the prestigious Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. One of his sons makes me tea before whizzing off to show a friend round London. Cath, his wife, arrives with the dogs, who bound up and pinch my biscuit as we talk. But Peter focuses on The Ogden Trust. Focus is obviously essential in a busy life like this, and one of his colleagues tells me later that he only believes in doing what he can do well – everything else must be delegated to others.

So, what has he achieved since he started The Ogden Trust five years ago?

“Well, I feel we’ve done three main things. There was the first phase, aimed at 11- to 13-year-olds (the bursaries for independent schools), then we moved into the state sector and started to work with specialist schools. That was really fun. We helped schools leverage funding to achieve specialist status. I put up half of what they needed and they had to find the rest. This wasn’t going to change their academic ability overnight but it gave them a huge sense of purpose and freshness.”

This phase two, as Ogden thinks of it, helping specialist schools get started, came about as a reaction to the very people who felt that the comprehensive sector should also be a focus for excellence and philanthropy. When the headmaster of his old school, Rochdale Grammar, which had by then become Balderstone Community College, invited Ogden up to look round, Peter accepted the challenge to help it raise its game. He gave them £135,000 as a kick-start to specialist schools status. The government put in £600,000. The Balderstone Technology College Rochdale was born. The Ogden Trust is now supporting 42 specialist schools across the country.

“The third phase,” Ogden continues, “was all about teaching. I wanted to get really good graduates back into schools to teach at both primary and secondary level. The Ogden Teaching Fellowships have been launched to support this process.”

Over this last year or so Ogden decided he couldn’t be all things to all people. ”I was worried that The Ogden Trust was going to be drawn into anything to do with education...So I decided to focus on science,” explains Ogden.

Having gone to a grammar school with strong science teaching, and then read Physics at Durham University to PhD level, Ogden is appalled by the lack of serious science focus in the state sector today. “You generally can’t do single subjects in comprehensive schools in science. I guess, it’s lack of teachers, time, money, whatever. But it’s self-fulfiling that kids don’t do science. I get angry about that. We’re writing our death knell doing only combined sciences. Why can’t the government see that?” So Ogden has set up a scheme for kids who want to do science, with bursaries now offered to those who want to pursue maths and physics. Bright students, but again from less well-off backgrounds, are given bursaries to go to independent schools, often because their state schools don’t have sixth form but usually because they don’t teach single subject science.

He has enjoyed this new stage of dealing with more mature students. Those who are really determined to pursue their studies: “The good thing about focusing on older kids is that you can recognise real potential. You can see how much more the bright ones are achieving than their peer group. When they’re only 11 they have a big family push, and it’s hard to know whether it’s them or their parents who want to succeed and are getting the top marks.”

So the Ogden game plan for making science sexy again is three-fold, he tells me. (That Harvard Business School training makes him keen on tripartite schemes.) Firstly, he’s looking at how to get role models into primary schools to teach science by encouraging current science students and sixth formers to help out. Secondly, there’s his ongoing scheme to get good fifth formers to do single subject sciences at sixth form. Then the final part of the scheme is to team up with university partners and provide science scholarships – £1,500 per year – for students to do maths or physics.

“I do get really fed up with people thinking it’s cool not to understand science. People are horrified if you rubbish Shakespeare, but quite proud to admit to not being able to change a plug. But who couldn’t love physics? It’s all about why we’re here. It’s about life itself. How could it not be fascinating?”

In Peter’s words, physics begins to sound as cool as a Calvin Klein perfume advert. The Government should bottle him now and make him an ambassador for science with a capital S!

In terms of five-year achievements, he’s pleased with how well The Ogden Trust has made people work together. There’s the massively popular National Schools Business Competition for sixth-formers, which has brought keen entrepreneurs and public speakers from all types of schools and backgrounds together.

He also gathers teachers, professors, state and private school heads and makes them address a central problem. This year, science, naturally. The Science Forum was held in the prestigious surroundings of the Master’s Lodge at Trinity College, Cambridge and was hosted by Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Ogden Patron. The outcome was more than Ogden had hoped for. Private schools offered to help state schools with extra teaching, and the universities volunteered to trial the science bursary scheme.

“People need catalysts,” he muses. “I guess I’m that. They are willing to work together and actually when it comes down to it no school wants to teach just rich people. The parents themselves are happier to pay higher fees if they think it means there’s a social mix in the school. The schools want that too. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t want to work with them.”

And where will The Ogden Trust be in 2010?

“Well, I hope it will have made an impact on reversing the trend in the decline of sciences, if it does nothing else.”

He is the same man I knew five years ago, but he’s now talking a different talk. He’s more confident and focused, keener to change the sector rather than the individual, more impatient with bureaucratic excuses. His backing of overall subject excellence has become a mission to boost British science. The focus on the independent sector has broadened into a passion to make state and private work together. To make all schools good schools. To expect co-operation and not compromise.

And overriding these huge ambitions is a sense of quiet joy in seeing some of the young people he has helped over the years begin to adopt the status of philanthropists – not by giving away their own money (just yet), but by giving something more valuable, their time in teaching others. As Peter says, he’s a catalyst, and a converted one at that.

Louise Simpson is the former Director of Communications at the University of Cambridge and founding partner of the educational consultancy The Knowledge Partnership.
 
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My only ideology: Give Back

Nearly 75 ISC schools are now offering more awards to children from low income families thanks to the initiative of PETER OGDEN. In conversation with Dick Davison of the Independent Schools Council in 2001, this grammar-school educated businessman explains why he decided to put millions into independent secondary schools.

RD: Why did you become involved in education?

PO: The opportunity arose. I created a successful company, it went public, I sold shares, got a lot of money. You soon realise three things: you can't consume it however hard you try, you can't leave it to your children because you deny them the opportunity, and you can't die and leave it, because it's your responsibility to solve the problem in your lifetime. You quickly realise too that it should be purposeful; you can't just keep writing cheques every time the Royal Ballet or the RSC walks in. I wanted to commit time as well as the money and that's why I picked education. I do honestly believe that equality in education does provide the opportunity to build a better society.

I went round in circles to start with. I looked at university education, but I came to the conclusion that universities had good corporate sponsorship in many areas. I wasn't convinced either that students were being denied opportunity to go to university because they couldn't pay. You may have to borrow but it's not being denied to you. I looked at primary schools but I couldn't see any good target; in any case, I thought the government were doing good things in primary education.

Involvement with the development council at Westminster School, where my son had been, led me to think there was an opportunity in secondary education. The demise of grammar schools meant less opportunity, for people that couldn't pay, to send their children to academic schools. And I saw at Westminster, with inflation, that the bursary and scholarship money was doing less and less.

I also realised early on that even with £30 million, I couldn't change the world. I looked at the schools and the harsh conclusion was that some of the best academic schools are in the private sector. I do accept the argument that schools shouldn't just be for academics. But I think there is a need for academic elites, all societies have academic elites, and those schools unfortunately weren't accessible to everybody, and that's really how I started.

RD: Did you choose to put your money into the private sector, then, because grammar schools had largely disappeared from the state sector?

PO: I looked at it this way: I couldn't solve the problem of the state sector. I didn't want to become involved in the campaign over grammar schools. I made a rule that I was going to be non-political. I decided to focus on individuals. I can't solve it for the world but with this money, for some individuals, I can create an opportunity to have a unique educational experience. That led me to the idea of partnering schools. I didn't want to get into the operations business. It seemed to me that I could achieve it in partnership with schools, rather than me getting involved with the selection of individuals. The first selection of schools wasn't formal; it was more a matter of who I thought I could work with.

RD: The schools you have chosen, although they are in the independent sector, are like the kind of school that you went to yourself.

PO: Exactly, and as I went to see the schools, obviously I had to come up with some criteria for them. They had to be committed to some form of meritocracy and to a social mix more reflective of society and I wanted to see they were making an effort to find bright children for their existing scholarship programme. I judged that by how much they were already doing in outreach programmes, mailing the local primary heads, getting the primary heads into the school. And to be honest they weren't all there then, but it's something they had to do as part of their commitment.

The second thing that I looked at was common entrance exams. I said they had to be more realistic. That didn't mean that they had to slide the criteria but they had to try to accommodate children from the state sector. Schools using Common Entrance could take them into their feeder schools at the age of 11 and give them two years before the Common Entrance. Schools that didn't use the Common Entrance, like Portsmouth, we asked to modify their entrance exam to make it less of a fearsome process. That's worked quite well.

The other important criterion was that they had to match our money 50-50. The idea was: if you really want it, you'll make an effort. I have been staggered at how successful they have been at matching what we have done, even though a lot of parents still say: 'I've paid for my children, why should I pay for others?' I find that attitude surprising.

RD: You said you didn't want to get into operations, but you obviously needed some organisation.

PO: I hired Tim Simmons as the director, who was the fundraiser for Cambridge University, and had persuaded me to part with money for their centre for Mathematical Sciences. We then started to set it into a concrete scheme, visiting the schools, getting the criteria, forming a partnership. It's up to the schools to select the individuals. What I would like, and it hasn't always s worked out this way, is to take the brightest child from the state sector who needs 100% funding. If there is someone who is brighter, but the parents can afford 50%, the schools can sort that out. I always worry if they can afford 50% of school fees, they're not doing badly, and I want to get the ones who really need help.

RD: How do you judge need?
 
PO: In addition to the schools' normal methodologies of means testing, we have insisted that schools make a family home visit before they award our scholarships. Some schools were opposed to this, but now it's largely accepted because the families too need a lot of assurance about what they are getting themselves into. I've no axe to grind about the assisted places scheme, but everyone tells me it was hijacked by the middle classes. I want to see help going to the most deserving and you can judge a lot by visiting somebody at home.

The other problem with all these schemes is that no child wakes up at the age of 11 and says: I want to be educated. Behind most of the children we are dealing with is a pushy parent. So the child who doesn't have a pushy parent may slip through the net.

RD: What do you do where the brightest children don't coincide with the greatest financial need?

PO: I would rather pick ones lower down the academic scale with the maximum need, but I am not going to get prescriptive. This is a new scheme; we are trying to work with the schools and they have got their own concerns.

We also think it is important that it is seen as an award scheme, not a charitable handout for poor children. So we have tried to put things around the scheme to try to make sure it's perceived as an award. For example, I have spent some time thinking about mentoring. If my children were interested in law I could send them off to a lawyer in Lincoln's Inn, or if they were interested in theatre I could find someone who would give them a day in the theatre. So I thought it was important we had some form of mentoring to give the sort of benefits, the contacts, that middle class children enjoy. So we have formed a group; for example, if someone wants to talk about broadcasting, we've got Martyn Lewis involved.

RD:  You have expanded the scheme to 28 schools;  is that now what you would regard as the optimum size?
 
PO:  There may be a few more schools, but this is not a commitment for ever.  It’s a commitment for each individual for his whole schooling, but, over time, we want to make sure these schools move along with the ideas.  If we thought a school was not really committed to expanding the social mix, we might not continue with that school.  So there could be changes.
I’m very keen to look at schools at a bit lower down the top 100.  We have found a couple of schools which are really making progress but they haven’t got there yet because of their intake.  If I find a high value-added school, and we get on with the head, we’d be looking at that.  And this year we are going to do more sixth-form places.  That’s a very fast-return business.  If you take a bright student from the state sector who may want to do things they can’t do in their state school, I think you can get a very quick return.
 
RD:  You said earlier that you didn’t want to be political but do you see yourself as a catalyst for change?
 
PO:  I want to encourage others to follow.  We are working with a company at the moment and saying to them: ‘If you want to do the same, call it what you want, and we will help you run that scheme’.  Setting the infrastructure up is daunting if you are a small concern.
I also want, rather than trying to change the system, to encourage business to support secondary education.  If you spend more money per pupil you get better results.  You see that in the specialist colleges, where they have made the effort and given the budget to the schools.  I don’t have the budget myself to spend the extra £300 per pupil but I can’t understand why we couldn’t get maybe £100 per pupil in from the private sector if we really pushed at it.  I would like to see the Government clearly announce how it was going to work the public-private sector combination.
What worries me is what happens if nobody takes up these changes.  I’m a great admirer of what Peter Lampl is doing, but what happens if nobody takes up his Belvedere scheme?  I find it very hard to believe that this government is going to take that up.  With my scheme, maybe I’m being a bit too cautious, but if nobody takes it up nobody gets injured.
 
RD: Do you think that government should become involved?
 
PO:  One of the things I find difficult to accept is the argument that the amount spent per pupil should be equal.  Nobody questions that when you go to university, you get more money spent on you if you become a medical student.  We don’t have a problem with differential spending after secondary but we seem to have a ‘one for all’ in secondary.  I think the government should have differential spending in secondary education; that’s where I like the CTCs and the specialist colleges.
 
We need to find a system where state and independent sectors do the work in tandem and there is a free flow of pupils between state and independent schools and that means that the government will have to spend more on those pupils than they will on others.  There is nothing wrong with an academic elite.  It think it’s required and it should be an academic elite based on a meritocracy.  But in Britain we struggle with that idea.
 
RD:  There are stroking similarities between Peter Lampl and yourself:  both grammar school boys, both with a scientific training, both with US experience.  Is there some common factor that has brought you both into education?
 
PO:  I am a very big fan of Peter Lampl.  He is the most articulate presenter of the arguments.
It is probably our American experience.  We both saw that the American way is for peple to give back, to commit themselves, to be involved.  In America the idea that the individual should interfere in a process of the state, like education, is commonplace.  In England, it just doesn’t seem to be done.  In America, people get social status by the amount they have given;  in England you get a letterhead with fifty famous names, who give nothing but who are there because they know people.  In America, the first thing the fifty names have to do is cough up a couple of million each.  I don’t think we have quite got it right yet.
 
But there are other people coming into it now:  the ability to create philanthropy is a function of the ability to create money.  One of the things that encourages me now is that people who are making money are finding uses for it and education seems to be high on the list.
 
Another American influence is the idea of shared experience.  It’s early days for our scheme, but one thing we are doing is to build a web site for the children so they can share their experiences.  America makes a lot out of shared experiences – that’s how they produce bonding, the ‘the class of 45; kind of thing.  Will they use the web site, will a child in Newcastle feel a bonding to a child in Surrey just because they are in the same scheme?  I don’t know, but we are going to try and encourage it.
The only ideological beating they’ll get from me as they get older is:  ‘Give back’.  Only one thing would really upset me:  if, in 20 years’ time, one of these children becomes famous and somebody says:  What do you think about philanthropy?  And they gave a ‘Scrooge, bah humbug’, kind of answer, that would really upset me.  So they are going to have to listen to a lecture from me at some state:  ‘give back’ is the only ideology.
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Talking heads: Sir Peter Ogden in conversation with Martyn Lewis

In 2005 The Ogden Trust celebrated its 5th Anniversary with a dinner at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Since the first dinner in 2000 the guest list has grown from less than 20 people – the head teachers of the independent schools who first trialled the Ogden Scholarship scheme – to more than 400, including representatives from more than 100 schools, various universities, educational trusts and charities. Trustees, friends, advisers, scholars and grant recipients joined them to congratulate Sir Peter on his Knighthood and to pay tribute to him and The Ogden Trust for its support. The former BBC and ITN Newsreader, Martyn Lewis, joined Sir Peter on stage to learn more about his philanthropic philosophies.
 
ML: Why did you start the Ogden Trust in the first place and who influenced your philanthropy? 
 
PO: I had an idea that I wanted to do something in the charitable world. But the most important thing was that I happened to build a company that was successfully floated. A lot of people would like to do these things and I was very lucky that I had the opportunity – I had the money to set up the Trust.
I’ve thought about people who influenced me and there are no single individuals, it is more about my experiences.
 
I went to Business School in America and worked there for a while. People I met there identified strongly with the institution that had a major impact on their lives – be it a school, a university, even a hospital or a church, but things that had influenced their lives – and they found a belief that it wasn’t just nice to give back, but that it actually formed part of a moral culture.
 
I think that the creation of wealth and financial success is only really one side of the coin. The other side is the obligation to give some of that wealth back through charitable giving.
 
ML: But why education?
 
PO: Well education is pretty fundamental to me. I came from a Lancashire working-class background where the importance of education was instilled in me. I had the privilege of going to a grammar school, where I had a very good physics teacher. I was even more fortunate to go to Durham University, where they somehow overlooked the erratic, wayward behaviour of a Northern undergraduate and allowed me to get a degree and then to do research. That led to Harvard Business School, and of course, I went on to find my way in a business career.
 
So really, it seems natural to me that I should support education. It is the one thing that levels the playing field between people who have economic or social privilege and those who do not. I believe that education guarantees a fairer society.
 
ML: When you are setting up a new project such as this, there must be people who tell you to move in a different direction, people who say don’t do this, do that. What was the most frustrating part of setting up The Ogden Trust?
 
PO: One of the frustrations is that people would always like to be a catalyst for change, but I have come to understand that actually you have to do it because there is nobody there to pick up the good ideas – you have to live the good ideas.
 
Another frustration for me is working with the Government. Most of the people I deal with in Government, I would say, have had the benefit of a highly privileged education and usually, according to popular press, would like to give these opportunities to their children, but somehow that doesn’t translate to providing that benefit for others.
 
So my biggest frustration is that the ideas that we do have are good ideas and are certainly in the public good, and yet somehow the Government does not seem them as opportunities.
 
ML: Do you think that the government should actually have spotted the gap that you saw and decided to fill, and filled it themselves? Or do you think that some parts of the education system should be left to philanthropists who have the vision and the purpose, and the means, to achieve it?
 
PO: I would say that we have difficulty in the UK in understanding the way that private capital can participate in what we believe is the responsibility of the state. However, I think that the government would find it difficult to be in the areas that we are in as they are so individually specific. But I do think they could do more with the bright children who really could benefit from the education, for example, of independent schools.
 
I am really keen on partnerships between trusts, state schools, independent schools and universities. Between us maybe we can solve the problems that Government finds hard to solve. Clearly there is a lot to be done by working together rather than keeping the systems separate.
 
ML: A lot to be done then. Put your mind ten years ahead – what do you see The Ogden Trust doing, and being, at that time?
 
PO: Well firstly, there was never an intention that the Trust would be in any way dynastic. I have no intention of effectively saying that somebody else should do the same as I’ve done. The idea is that the Trust will spend its assets in a reasonable lifetime – it is not intended to be an endowment going forward.
 
The hope is that somebody we’ve worked with will also see the benefits and carry on the ideas. But it is more about turning them into philanthropists rather than saying do what I do. They may have different ideas and totally different objectives. If they are successful, I hope that they will see the benefit of giving something back and doing good in society.
 
ML: So we’ve come full circle and returned to the idea that inspired you in America: that people actually put something back into society?
 
PO: For the Ogden Scholars to share that idea would be the most satisfying thing for me. I came up with one of them on the train today and just talking to her, and to others here tonight, I believe that they do understand that the opportunity to give back is a good thing. I hope that they all have that opportunity and I am very proud of them all.