Not Such A New Boy Now

The headmaster of Summer Fields on a political and educational legacy

- Kate Green

THERE was spluttering in common rooms across the land when former Conservative MP David Faber’s appointment as headmaster of one of the finest prep schools in England was announced in 2009. The reaction—‘unusual’ gasped one tabloid—was, perhaps, akin to the flutter in the museum world at Labour MP Tristram Hunt’s recent parachuting into the V&A.

‘There were raised eyebrows, but it blew over. The boys were great and the parents were prepared to trust me,’ Mr Faber recalls. ‘They pay a lot and make sacrifices and we need to be in touch with that, but I would hope that they know I’m one of them and can see it from their point of view.’

Mr Faber had written two respected historical biographies and was a governor at Summer Fields, his old prep school, as well as a parent—his son, Henry, was the fifth generation of the family there—but he had no teaching qualifications and had bypassed the traditional route of deputy head or house master.

‘It’s easy to say in hindsight, but I wished I’d done a teaching degree,’ admits Mr Faber, whose warm, friendly style combines the reassurance of establishment with the glamour of the outsider. ‘People had said I’d make a good teacher, perhaps because I’m bossy. I certainly had the teaching bent—my maiden speech was on education.’