Head arrives at under-pressure secondary academy seemingly without experience of working in state education

Is state-funded education under the Conservative government being made more posh? Eyebrows are certainly likely to be raised in relation to one academy trust often featured on this website, which has just appointed a new headteacher.

Dr Philip Hills is taking the helm at Bushey Academy, Hertfordshire, which until its recent takeover by Future Academies was rated “inadequate” by Ofsted and which has a relatively high proportion of disadvantaged pupils.

This comes despite Hills’s cv pointing to his employment experience thus far having been exclusively in private schooling.

And not just any private schools, either. Dr Hills’ LinkedIn profile suggested that after graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge and a post as a Cambridge classics lecturer and research fellow, his schoolteaching career started with a post teaching classics at Eton.

Posts as head of classics at the fee-charging Bristol Grammar School and at St Paul’s, the famous boarding school in Barnes, west London, followed, before Dr Hills became deputy head of Hampton, a boys’ day school in nearby Richmond upon Thames.