All Can Achieve: The Story of the Harris Federation

In 1986, Sylvan High School in Crystal Palace was a broken school, with a pass rate of 9 per cent, truancy of 60 per cent and teachers who seldom lasted longer than six months. Today, the Harris City Academy Crystal Palace, Sylvan’s successor, is hailed as one of the best schools in the country. This transformation was the blueprint for a national education revolution. Philip Harris’s achievements paved the way for the academies movement, and academies now account for nearly half of England’s schools. The same remarkable effect can be seen throughout the Harris Federation, the most successful multi-academy trust in England, which runs fifty-nine state academies with around 50,000 students and 5,000 members of staff. Every single one is rated ‘Good’ or better by Ofsted, and seven were recently listed in an international report as ‘World Class’. The Harris revolution has driven the extraordinary improvements in our education system over the past twenty years. In 2009, England lagged at twenty-seventh in the world for maths and twenty-fifth for reading. Today, reports show it is among the best-performing countries in Europe. All Can Achieve is both the inspiring account of how Philip Harris took on the near-impossible challenge of turning around failing state schools and the inside story of a seismic change in English education.