Toby Young Loses ANOTHER Job

The appointment to the board of the new Office for Students of the loathsome Toby Young may have caused dismay among all those who wondered why he was even considered for such a role, but it now seems that the shining of the light on Tobes’ past, and his less than perfectly formed character, has had a beneficial effect in the longer term.

After all, he soon stood down from the board of the OfS, and more recently departed from his mainly taxpayer-funded £90,000 a year role as Director of the New Schools Network. The trajectory of Tobes’ publicly-funded career was now firmly downward. And it now seems that there is another success to add to that list.

The Knowledge Schools Trust is the new name for the company previously known by the name The West London Free School Academy Trust. That’s The West London Free School, which Tobes co-founded back in the heady days when Michael “Oiky” Gove was in charge at Education and his polecats Dominic Cummings and Henry de Zoete were running around the DfE pretending to know what they were doing.

Tobes had previously stepped down, or perhaps that should be caused to have stepped down, as the main man at the WLFS, but he had remained on the board. Not any more: the Companies House records for the KST show that he resigned from the board this week - in fact, just two days ago. That means Toby Young has rather less of a formal connection to the school he so publicly co-founded and championed.

To no surprise at all, there has been no word yet of this further reduction in the Tobes employment portfolio in the right-leaning press which devoted so many articles to eulogising his great success as co-founder of the WLFS. Nor has there been a word about it on the Tobes twitter feed, although he has dutifully devoted plenty of time to kicking the Labour leadership, and pretending to know his educational onions.

Perhaps it’s no longer news that Tobes loses a job, as he’s lost two this year already. Perhaps he really is getting ready to emigrate, although which country would volunteer to have him is not known. Perhaps he was eased out and would rather no-one start telling the world about it. Well, stuff that one for a game of soldiers.

There have been no appointments to the board of the KST since December 2016. It’s not as if Tobes has been replaced by someone else. It looks as if the grownups have finally wrested control of the WLFS from the amateurs. And they’ll have plenty of work to do in the future world of less state handouts for Free Schools.

What will be the next job Toby Young loses? Perhaps someone should open a book on it.