John McIntosh (educator)

John Charles McIntosh, CBE, FRSA (born 6 February 1946) was Headmaster of The London Oratory School for 29 years until his retirement on 31 December 2006.

He was educated at Ebury School, Shoreditch College and Sussex University. He joined the London Oratory School as an Assistant Master for Mathematics at the age of 21 in 1967, was promoted to Deputy Headmaster in 1971 and was appointed Headmaster in 1977.

A report by the Sutton Trust on university admissions in 2006 reported that of the 100 schools with the highest admission rates to Oxford and Cambridge, 80 were independent schools, 18 grammar schools and 2 comprehensive schools. One of the comprehensive schools was 99th; the other – The London Oratory – was 21st, comfortably ahead of many highly successful and very well known public schools. The table for state school entries to the 13 highest performing universities put the school at number 2, the first place going to a grammar school.

While he was headmaster of The London Oratory School, he established a specialist music course for boys from seven to eighteen, which included a liturgical choir which provided a rigorous choral education, equivalent to that otherwise only available in independent cathedral choir schools.

He was elected an additional member of the Headmasters Conference (HMC) in 1986.

Throughout his career, McIntosh has lobbied for greater autonomy for maintained schools. This was the theme of the paper he presented at the invitation of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, at The State of Our Schools at an Education Seminar at Downing Street in 1986. He went on to chair a group which proposed what were to become grant maintained schools. In 1989 The London Oratory School was in the first tranche of schools to opt for grant maintained status.

He has frequently found himself at odds with the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, most notably in 1989, when the Westminster Diocese tried to browbeat his governors and trustees into abandoning the sixth form. More recently he has been at odds with the Bishops over the issue of whether RE should be included in the English Baccalaureate: McIntosh believes that it should not.

He fought tenaciously to retain the right to interview applicants for places at the school, a fight which was vindicated by the High Court in 2004, when Mr Justice Rupert Jackson quashed an order made by the Schools Adjudicator ordering the School not to interview.

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Wikipedia