Toby Young, who has been appointed to the board of the new Office for Students, once said that running free schools was harder than he thought. He decided to quit:
His school was also rejected by the Department for Education (DfE) when it applied to open a second school:
Yet the government made him universities regulator instead.
Young has been unflattering of working class students, referring to them as ‘stains’:
Young has also called for the repeal of the Equality Act, arguing that disabled children should be excluded from schools, referring to them as ‘functionally illiterate troglodyte[s]’ – a fact he allegedly tried to obscure when his appointment was announced:
Not satisfied with disrespecting students, he also infamously showed an utter ignorance of what being a teacher really entails, claiming it’s ‘not that tough’ and only really involved working 9am-3.30pm with six weeks holiday:
Everytime #TobyYoung trends, my Fairy Godmother says to me "you must tweet that video."
So, here you go folks. pic.twitter.com/kdJjOwgJmf
— 🇬🇧 TeacherToolkit.co.uk (@TeacherToolkit) January 1, 2018
And his Twitter history includes some seriously – well, troglodytic moments:
If all that doesn’t make it hard enough to claim that Young has the status and dignity a senior role requires, here he is pictured in bed with S*n scribbler Harry Cole and Fawkes blogger Paul Staines:
The University and College Union was about as far from impressed as could be:
But a disturbing aspect of the government’s appointment of the man who chose the Twitter handle ‘toadmeister’ may be revealed in a tweet by an eminently qualified candidate who applied for the position handed to Young:
Nazir Afzal OBE applied and didn’t even get an interview, in spite of his experience and qualifications listed above. He happens to be a member of the Asian community.
Of course, the government’s failure to even interview him may have had nothing to do with his brown skin. It might instead have been driven by the fact that Mr Afzal’s politics are less aligned with the government’s and that his sympathies are less with the Establishment.
For example, his tweet following the Grenfell Tower memorial service last month was uncompromising:
In view of the facts, Mr Young’s appointment – and the failure to even interview candidates who seem far better equipped to actually do the job – may have been driven far more by politics than by any wish on the part of the Tories to actually make life better for students or to help universities provide the best education and experience.
At the very least, we can say with certainty that at least one highly-qualified candidate with brown skin was ignored while a white man considered crass and offensive by many was ushered into the job.
Which calls into serious question the Tories’ motives for creating the position and choosing the person to fill it.
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Well of course they appointed Toby Young, MaCarthy is just not available anymore…
In the interests of trying to keep it real, would it be worth pointing out that the 1988 book ‘The Oxford Myth’ was a satirical goon show collection (R and B Johnson et al.) and so shouldn’t be presented as prima facie evidence? Yes he wrote it but there’s more recent stuff that surely counts more. Just wanting to ensure that your good work is robust (perhaps more of a problem for e.g. Paul Mason’s twitter coverage of TY, but still worth a mention).
i haven’t got words left to call this guy – i’m exasperated by the class bias and loathe and hate the tories – but no sign of them being got rid of and the country suffers as a result – hohum, easy to die than live in this crap country
Just more Tory skullduggery perpetuated without shame and definitely without of fear of any dire consequences! How much of this shit will we have to put up with and for how much longer? The Tories just keep doing what they’re doing and the only possibility we are offered whereby they will be dealt with, is putting an X on a bit of paper sometime in the future! Is this enough? I think not because even if the Tory Party loses seats, those losers will just go and pick up some lucrative jobs from their mates in the media, big business, or some public or charitable body which is will be run by even more of their mates! If the worst come to the worst for any of these Tory losers they’ll get a place in the Lords! Listen, this lot have been, are and continue to be culpable in the deaths of the poor, the vulnerable and the just downright unlucky amongst us workers (which is most of us) but even if they lose an election they’re gonna get away with it! They’ll laugh in our faces, well, maybe we should give up being stoic and all round good eggs and spit in their faces and then give the bastards a really good kicking, after a fair trial of course, and that might just make those who are ambitious to screw the rest of us (although they never ‘mean it’ and it’s all for the ‘great good’) pause and make them take democracy seriously!
Apparently he only got into Oxford due to an admin error. They sent him an acceptance letter by mistake. His father Lord Young then pressurised them to take him in regardless.*
I think we should have a photo caption competition the bedroom photo.
” The three understains combine to make one large turd in a bed”
* Info via Tom @ AAV
“Free school pioneer Toby Young described working-class grammar school boys who secured places at Oxford as “universally unattractive” and “small, vaguely deformed undergraduates”.” — I know I’m an American and I have no idea what it’s like to live with a class system like this, but…wow. This guy sounds like a real A-hole. An inbred, entitled A-hole.