Lawrence Foley went from school reject to doctor of modernist literature. But his career almost came to a halt after a vicious online campaign.
Polly was sitting in the park with her wife, Sonia, when the phone rang. It was the Metropolitan Police Station. A social media campaign accusing Foley of being racist for excluding three children, one of whom had hit a teacher, was going viral. It reached ministers' inboxes. The officer said Foley's death threats against him meant tagging his phone. If he calls 999, armed police will arrive immediately to ensure his safety.
His wife asked him if it was “time to call it a day” about a job he liked. After a few sleepless nights, Polly decided (thankfully) to call it quits.
Foley, who is now chief executive of the 10-school Future Academies Trust, tells his story in a week where a government review found that a breakdown in social cohesion was increasingly putting staff safety at risk.
It's a dark chapter in the colorful life of a school-refusing teenager who becomes a financial merchant, a doctor of modern literature, and then a school leader.
dickens at night
Foley is of Irish Catholic descent from Stratford. He went to secondary school in Newham, which was so terrible (the English and maths GCSE pass rate was 9%) that his parents (a teaching assistant and kitchen sales manager) took him away when he was 11 and sent him to a school 90 minutes away. Epping.
He initially found it “difficult to make friends” at St John's Church of England School, where “parents dropped their kids off in Land Rovers”. It felt a world apart from multicultural Newham. He “hated” it. Foley skipped school 40% of the time, but he took a turn when he was in grade 9 and discovered the joy of playing rugby.
Now he feels “really lucky” to have “a really supportive family and peer group” to get him back on the straight and narrow.
“Peer groups these days are everyone kids interact with on social media. “The challenge for schools is to have a culture that is stronger than what we experience out there.”
After achieving a “pretty average” GCSE, Foley followed in his uncle’s footsteps by leaving school and working on a construction site. But after a year he found it “exhausting” and enrolled in sixth grade instead.
Foley later joined KPMG's accounting trainee program, which he assumed would be “fascinating”. The reality was “a dismal hotel in Luton doing a spreadsheet of VAT receipts”.
He spent his evenings reading books by Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway that he bought from charity shops. He continued to work in finance while his love of literature grew as he earned a degree in English from Queen Mary University.
After that, he worked as a trader at IG Index. Luckily, when the credit crunch hit in 2008, a generous voluntary redundancy package enabled him to complete a Masters in English Literature at UCL without having to work while studying.
wrong impression
Foley's interest was turned to schooling after seeing an advertisement for trainee teachers at Future's Pimlico Academy. He was involved in an internal scheme funded by the trust's patron, Lord Nash, a former Academy Chancellor.
Foley wants to challenge misperceptions about trust, including the involvement of Lord Nash and his wife in affairs. “The reality is you rarely see them,” he says.
But the Nashes still donate around £1 million (£100,000 each) to Future's school each year, and Foley is working with them on how to spend that money. He wants Future to be a place where “people with my background want to train” and most of the funding will go towards trainee teacher scholarships.
But receiving public support from a prominent Tory colleague has brought confidence to the political debate around education. The school's brand reflects that of an elite private school. For example, the website's prominent Latin motto is 'Liberty per Culture' (translated as 'Freedom through Education').
Foley acknowledges that the trust “has been perceived in the past as being very elitist” but argues that “perceptions from outside do not reflect the reality of the school”.
He attributes the misunderstanding to Future’s “clear commitment to providing children with an academic curriculum. “It’s pathetic to assume that kids with backgrounds like mine don’t have access to that curriculum.”
Looking back, Foley said his classes at Pimlico “had a direct and real impact in a way that I couldn’t when I was working in finance.”
But he had his heart set on a Ph.D. He recalls that at his only social event as a non-Oxbridge graduate, “the ground wanted to swallow me up.” He made his mistake by not knowing that there were two versions of the play Doctor Faustus.
“I didn’t have broader cultural capital. In some ways, my anger motivated me to pursue a Ph.D. In other words, it was to prove myself.”
Although he loved his PhD (on interpretations of bullfights by modernist writers), he hated lecturing to the best students at Queen Mary. Because he couldn't have the same impact he had at Pimlico.
return to the future
This led him to apply to Teach First, which resulted in his placement at Bishop Challoner in Tower Hamlets, the school from which his cousin was expelled.
He recalls waking up at 4 a.m. and revising his doctoral thesis for three hours before giving six lectures. He spent an exhausting evening texting his future wife (whom he met at Teach First) and then “falling asleep with the phone on her chest.”
Foley later returned to Pimlico to lead Future's teacher training program. Overseeing a curriculum center (founded by Daisy Christodoulou) comprised of in-house materials was a “strange avoidance” for Foley because he was “directing senior leaders who were not in charge myself.”
He missed the 'school routine' and these days he tries to bridge this sense of disconnection by sending Future's central staff to the school on a regular basis. He spends three days a week at the school “doing gate duty and running lineups.”
Being offered the role of headteacher at the David Ross Education Trust's (DRET) new Bobby Moore Academy in his hometown of Stratford in 2018 was a “dream come true”. But the trust was struggling with a deficit of close to £5 million and its budget had been cut.
Foley claims that DRET's only London school, Bobby Moore, was “left out” of the gag pooling policy because its funding was “much larger” than the other 33 schools.
“The school was growing every year, so we didn’t have enough capacity to do what we wanted to do.”
When Foley complained that his new school library had no books, he was told to ask his parents to donate to the library fund. However, because the school was in Newham, “one of the most deprived boroughs in the country”, Foley felt that could not be done.
“There was a real disconnect. “I didn’t fit the vision,” he added.
petition and confusion
He resigned in May 2020 to take up the role of principal of Harris Tottenham, part of the Harris League, three months after the birth of his son. Just six weeks into the role, Foley was caught at knifepoint while riding his Brompton home from a Tottenham parade. Four men with zombie knives and balaclavas for 30 minutes.
They stabbed him in the leg.
Foley recalls thinking he might never see his son again. He took a month off but still can't ride his bike. This meant he would have to ride a taxi for six months until he learned to drive.
When he returned to school, things became more difficult.
Last April, a teacher at Harris Tottenham agitated a petition calling for Foley's resignation after he excluded three black year 11 students in his first month.
The petition accused Foley of introducing a “zero-tolerance behavior policy that disproportionately affects BAME and SEN students”. He believes the campaign was part of “a very special and powerful cultural moment.”
Harris Tottenham were 'outstanding' on the surface but had not been inspected since 2017 and Foley said staff behavior was so poor that morale was lost.
He claimed he texted students a link to a petition on the playground and told them he was a racist.
The campaign “exploded” on social media after being shared by certain influencers, and “Americans were posting to this petition without any knowledge of the facts.”
More than 6,700 people signed. One comment claimed the school was 'run by white people who don't understand kids', while another likened the school's policies to 'Putin's Russia'. Police contacted him after the death threats were made.
Foley this week welcomed a solidarity report calling for a new conflict unit to better support schools, the government to collect figures on teacher bullying and legislation for “buffer zones” to prevent direct protests outside schools.
The accusations of racism are especially shocking to Foley because his wife is of Indian descent. His mother-in-law felt “confused.” He questions how she would feel if her mixed-race child one day Googled her father and saw her accusations.
Fortunately, “things have improved” and three weeks after he left in January 2023 to lead Future, the school was inspected and maintained its outstanding rating.
future pride
These days, Foley is particularly proud of Future's SCITT. Started 10 years ago, 130 alumni now work at the school and are “probably the main driving force behind our school's improvement”.
With large trusts becoming the “main vehicle for teacher training over the next decade”, he worries that smaller SCITTs like his, which have “something really special”, are in a “quite vulnerable position”.
But he withdrew from “high-level” discussions with the National Institute of Teaching and the Future about becoming a para-educational university because “if we take over this behemoth we will lose our identity”.
But he also criticizes Future for not being “outward-looking” compared to Harris, who “really takes the time to create that perception.” Future is now embarking on more public engagement.
A poster on the doorstep of Pimlico Primary, which is a 20-minute walk from Buckingham Palace but “serves many of the poor”, asks parents to share their experiences of living in the community.
The downturn means Future is consulting on a merger of two of the three London primaries. As a devoted Londoner, Foley finds this “really sad”. However, half of Future's four schools in Hertfordshire are increasing their capacity, reflecting the trend of migration from London.
Weaponization of Attendance
But attendance was a particular problem in an area where “large populations of white working-class parents often have very complex relationships with the state.”
A lot has changed since Foley's skiing days. He believes that outside London attendance is increasingly being used as a weapon against schools. Parents know that schools are under pressure to increase attendance. As soon as a disagreement arises, he will respond by saying 'I will not send the child back to school until this matter is resolved.'
“The parents saw that the emperor had no clothes on. Because schools have very limited authority over what they can do.”
Meanwhile, as someone who has struggled with the transition to secondary school, he has spearheaded a collaboration between primary and secondary schools in Pimlico to ease this transition.
He is using Reach's 'Cradle of Careers' framework, through which schools engage with local stakeholders from 0 to 21 years. He plans to apply this model to other schools.
“On the surface, we are working with the same family and dealing with the same issues. “It’s really upsetting to me that we have all this institutional and local knowledge of public institutions so close to us, but that information and best practice is never shared.”
Exclusion is also a controversial issue. The Mayor of London's Violence Reduction Department decided to lower the exclusion. But he believes the solution to serious behavior problems lies in “more money for schools” rather than “siloed departments in the mayor’s office.”
He said that if Future had the money to buy his own suspension unit, “we would do that in a heartbeat because we know they are safe when they are with us.”
And Foley knows all too well what it feels like to feel unsafe.
Reflecting on his time at Tottenham, Harris added: “It's really scary. Because it could have ended my career.
“But we changed that school. “I’m really proud of the work we did under very difficult circumstances.”