Hampstead and Kilburn MP Tulip Siddiq delivering her speech at the UCL Academy [Peter Mason]

CAMDEN’S only academy secondary school has celebrated its 10th birthday with speeches from university professors, performances from students and a visit from MP Tulip Siddiq.

UCL Academy in Swiss Cottage, sponsored by the university, opened at the top of Adelaide Road in September 2012.

It followed lengthy debates over whether it should have opened south of Euston Road to meet demand for school places there and not put extra pressure on Haverstock and Quintin Kynaston, and why a new secondary needed an outside sponsor.

This was all water under the bridge last Wednesday, however, when visitors praised an ambitious curriculum and its links with the world famous university in Bloomsbury.

Speaking at the birthday celebration, Tulip Siddiq, MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, told the audience: “It’s a busy day in parliament. I said to our whips today that I really wanted to come to UCL Academy to just show how much I value the community here, the students, the staff, the senior leadership team and also UCL for all the support you’ve given to Camden schools.”

She added: “During the Covid years we really realised, all of us who are not teachers, what it is to teach young children at home all day. I’d much rather be a politician, I have to say. But we really do value the work you put in. We know that you work very long hours. We know that you don’t always receive the support that you should from people in positions of authority in government – but we are on your side.”

Ms Siddiq added that she was “very proud” that there were 60 home languages spoken by students at the school and “all the institutions” in the area, including the neighbouring Swiss Cottage Special School.

Ms Siddiq with staff and students at the school [Peter Mason]

Co-principal Simon McBride said: “I’m deeply touched by the number of people who have given up their afternoons to be with us. “We can go further and deeper in the education of the whole person and all of that is built on the community that we have here. We have such a wide range of backgrounds in the school but I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface yet of that richness and contribution that the wider community can make in the school.”

The UCL Academy’s first principal, Geraldine Davies, who was in charge at the school for six years, added: “It’s absolutely wonderful to see how the school has grown and matured and developed, taken off in different directions, but the core values that UCL set out are still here.”

The plans for the academy school were approved by the Lib Dem and Tory coalition which ran Camden for four years, with Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children moved out to a new site in King’s Cross.

Professor I was heckled

Professor Michael Worton, who is vice-provost at UCL and initially set up the academy, was also at the birthday celebration.

He told the New Journal he was “very pleased” that he was able “to plant the seed” and praised the staff for their hard work. Professor Worton said: “The social skills that [the pupils] are gaining here are coming out of the curriculum. It’s changing their lives in a way that curriculum alone can’t.”

He added that the diversity in the student population was another key ambition that the school had realised. But not everyone agreed with his vision for an academy when it was backed by the Con/Lib Dem Coalition government.

Professor Worton said: “It was hard. I was trying to explain what we were and I’d be heckled by people who were just fighting it for political reasons because it was seen as a Lib Dem idea. It was all kind of politicised. “I kept saying, can we please talk about education? I can understand why because we were taking risks, but we had done a lot of work.”

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