In June 2007 Salisbury School in Enfield became the first state secondary school to be taken over by private management. Follow the first six months of the experiment with this whole-school video for secondary headteachers.
The three-year, £1.2 million contract to manage the north London school was awarded to Edison UK, a subsidiary of an American-owned education firm, with the fee being directly related to school achievement.
According to executive headteacher Trevor Averre-Beeson, the secret behind school improvement is similar to the way profitable businesses such as Tesco have achieved success; they found a successful formula and repeated it.
Staff at Salisbury School were initially sceptical about this corporate philosophy, but with time many have started to respond positively to a more business-oriented culture, as seen in this performance-management video.
