Where do you see yourself in ten years time? It’s a question that haunts many Cambridge students, and few have a concrete idea about what their answer might be, save for the odd fantasy about a Marylebone townhouse replete with an Aga oven and Farrow & Ball everything. Fewer still would imagine themselves to be living in a decidedly unglamorous and somewhat grey suburb of southwest London.

But Feltham, in the London borough of Hounslow, is exactly where Cantabrigian Ed Vainker has found himself. Just two miles south of Heathrow Airport, local estate agents have previously had something of a hard sell. Thanks to Vainker, however, their fortunes might be on the up.

Reach Academy Feltham, founded by Vainker and partners in 2012, is the latest free school to be rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted. The inspector found that Vainker had provided the school with “excellent leadership”, and “a sense of excitement generated by pupils enjoying their learning.” Not bad for a project that hasn’t even reached its second birthday.

Free schools, which were launched by the government in 2010, are schools set up and controlled by local groups, such as parents or private companies. They are funded by the taxpayer but are not governed by the local authority.

In recent months, this localised approach has been the subject of considerable bad press: notably, the allegations about the infiltration of Islamic extremism into a chain of academies in Birmingham. Michael Gove has come under fire for earmarking under-performing free schools to be fast-tracked for special attention, so great will be the potential political embarrassment if they fail.

Reach Academy is one free school that Gove doesn’t need to worry about. The school is unusual in that it wasn’t founded by parents in a certain area; in fact, Vainker had no particular attachment to Feltham before arriving two years ago.

“We were committed to serving a community of social need…not a leafy community. Also, we wanted to be in a place where there was a shortage of school places.”

Serving through education has been at the core of Vainker’s career since leaving Cambridge. After graduating from Downing with a degree in History in 2002, he stayed on for a year to be the College’s Schools Liaison Officer, before joining Teach First.

He then moved to Washington DC to work for an international network of Teach First programs. His work took him to visit schools around the world, including ones in China, Lebanon and Australia, to name but a few. Suffice to say, he certainly has a more well-rounded view of education than most.

When the free school policy was announced, Vainker got in touch with Jon McIntosh, a friend from Cambridge who had founded Reach Cambridge, a programme of summer residential camps. They decided to go into education together. “We handed in about a 450-page document [to the Department for Education], which was […] apparently laughed at for being too long, but we’d actually edited stuff out,” he tells me. Their diligence paid off, and in September 2010 they welcomed in their first cohort of students.

But what is it that makes Reach Feltham unique? As a school, it has a number of notable characteristics: it is “all-through”, taking children from the age of four all the way to 18; they have a longer school day (from 9am to 4pm); the teachers are young (the oldest is 36), and there is a strong emphasis on high expectations.

“In some schools...there is a focus on getting five A-C English and Maths [GCSEs]…but a C grade at GCSE is not a passport to more choices, and the level of competence that it shows is not high. The problem is that there’s an expectation that that’s what children will aspire to”.

“For us, it was important that the expectation is much, much higher, so our expectation and our aspiration is that our children will get As and Bs [at] A Level, As at GCSEs, and we’re really aspiring to that and we’re working towards that.”

The combination of academic rigour and a vibrant atmosphere is refreshing. As Vainker rightly identifies, schools are often judged by how many students achieve an A*-C grade at GCSE, so teachers often focus on improving the prospects of a D/C student, rather than pushing the more able students.

The school’s ethos is clear, and all the more so thanks to the helpful array of buzzwords and acronyms that they’ve implemented. Ishita, a remarkably confident and articulate Year Seven student, talks me through the “Payslip” system.

“Every week we start with 75 on our payslip, and we get merits in class for anything good we do and accordingly we get demerits if we do something bad.” I learn that merits are worth two points and demerits are minus two. “Detentions reduce five points from your payslip and Step 1 and Step 2 are further forms of detention that reduce more points, like minus 10, minus 20, and exclusion is minus 30.”

These are just the basics of a complex system that also includes: AWPR (Act Worthy of Public Recognition), TANC (Homework should be on Time, Accurate, Neat, Complete) and DEAR (Drop Everything And Read). Even the school’s name, Reach, stands for “Respect, Endeavour, Aspire, show Courage and Have fun’”

It would be easy to mock the school’s predilection for snappy, soundbite-friendly systems of organisation, but if anything it seems to bond the school closer, fostering a sense of community around this in-house terminology.

The school is not without its detractors. “We didn’t have a particularly positive reaction from [local] schools,” Vainker tells me. He admits that there was only a shortage for the primary school when they opened. For the eleven-plus intake, the opening of Reach Academy increased the proportion of children being educated locally, perhaps attracting the more affluent families who would have previously moved to neighbouring boroughs for their children’s education.

Vainker, unsurprisingly, refutes this: “It’s impossible to know for sure. In secondary, we have a higher proportion of children on free school meals than the local average […] we didn’t set the school up to become a middle class enclave, and that’s why we put it here. We’ve got a very diverse cohort.”

Reach Academy is intriguing. Despite its progressive and liberal atmosphere, with a student body that is clearly engaged and excited, it is at its core a steadfastly traditional institution. The range of subjects on offer is fairly narrow and academic, and students follow strict rules. Vainker’s Cambridge education is evident in the expectation of high academic achievement at school and beyond. Whether or not the school reaches its lofty aims remains to be seen, but it has certainly already started the climb.

Reach Academy is now recruiting for Teacher Fellows. See their website for more details.