I thought she was the coolest person I had ever met, and signed up immediately, in full knowledge that it was also by far the most expensive school I had got on my list of potentials.But things started to go rapidly downhill when I started my first term there. Wearing baggy Levis and chewing at a piece of grass, we shambled around the school farm, bakery (oh yes, indeed) and mixed-age dormitories (all part of the ethos of pastoral care the school espoused at every opportunity, though also, one presumed, a financially shrewd housing solution that entailed getting everybody to budge in alongside each other in the name of good conscience) My girl guide beamed with Bohemian incandescence. The girl who picked me up from the head’s office looked like a poster child for the progressive way. The tour would provide me with an opportunity to ask those questions that might be deemed impolitic if asked of the governing body.

In recognition of the libertarian principle, we were to walk around unaccompanied. How could it have been anything other than utterly spellbinding?In a bid to secure the deal, the admissions process also included a grand tour of the school’s campus, a task undertaken by a current pupil. The school’s founding fathers had been the principle architects of the Arts and Crafts movement. Hell, Daniel Day Lewis was an alumnus: he even learnt the basic tenets of carpentry that he would later employ on the set of The Crucible in the very workshops that I was standing in. Here was a school with an excellent musical department, a tailor-made arts and design centre, and a library to rival the Bodleian at Oxford. Having spent the previous four years at an international school in the Middle East, and amid mounting speculation that war was about to break out in the region, I was anxious to find an escape from a desert wasteland, in which the only cultural highlights had been the odd screening of a David Lean classic at the local British Consulate, and some really dire Gilbert and Sullivan productions enacted by an expatriate “choral group”.

That a teacher should have been able adequately to disguise his upbringing on the mean streets of South London must have shocked the teaching body to the core, duped as they were into believing that a filthy commoner – albeit a filthy commoner with a PhD from the University of St Andrews – was a resident of Skye.How laughable then, that the school hasn’t seen fit to use the opportunity to examine its own mythic status. For decades, Bedales, too, has been duping hundreds of students into believing that sheltered within its walls lies the very bedrock of a humanitarian education.They certainly succeeded in duping me when I first visited Bedales in June 1990, as a prospective student Perhaps I was an easy target. Here was a man who, far from being Scottish, had grown up in a two-bedroom semi on a council estate in Woolwich. Only here will its scholars be able fully to absorb and employ the Quaker principles upon which the school has based its near-120-year history: “Work of each for weal of all”.Last week, Dr Scott Peake, a popular classics teacher at the school, was forced to resign amid revelations that, despite his penchant for tweed, his lilting Hebridean accent and his apparent prowess as a shinty player, he is a 40-year-old fantasist who was actually concealing an alternative past. Are they reprimanded for being so louche in their greeting to a superior? Not at Bedales. If that’s how the student body address their peers, then that’s how they are expected to address their teachers.And it is by using exactly this approach,Bedales says, that it is instilling in its young charges the foundations of a truly progressive education. Elsewhere, one of the teaching staff cycles past a group of his English students “Hi, Graham,” they call as he peddles past.