ABSTRACT
Those were the seven hardest years of my life. They were shared with a staff as dedicated as you might ever hope to find. And yet somewhere we failed, and failed miserably. I do not think that we were bad teachers – certainly our inspection reports were never unfavourable, and those that have remained in the service are now in senior positions. On the other hand, I do not think we were lumbered with bad children. It seems to me now that the failure, the miserable failure, was in large part inevitable, being built into the very structure of the situation in a way which I did not understand, and which none of us understood (Kevin Harris, Teachers and Classes, 1982, p. 2).
