ABSTRACT
The pressures of unrealistic expectations from mainstream schools is making survival in a ‘difficult’ school ever more difficult. Teachers are increasingly blamed for the more complex failures of the educational system, with its inappropriate curriculum, its failure to compensate for harsh home backgrounds of pupils with low levels of literacy and numeracy. Teachers are increasingly squeezed. Being asked to be more accountable for the professional task they do is not necessarily a bad thing, but being asked to take the lion’s share of the blame for complex failures of the system, in which they are only one group of the many stakeholders, is blatantly unfair.
