ABSTRACT
On one level it was hard to see what Karen, a bright woman who had gone back to college later – “They built it up slowly and convinced me I wasn’t stupid” – had got from her years at secondary school, except a sense that education wasn’t for her. There were no certificates to open doors to a better job, no sense either that she had started a journey she could continue. She was marked down for a job in a factory, then motherhood, and for those things a secondary education wasn’t really needed.
