ABSTRACT
I have never forgotten my first week as a young teacher fifteen years ago in an inner city comprehensive school belonging to Britain’s largest urban authority. On the second day the book stock given to me for a class of ‘remedial children’ consisted of thirty brand-new bibles. These were provided by the County Hall; the school had nothing to give me, so great had been the previous term’s destruction. Ten of the children needed special educational placement, one was psychotic and the remainder presented a formidable galaxy of problems. The school suffered repeated spasms of fire-raising. Professional life was nasty, brutish and short – many teachers left each year. Individual departments achieved social order, but often by violent means. Cliques among the staff complained to cabinet ministers in secret after-hours meetings that the school was a disaster – yet it was one of the most expensively staffed, best resourced and most carefully designed inner city schools in the country. In painting a turbulent picture in my first chapter, therefore, I have not exaggerated; I have presented a simplistic cartoon of the urban classroom jungle as it stirred the popular imagination, because it makes a good starting point for the following chapters, which have attempted to deepen the reader’s understanding, and my own, of what really was happening and what must happen in the future.
