ABSTRACT
I was born in 1958. I belong to the generation that struggled behind that which came of age in the 1960s, which seemed to have broken down society’s traditional barriers and bagged all the interesting jobs – one of Richard Hell’s ‘blank generation’ who wallowed in punk and unemployment as Margaret Thatcher set out to unravel the welfare state. Or so it seemed when in 1980 I was thrown off the conveyor belt of education and had to find a job. With hindsight, however, the balance of idealism and angst of the late 1970s seems a truly creative time in which to have attended university, the first of my family to do so: student grants were never so good again, and I had been suited to a schooling that had directed me exclusively to that end. Mine was a very exam-focused, classroom-based education that had survived virtually unaltered since my schools were built, all of them in the 1950s. My brother, eleven years younger (I was planned), had a very different experience. Between us we span the history of local authority education in a working-class suburban area from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s.
