ABSTRACT
This article reflects on the process of innovation and change in a secondary comprehensive school for girls serving an inner city area. Originally a grammar school, it became a large comprehensive school that has suffered in recent years from falling rolls. The school had remained open largely due to the efforts, at a critical moment, of the local Asian community which wanted single sex education for their daughters. The school had a city-wide intake, with about a quarter of the pupils coming from ethnic minority groups; in the majority were pupils from Pakistani Muslim families. Only a small number of these pupils went on to higher education. There were no full-time teachers from ethnic minority groups when I took up my post; a parttime Pakistani teacher employed under Section 11 was paid on instructor rate to teach English and Urdu.
