ABSTRACT
Whose fault is it when a school declines, and how do we know? The second question is clearer cut than the first: the first sign of a school’s decline is behaviour. It is evident to the people who work in the school that there is trouble by the sounds coming from classrooms and corridors, and frequently this disturbance is transmitted to the outside world by the conduit of an identifying school uniform. Children in the best schools in the country do awful things in uniform out of school hours, but there tends to be an increased prevalence of this when a school is in decline, and it is particularly evident at points where children congregate before and after the school day.
