The hard school of education
Eric Anderson
I'm A TEACHER, GET ME OUT OF HERE by Francis Gilbert Short Books, £9.99, pp. 207, ISBN 1904095682 my only experience of a tough inner-city school was on teaching practice in 1959. With three or four other students I was sent to a Secondary Modern in the Tollcross area of Edinburgh, a grim building of blackened brick where every window was covered with wire-netting — on the inside since the danger was greater from that direction. I remember a careworn English teacher punctuating each stanza of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' by swinging his tawse (the leather belt which Scottish schoolmasters preferred to the cane) at the three principal trouble-makers whom he had seated together within reach. The arrival of student-teachers was the signal for several of the real teachers to go off sick, so we all found ourselves in at the deep end. Our one chance of survival was the headmaster, a splendid figure in gown and mortarboard, who stood at the classroom door and said in a loud voice, 'If you have any trouble, send the boy to me: I shall be glad to deal with him.'
That brief experience, before I swapped an urban clientele for an urbane one, at least allows me to confirm that Francis Gilbert's description of life in a dire innercity school rings absolutely true. It seems that discipline is even worse these days; that girls can be as disruptive now as boys and that the problem of language is more complex. Tol[cross pupils were largely incomprehensible to anyone who was not a native of the city, but at least they all spoke the same language, unlike Gilbert's rainbow coalition in London's East End. In schools, foul language was confined to the playground in the Fifties; not now. I liked this humane, funny, sharply observed book. Francis Gilbert started with the idealistic wish to make a real difference. After teaching practice in a primary school, which was 'a benign version of a Breughel depiction of Hell', and an inner-city school — where incidentally several regular teachers went off ill when the students arrived — he took his first job at Truss (real school: fictional name). At first he enjoyed riding his bicycle through the desolate council estate at dawn, through derelict streets strewn with litter and burnt-out cars and he did pretty well with the rough, tough, badly behaved but occasionally endearing 'kids' he had to teach. The school had a headmistress who seldom ventured out of her office, homework which 'rarely happened outside of policy documents' and a bizarre range of teachers, deftly sketched by Gilbert, The school came bottom of the national league tables with a 3 per cent success rate at GCSE during the year he was there. Social and family problems dwarf the educational problems in places like Truss and Gilbert quickly revised his idealistic hopes as he discovered the inadequacy of the educational nostrums of the day with all their jargon of 'classroom management', 'differentiation', 'directed talk', 'group work' and 'equal opps'. His conclusions are dead right. The inspectors who descend to 'inject their mind-numbing, target-driven, soulless ideology' do not help much. Nor do league tables, which cannot measure the real triumphs of such schools: those pupils persuaded to do better than could be expected. Success depends on 'permanent, hardworking teachers' like Sean, who reduces the schools 22-point code to the words 'I expect you to work and to behave', or Sharon, who cares enough to visit her pupils at home, or Gilbert himself, who has, he says, 'the ability to keep ploughing on'.
In fact he has a lot more than that. He is a born teacher and a good writer. He has an eye for detail and the telling phrase, writes a great deal of good sense and is in love with literature and with words. There would be nothing much wrong with our schools if every teacher was like him. But the social problems are harder to solve.
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