“Hide the fact / You are alienated” commands Priya, a schoolgirl poet taught by Kate Clanchy, who considers her life as a migrant. “Chew on the candy floss. / It melts in your mouth. Such foreign stuff!” The poets Clanchy has nurtured at the comprehensive where she teaches in Oxford are now well known. They’ve won poetry competitions and been included in her anthology England: Poems from a School. In Some Kids I Taught Clanchy has set out to tell the story of how this happened, while analysing the wider educational landscape in Britain over the past 20 years.
Her teaching career began in the early 1990s in London, Scotland and Essex. There’s a rather moving chapter contrasting her attempts at sex education in the three places, confronted with ignorance and homophobia, which entailed (surely no teacher could do this now?) taking one of her sixth formers to the GAY nightclub to celebrate his coming out. The decades since have been spent in Oxford, working in a series of state secondaries. She’s also had children herself, and describes with helpful honesty her deliberations about whether to send her “delicate, clever, between-class sprogs” to the school where she teaches: “the choosing year, I often seem to find myself in school standing at the bottom of a staircase listening to the harsh noise of descending teenagers and looking for my son’s peers”.
Passages like this would be easy to satirise, but thankfully Clanchy is aware of her status as a liberal meddler. “I still want to change the world,” she writes, “and think that school is an excellent place to do it.” However, she worries about whether she’s “a posh do-gooder, a Victorian lady on a mission who has not noticed that her message is obscured by her person, and the injustices of class which she embodies”.
I worried about this too, but I remained convinced that her efforts are worthwhile. The book’s weakness is also its strength: the specificity of Clanchy’s perspective. She’s white, middle-class and private school educated and makes no attempt to hide it. Her insights therefore avoid the vague generalisations we might find in a government report and come with the practical wisdom of a teacher on the ground – “a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper, or an acrobat”. For those of us who haven’t been in a classroom for some time, she successfully evokes the full sensorium of school life.
Clanchy admits to her own prejudice: not just prejudice she’s overcome but prejudice she retains. She seems right to believe that after teaching so many students from so many countries she isn’t racist. But she remains not just frustrated but repelled by the more complacent examples of the white working class, and therefore all the more frustrated by the rigidity of the class structure. Take Cheyenne, for example, an angry 15-year-old who develops the disturbing habit of stalking Clanchy at the weekend, taunting her because her family’s ordinary clothes and bikes contrast with the shininess of Cheyenne’s own. Clanchy sympathises with Cheyenne, who is perplexed that goods and status are so wonkily aligned, but she also fears her “mean mouth” and “the class hate she carries with her”.
It’s through Cheyenne and children like her that Clanchy makes the case against church and grammar schools, which is the most passionate argument in the book. The arguments against allowing these schools to take the best students from comprehensives are well known, but she shows what this feels like for the teachers and students in an undesirable comprehensive: the feeling that there’s no point trying because the people with any hope of succeeding (the people for whom A-levels were designed in the first place) are elsewhere. The experience of Clanchy’s son at the school where she teaches provides a revealing case study. He enjoys his time there and gets his A*s at GCSE, as good students in bad schools have been shown to generally manage to do. But he leaves for a different sixth form to take his A-levels, because the way schools are funded means that only those with large numbers of motivated, academically adept students are able to offer a wide range of A-level subjects, resulting in further segregation. Clanchy demonstrates why this is so and why it’s a problem that it is.
When it comes to other political matters, her partial, experience-driven perspective can be more frustrating. Her thoughts on the hijab, for example, feel a little underdeveloped. One of the book’s most passionate cases is for teaching creative writing as a major part of secondary English teaching. She’s right to point out that art and music students learn through practice and imitation but that when it comes to writing, students are required only to critique the writing of others. Clanchy is convinced that she’s not offering therapy when she teaches writing. She does not clarify what she’s offering instead, but it seems to be a confidence in self-expression and an alert yet intuitive kind of reading. It’s clear that for the students she quotes it has provided moral and emotional growth. As the curriculum gets more drearily objective driven, inspiring teachers become more constrained. The liberal ethos has its own restrictions, but it may still be the best we have. We need people like Clanchy to keep these ideals alive.
Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me is published by Picador (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.