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  • Yob Nation Extract — Part 1

    The firework exploded at our feet in the grotty north London playground. Three white boys snarled with laughter from behind the hoods of their green parkas. One of them chucked another firework in our direction. It fizzled and snapped. My brother and I retreated, but my father, in a tough-guy Marks and Spencer anorak, approached…

  • The Times’ Review of ‘Yob Nation’ — Diary of a plagued society by LEO MCKINSTRY

    FEAR OF CRIME CASTS AN increasingly dark shadow over modern British society. We seem to be beset by problems such as binge-drinking, drug-taking, antisocial behaviour, aggressive mugging, and gang warfare. Many liberal commentators have argued that this perceived decline in social cohesion is an illusion, fuelled by a reactionary press and nostalgia for a mythical…

  • The Famous Biographer and the Cheeky Waiter

    It’s a cold, rainy Friday evening. I scooter through town, clattering along bus lanes and over the pavement, nod a polite hello to my great-great grandfather’s sculpture Eros at Picadilly Circus, and arrive at a posh hotel, where a famous biographer and his husband greet me warmly in the lobby. I’ve known him for years…

  • Unsentimental education — Book Review

    IS THERE ANYTHING new to say about public schools? Some great books have been written about them, most notably Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious and devastating satire Decline and Fall (1928) and William Golding’s fable about public school morality, Lord of the Flies (1954). These classics, and a raft of others, portrayed these revered, eltitist institutions as…

  • Finally, freedom

    The door of my classroom crashed open as I was explaining the different media techniques used on the front cover of a controversial "election issue" New Statesman. My GCSE class swung their heads around in shock. "Been kicked out again!" shouted Jon. "So I’ve come to join in your lesson!" As head of English, part…

  • New suit, new tie, new person

    First day back after half-term, and everyone is astonished at how smart I am: I am wearing a new black suit with those trendy small lapels and a longish cut, a new swish tie with silky red stripes, and I have a neat, short back and sides haircut. L in the office says I look…

  • Scooter At The Opera

    I took my scooter to the Opera this week. It was the first time my scooter had ever been there, and only my second trip. I asked the check-in lady whether she had ever checked in a muddy push scooter at the Royal Opera House before. She said with a wry smile that she hadn’t.…

  • Lost Worlds

    My father remembers how different things were when he was a child growing up in Northumberland: ‘I can remember when there was a bakery at Christon Bank, in the village near where my parents lived. I can still recall the smell of baking bread early in the morning, and buying the bread from the bakery…

  • Racing Ahead in Iran

    On Saturday my stepmother and her sister, Shaheen, invited us to dinner. They cooked us Iranian food: amazing rice dishes and soup with saffron and pasta, yoghurt and cucumber sauce, fried aberguine. It was delicious. My stepmother is Iranian, as is Shaheen, who is visiting for a few months. Shaheen had invited around the son…

  • Panic!

    Yesterday I saw Chicken Little with my five-year-old. I had been expecting to hate it but I actually laughed out loud at the beginning of the film. In it, Chicken Little — just like Chicken Licken — panicks when he thinks a piece of the sky has fallen on his head, waking up the whole…

  • New Website

    This is the day that I launch my website!

  • Terrorists attack

    Finally, they have come. They have attacked. At the latest count, there are nearly forty dead. It is a traumatic time. I am in school when it happens. I see it come over the phone in the form of a text message from the Guardian. Explosions near Aldgate. Other people at work have heard differently.…

  • A Window on the Heart of Africa

    The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s website was not encouraging. It advised against all but essential travel to the state I was now rattling through in a beat-up Nissan taxi. I was in Bayelsa, in the Niger Delta, a remote region of Nigeria: taking hostages for ransom had occurred here. Near by, local youths had invaded…

  • Who examines the examiners?

    SHAKING HIS HEAD IN exasperation, my pupil, Nicolas Christodoulou, 16, asked if he could write an e-mail of complaint to the exam board, AQA. It was a bleak February morning and my English class had just read the “pre-release anthology” issued to all candidates studying GCSE English. The idea was for students to read the…

  • … as any teacher can tell you

    Phil Smith was the man who sorted out the yobs… and I desperately needed him. I was in my first year of teaching, and I had just encountered my most unruly class. Halfway through my lesson, the pupils began to shout obscenities at the top of their voices, they then proceeded to push all the…

  • The senior teacher made it clear: it must be my fault if the children behaved badly

    I gulped, finally I was going to tell the truth. "The thing is, I just don’t think I am coping with some of the classes," I said with my head bowed. Simon Filer, the senior manager to whom I was confessing this in an empty classroom, blinked and then tapped his pen against the desk.…

  • Terrorists attack

    Finally, they have come. They have attacked. At the latest count, there are nearly forty dead. It is a traumatic time. I am in school when it happens. I see it come over the phone in the form of a text message from the Guardian. Explosions near Aldgate. Other people at work have heard differently.…

  • Class warfare

    I actually clapped my hands in agreement and sympathy as I finished watching this documentary. I had been expecting an over-sensationalised picture of classroom violence and mayhem, but instead, I watched an incisive, analytical programme which was all the more shocking because it was so rational. It was not Big Brother meets The Blackboard Jungle,…

  • Kelly gives Labour its best day this term

    Far from being the worst day in Labour’s second term – the New Statesman’s Richard Reeves described it as "the biggest domestic policy failure" of this parliament – the Education Secretary’s rejection of the Tomlinson Report makes it their best. The educational establishment’s howl of fury at Ruth Kelly’s education White Paper, published on Thursday,…

  • One rogue pupil held up my class for a year

    The way that Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, has attempted to discipline the wayward Prince Charles makes me wonder how he would have dealt with Lancel Hendricks – one of the most difficult pupils I have ever taught. Mr Clarke is fuming because he believes that the Prince’s views about education are "old-fashioned and out…

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