The timing of Sammy Wright’s book couldn’t be better. The landslide victory of a progressive party and the evisceration of a government that repeatedly used education as a political football should be a good moment for some serious soul-searching about the state of our schools.
His journey through the history of English education, its relationship to class, and our exam culture, meets that challenge. Peppered with anecdotes about young people he has met or taught in his 21-year career, it is rich in analysis of the current problem and in solutions, too. Sadly, it also shows the depth of our malaise and how unlikely any government is to have the stomach for the scale of the reform needed.
