A year ago, when I was investigating a piece on the inequality of UK schools, I stepped out my metropolitan bubble and went to visit schools in coastal towns, and cities in the Midlands, ex-industrial towns in the North as well as the more deprived areas around London. With all due acknowledgment that there are some fantastic schools in these places, the scale and extent of deprivation in many schools was truly shocking.
It wasn’t just the lack of teachers, wretchedly inadequate resources and buildings that didn’t look like they would pass any official inspection, but the frozen-out nature of these schools. They were places both the media and government had seemed to forget or deem not worth covering, and some of the stories were shocking.
