I've just read "To Miss with Love". Is it really like that?

[ambivalentaboutmarmite]

Are all state secondary schools like this? Or is it just comprehensives? Or inner city schools? How on earth do the children have a chance at anything if all their lessons are disrupted by bad behaviour?

My children are at the start of primary at the moment - we live in a rural area with a few grammar and mostly comprehensive schools and I'm now worrying about what's ahead. Is the school in To Miss with Love really representative? Surely it can't all be like that?

I haven't read all of it, only extracts, but my rural comprehensive school is nothing like that! The troubled kids she describes do exist, certainly, but there's maybe one real hard nut per year - so about 4 in the school at any one time, given that they get excluded or sent on alternative provision. We're a large school but everybody knows who the problem students are, which shows they're relatively few.

My DH, who teaches in the same LA but nearer a city with very poor schools, finds his school attracts lots of students from said city and he has worse behaviour to deal with, although still has plenty of very good classes. To put it in context, in a year he has heard over 30 f-words said to his face. In eight years at my school I think it's happened to me once (and then not in a classroom but with an unknown child during break duty), and that child got suspended for it. Fighting is very rare in school and outright hostility or defiance almost never experienced. Low-level disruption is a different matter.

I agree with coastgirl - comprehensive schools vary greatly in terms of intake. I also think that quality of leadershp and ability to attract and retain good staff makes a big difference too.

'To Miss with Love' is a novel. The author Katharine Birbalsingh worked in several schools and has written about the most dramatic things she's seen and heard over her years of teaching. Her experiences didn't all occur at one school.

fantasy - just like that bl*dy rubbish Waterloo Road. This tosh really makes me

Sadly the book is being peddled as fact when in fact it is fiction. So by all means read it but remember is not true.

Katharine Birbalsingh was completely swooned recently by that greatest of schools ? and honestly, who wouldn?t?

I seem to remember having many arguments with various people here and elsewhere who know nuts about this school but keep insisting to me how arrogant the pupils of this school are, all born with the divine right to Oxbridge and other greatness in life, etc.

Well, Katharine has recently been to this school to find out for herself. Read her article she wrote for The Telegraph here here.

Well I've not read it - so this is not a comment on literary merit. But novels and works of fiction can and often do contain 'truths'. Charles Dickens with Oliver for example, or Ken Loach, with Cathy Comes Home, used fiction to raise many social issues.

Birbalsingh wrote a popular blog for a while, describing her experiences as a teacher. She has (I think) based much of her story on this.

Not at dd's school at any rate.

No-I wouldn't send them if it was!

Not all, of course, not.

But some are like that. And for me, the existence of even one is a fucking travesty for those children.

But apparently we can sweep schools such as these under the carpet as long as our own DCs don't do there.

I've just spotted that 'To Miss with Love' is Radio 4's Book of the Week on at 9.45am all this week.

"the existence of even one is a fucking travesty for those children"

But who has made it like that? It may be a travesty for the children who want to learn and achieve, but who is disrupting the classes?

Of course they shouldn't exist- but while there are parents and children who don't see the value of education -they will. A few disruptive DC will be pulled up by the rest, but if there are too many they pull the rest down.

There's an anecdotal book by Frank Chalk in a similar vein, "It's Your Time You're Wasting". Highly recommended.

Sadly some schools really are like this. I work in one - 5% of the students cause 100% of the trouble. If you're in the top sets you're pretty much OK, but if not ......

This is a very interesting interview with the author Katharine Birbalsingh.

'The middle class is disguising the failings of state schools in the inner city

"You have examples of children from comprehensive schools getting into Oxford and Cambridge, but too often it's down to middle-class parents who arrange private tutors and supervise their children's schoolwork. I have nothing but admiration for such parents, but the kids I'm worried about are the working classes, the ethnic minorities.""

She also makes an interesting point about teachers.

"As for good teachers, because they can control unruly classes, they are wont to look down on those that can't. "So we say the problem is not the system, it's crap teachers. But that just sustains the system. The point is no school is going to fill itself with outstanding teachers, so it needs a system that supports the weaker teachers."

I read KB's column in Torygraph and she said her publishers were too worried about identifying pupils, so she had to 'fictionalise' things to protect them - which she says she didn't want to, hence the 'fiction' jibe. But she says it's essentially true in what happened etc.