My only experience of a tough inner-city school was on teaching practice in 1959. With three or four other students I was sent to a Secondary Modern in the Tollcross area of Edinburgh, a grim building of blackened brick where every window was covered with wire-netting —on the inside since the danger was greater from that direction. I remember a careworn English teacher punctuating each stanza of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by swinging his tawse (the leather belt which Scottish schoolmasters preferred to the cane) at the three principal trouble-makers whom he had seated together within reach. The arrival of student-teachers was the signal for several of the real teachers to go off sick, so we all found ourselves in at the deep end. Our one chance of survival was the headmaster, a splendid figure in gown and mortarboard, who stood at the classroom door and said in a loud voice, ‘If you have any trouble, send the boy to me: I shall be glad to deal with him.’

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