A class act | 2 May 2019

Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well as an acclaimed poet (awarded an MBE in 2018 for services to literature) who has nurtured a generation of successful young migrant writers.

In 2006 she was one of the judges for the Foyle young poets of the year award. Seven years later, seeing how the winners were scything through Oxbridge and networking ‘like an artsy version of the Bullingdon Club’, she wanted the same opportunities for her own pupils, ‘not just the poetry, but the sense of entitlement’.  She was teaching at a comprehensive in east Oxford, a generally unloved institution, ‘record-breakingly under-subscribed’, where more than 50 languages were spoken. Some pupils were born in Britain to parents from Commonwealth countries, some were migrants from eastern Europe or South America and others were refugees from war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Clanchy describes the school as ‘a gathering point for one of the most mixed communities ever to function on
the earth’.

She was sad but resigned that none of her poetry group won Foyle prizes that first time,  — until she scrutinised photographs of the winners and realised that they were all white, many, she discovered, from boarding schools. She concluded that they shared a landscape of aproned, cake-making grandmothers, deck chairs and copies of the National Geographic. ‘This was the landscape that was recognised as poetic.’

Clanchy complained and lobbied and continued to work with her pupils, convinced that their loss of country, and in many cases close family members, could be a gain to them as poets. The shock of dislocation ‘made them listen to their inner voice’. And she was proved resoundingly to have been right.