Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  Nice leftie middle-class parents are in theory an asset to a school because they bring high expectations and because their children are usually quick to learn and easy to teach. With any luck, we might become governors, start an after-school club, help. I do see parents like this, but in our primary school we are also often fusspots, uselessly at loggerheads with the teachers. We fuss because our expectations are unsettled. We don’t have personal experience of large classes, multiculturalism, dinner money, and it disconcerts us. We want a school like we went to ourselves, but not: more sport, but no exclusion from sport; more languages, more selection, more setting, yet also more equality.

  The more time I spend in the Inclusion Unit, the harder I find it to sympathize when my fellow primary parents murmur about special needs – why is their child not deemed to have any, when he is so very good at maths – and about behaviour, for though their children are scruffy, and swear, they still don’t want them sitting next to the one with real meltdowns, the one who hits. They fuss about ‘cultural exclusion’ in a C of E assembly, yet band tightly together and never ask a child in hijab home for tea. I hate it, above all, when they mutter about the teachers, who are not as educated as they are, have not read enough, use language coarsely, are not of their class. ‘It must have been nice for you to have a clever person like me to teach,’ I hear Isaac observe to the faithful and hard-working Mrs D as he leaves for private school.

  And now Oldest One is in Year 6, choosing a secondary school, and we fussy parents are working ourselves into a frenzy over the choice. Where shall we send our delicate, clever, between-class sprogs? Which school should be so lucky as to receive them? Where indeed? The line-up, as I see it, hasn’t changed much since I was a trainee teacher here, twenty-five years previously. There are the private schools: two highly academic; two less so but sporty; two to pick up the sensitive ones; one for those who can’t spell. They are famously successful, most of these schools, and in our rich little city many children go to them – about a quarter of the children who live inside the ring road. But they are unaffordable, and seem too, to both my husband and I, to be unrecognizable as the sort of school we went to – repulsively pressured, in fact, and horribly socially exclusive.

  Then there are the state schools, impoverished already, of course, by the loss of that 25 per cent. There is the famously good comp, and the good comp, both defended by a thicket of estate agents’ boards – but we live too far away to get into either of them. Near us is the Catholic school, the decent comp, and, nearest of all, my school, the one with Cheyenne and the Inclusion Unit, with Miss B and Miss T and Miss A and its bright, brand-new head – the school I am already beginning to love. But: ‘You couldn’t send him there,’ said my nearest neighbour. ‘So cute, and with his little French horn. Might as well put a sign saying “Hit me” round his neck. The problem,’ she went on, ‘is that that school has become a sort of bin. All the really bad kids at our school?’ (She has good children at the good comp.) ‘They send them down there.’

  Alas, poor Oldest One, by virtue of age pioneer of the family: my bookish, quiet, beautiful boy. He must walk first, with his wide eyes wide, into adolescence, into a school where the kids are full height, where they have bosoms and beards; just as he has obediently walked first, with careful, stilted steps, into every nursery, drop-in centre, park, friendship. Now he must also go, the first of his family on either side for a thousand generations, as Neil Kinnock said of the Kinnocks, to a state secondary. Can we really add to that that he must go to the least desired school in the neighbourhood, the one on the wrong side of the Wall? The choosing year, I often seem to find myself in school standing at the bottom of a staircase listening to the harsh noise of descending teenagers and looking for my son’s peers.

  Because if I believe that the class divide is bad and that schooling is a vital chance to dissolve it, if I deplore the Wall, then I should send my son here, to our local school. But: ‘This isn’t a comprehensive school,’ says Miss B, kind and frank and frustrated. ‘It doesn’t have a top. You can look at the stats, cut them any way you like. We don’t get the middle-classes. We don’t get the brighter kids.’ She speaks only the truth. Nationally, about 40 per cent of pupils at the end of the final year of primary school are Level 5 in Maths and English, cleverer than expected. In our school’s intake, it is fewer than 10 per cent. Nationally, 20 per cent are Level 3, that is, not at the ‘expected level’, not really ready for secondary; for us, it is 40 per cent. My son is Level 6.

  On paper, I remind myself, on paper: many of our students arrive late, have hidden qualities, blossom. Here, lumbering down the stairs with an enormous school bag, is Mattias, the strangely brilliant Hungarian, behind him some serious-looking Poles. And here is Emily, the pastor’s daughter, my very favourite student, with her precious violin, the only one for miles. She looks OK. And, here, actually, are the famously brainy Year 9 twins, chatting to each other, carrying briefcases, neatly combed. I know their mother. She is from my side of the Wall and believes you should send your child to the local school, no compromises. Her boys look fine. But there’re two of them: a portable peer group. What if my son came alone, without a single primary school friend? Already, I know that one best friend is going to a private school; another to a state school outside the ring road, three bus rides away, a good school, a white school.

  Though this is a class divide, not a racial one. I don’t fear the Somali and Ghanaian and Afghan kids thundering past me in hijabs and dishdashas and diamanté baseball caps – and I don’t believe my middle-class friends do, either. In England, social classes fear each other more than racial groups do, because that is where the history is, the abuse. I fear Darren, looming out from behind Mo and Imam. Darren from the Art Project. Darren, also from the estate. Enormous Darren with his belly and huge hands and huge shout and his eyes darting everywhere for offence. Darren with the father and older, even larger, brother in prison.

  And I fear Cheyenne, popping up beside me again, asking about my children, asking about my shoes. Cheyenne and her mean mouth, leaking insults at Emily, who doesn’t seem to hear. I fear Cheyenne and the class hate she carries with her. I know she has a point, and it’s not her fault; on the other hand, it isn’t my kid’s fault, either.

  If the problem, as Cheyenne points out, is not actual money but habits of mind, not access to school but the wish to learn, what should we do about it? How do we, as a school or as a nation, educate Cheyenne, get her to adopt middle-class habits such as reading, homework, and long-term ambition, without alienating her from her family? How do you induce her to go through the difficulties and deferred gratifications of studying when everyone around her would say that did not work for them?

  There are a lot of suggestions around, for this is the late noughties, and the educational plight of disadvantaged children is beginning to be clarified as their underperformance emerges, unchanging and solid as a rock, from the new, swirling floods of computerized school data. Mossbourne Academy in Hackney has just released its first, stunning set of GCSE results and the papers are full of the remarkable effects of strict uniform, silent corridors, and – this seems to pique every journalist’s attention – silent ping pong at the beginning of the day, on a motley bunch of Hackney kids. (Actually, Mossbourne did a lot of nurture groups and reading recovery too, but that doesn’t make the headlines.) The latest thinking is: merciless challenge, rigid boundaries, drastically raised expectations.

  A wave of new academies is breaking across the country in a foam of shiny, man-made blazers, this being the easiest part of the Mossbourne recipe to imitate. Miss B goes for an interview in one of them and tells the new head about the IU. He leans back in his new leather chair and says, ‘Touchy feely understanding? What about a bit of challenge?’ It takes three years for this delightful individual’s school to fail its Ofsted and for him to be ignominiously sacked, but longer for his words to leave Miss B, for her standards were always high and always challenging. It’s just tha
t the IU acknowledged that for some kids, very simple things were challenging.

  Miss T, though, Cheyenne’s English teacher, is Mossbourne in her own diminutive, high-heeled person. She is as famous through the school as Miss B, though they are regarded as rather opposite phenomena. Miss B teaches the whole person, then her subject; Miss T is resolutely only interested in English Literature. Miss B understands everything about the students’ background and always bears it in mind; Miss T proceeds as if that background did not exist. Miss B is warm, jokey, and available all hours; Miss T is glamorous and terrifying, and delivers her elegant, exhausting lessons in a classroom laid out in rows, dishing out detentions for yawning. Students run to Miss B in tears; but stagger out of Miss T’s classroom as the bell rings, clutching their foreheads as if some fundamental rearrangement had taken place. Both Miss B and Miss T, interestingly, are working-class girls who misbehaved at school. Both are living proof that there is not one single path to being an excellent teacher, getting extraordinary results, or being very loved – neither silent ping pong nor nurture groups. Both get on with me, but not with each other, like the opposing magnets they are.

  But they are both keen on my new lunchtime Poetry Group; Miss B for the personal development, and Miss T for the literature. And both suggest it to Cheyenne, and Cheyenne comes, comes regularly, and interrupts the cosy camaraderie I was beginning to establish, by staring at us all impassively with one pencilled eyebrow raised, rarely writing anything at all. What is she even doing there?

  Perhaps, says Miss B, perhaps Cheyenne just wants to come on the trip. Because we’ve booked a day out of school, at a literary festival. Trips, Miss B has taught me, are a huge deal for a kid like Cheyenne. Because here is an effect of deprivation that is far worse than generally imagined: poor children don’t travel. Over the years I work at our school, I take several into the historic city centre who have never been there before, though it is only twenty minutes away on the bus. It is as if there are real walls round the edge of the council estate, with checkpoints. Cheyenne has never, she confides during a lesson on Thomas Hardy, been on a train.

  Miss B took the IU out frequently, taking advantage of every free offer going. Once, we took the kids to Somerset House in London, and somehow I got left in the top gallery, the one that’s like a sumptuous sitting room, with Vikki and Dave. Vikki was keen on the images of ladies in hats; Dave was in thrall to the surfaces of the oil paintings, the clear slicks of colour without so much as a brush mark. Together, they sat on a red plush seat and held hands, in a room filled with the floating light of the Thames, and looked at their reflections in the gilt-framed mirror. It felt like a moment of joy and expansion, a whole new idea, the sudden abolition of the Wall.

  On the other hand, I remember taking my Essex students to Cambridge, their visible unease among the beautiful buildings I thought would attract them. ‘They was too much for us, Kate,’ said Zoe, who I thought ought to apply to King’s, ‘you can feel them looking down on you.’ Super-brainy Zoe, who explained to me that the reason she was finding it difficult to plan for university was because she had never met anyone, other than teachers, who had actually been there. Zoe, who refused to apply to Cambridge, and went, despite my warnings of green wellies, to Exeter, and rang me from a pay phone the first week saying help, all the girls here have been abroad, and none of them can cook. Lovely Zoe, who always had a point.

  But, says Miss B, looking at the festival invite, with kids like Cheyenne you have to be resilient.

  Miss T says, with kids like Cheyenne you must offer them the best. The very best. Like Shakespeare.

  And I say, OK.

  And so we put Cheyenne’s name on the list, pass it under the raised eyebrows of her form teacher and the Deputy Head, and indeed, on the festival bus, our hearts swell with pride when we turn the corner of the road and show Cheyenne our destination: a real, a top-drawer, an honestly Jacobean castle, golden as a fresh-baked cake on its very own shimmering silver plate of a moat. And what does she think of that! She chews a lock of hair, her eyes blacker than ever. ‘Nah,’ she says. ‘That ain’t beautiful. Why did you say it was going to be beautiful? It ain’t beautiful at all.’

  Worse, when she is there, Cheyenne and some other students disrupt a session with a young writer, a beautiful and clever young woman who has given up her time to talk pro bono to disadvantaged children about her witty, clever, top-drawer, silver-plate book. I speak to the writer afterwards, tearful by the moat, and try to console her, but I can see that I am not succeeding. She has been humiliated, ripped into like a young teacher in training. Cheyenne has sprayed her with the full force of her class hatred, and she can’t wipe it off. She won’t give up her time again.

  So is the castle beautiful, as it seemed to Miss B, or just an embodiment of money, privilege, and exclusion, as it seemed to Cheyenne? Is King’s College Chapel beautiful or ‘just looking down on us’, as it seemed to Zoe? And if they aren’t, is even poetry beautiful, as it seems to me; or Shakespeare an essential good, as it seems to Miss T; or classical music a spiritual force, as it seems to be already, so powerfully, to my son?

  I am not a relativist. I believe the castle is essentially beautiful; not for the rich family that lives in it, but for its shape, its placement in the landscape, its stonework, its mullions, its gardens – each of which represents hundreds and thousands of acts and thoughts of men who were not rich; each of which is a work of art. I believe in poetry and Shakespeare in the same way some people believe in God. I take Bach, by extension, on trust. Cheyenne does not disturb that belief essentially – but she has put her chapped finger with its elaborate nail extension once again squarely on one of my self-doubts: whether I am a posh do-gooder, a Victorian lady on a mission who has not noticed that her message is obscured by her person, and the injustices of class which she embodies.

  Sometimes, I can see that question on the faces of the school staff too. If I want to work among them, I should be more like them: more a teacher than a writer. I should be like Miss A, who graduated from Cambridge thirty years ago and has done nothing ever since except teach uncompromisingly excellent lessons; she has shown more children the beauty of poetry than any visiting writer ever could. I should be more like Mr H, the geography teacher, who takes minibus after minibus out of school to show children in hijabs the beautiful and ancient things of the English countryside – the White Horse, Stonehenge, Durdle Door – with the same indefatigable patience that he later uses to swim the Channel, backstroke. Above all, if I want to show Cheyenne that I see her as equal to my children, I should send my child to school alongside her, however afraid I might be.

  Miss T says: it isn’t treating Cheyenne as an equal if you make exceptions for her. That’s a double standard, a low expectation. If she behaved badly on that trip, you should report it.

  So I make a report of Cheyenne to her form teacher. Miss C listens and nods. She is an extremely patient woman and Cheyenne takes up a lot of her time. Cheyenne, she says, is particularly difficult right now because she isn’t well. The problem, well, one of the problems, is her teeth. The molars on both sides of her mouth are so profoundly rotted and infected that they have to be removed under general anaesthetic. She has to have, at fifteen years old, false teeth. In fact, Cheyenne is going into hospital next week and will be absent for Poetry Group, if that is any consolation to me.

  It isn’t much of a consolation to me. It isn’t much consolation to her form teacher, either; you can tell by the way she is whispering, her eyes down. She is a mother, I am a mother, and we both have our hands over our mouths. We are holding down the thought: what sort of mother did that? Never took her daughter to the dentist, not once, never brushed her teeth? Because Cheyenne has been entitled to free dental care since the day she was born, just as she has been entitled to free swimming pool entry, and library books, and never used those, either.

  Oh, Mr Booth, Mr Rowntree, poverty has survived every reform you could have imagined, and a few you cou
ldn’t. Poverty is stronger than plumbing, stronger than medicine, stronger than art. Poverty is stamped through Cheyenne like letters in a stick of rock, manifesting itself in her rotting, nineteenth-century mouth.

  The teeth absence lasts much longer than a week, and Cheyenne comes back to Poetry Group just once, for the session before Christmas. She upsets everyone by pouring contempt on the Edwin Morgan poem I have brought in to show them – that ain’t good, that’s stupid, you can’t see that, no, no you can’t understand it, it’s shit ain’t it. Then, when I try to smooth things over by showing her a typed-up version of one of her own poems, she becomes apoplectic because I have changed ‘was’ to ‘were’. She accepts nothing I have to say about the subjunctive. She shouts. I give her her work and ask her to leave, which, surprisingly, she does.

  And soon after that, she leaves school and goes to live in a nearby town with the dad of the black bag. In the staffroom, my colleagues recount pleasant conversations they have had with her, say that really, she was on the turn, on the verge of making a breakthrough. They seem genuinely regretful. Not me. I find the spaces between buildings easier to cross, now there is no risk of Cheyenne leaping in front of me, or shouting quotes from my Wikipedia page after me in her deep hoarse voice. I find it easier to see my son here.