Teaching Secondary School

'We want to give you and your child the best opportunity to thrive in secondary school. By the end of this book you're going to feel a whole lot more capable of dealing with what Year 7 throws at you.' The jump between primary and secondary school marks one of the biggest transitions in a...

This book is about my experiences in schools (and now academies which were formerly schools but run differently), as well as different teachers I have worked with, and how this all impacts the pupils we teach. It is an honest account revealing what it is like to be an aspirational teacher, and the difficulties we really find in this profession, with unprofessionalism often rife, senior leaders not in control and pupil behaviour varying from excellent to dangerous and often a challenge to manage. All of this in schools that parents hold in high esteem.

This book contains four essays written over 28 years ago while I was teaching writing and literature in the secondary school classroom. I do not wish to make apologies for the unpolished prose style of the essays or for arguments I once would have avidly defended, but today no longer stir a whole lot of zeal in me. Hopefully, a new generation of English teachers will find a few of the ideas contained in the essays of some value today.