Books - Those Who Can, Teach - Andria Zafirakou, Some Kids I Taught - Kate Clanchy

 Of the 49 individuals in government who have had control over the English schools system since 1900, only four previously taught in schools themselves. As Andria Zafirakou, the winner of the 2018 Global Teacher prize, expresses it: "The people who sit in 10 Downing Street are like gods to us teachers." That's to say, they seem so remote, their actions so unintelligible to those who actually work within schools that they might as well be gazing down from Mount Olympus, arbitrarily firing lightning bolts on to asphalt playgrounds.

In many ways Those Who Can, Teach, Zafirakou's first book, is a response to the government's scatter-gun approach to education, a plea for them to take notice of the pressures teachers are increasingly placed under, and how education policy is damaging young people. Her simple, direct style often feels close to a manifesto: "We are the ones who go above and beyond the duties we were employed for," she writes.

Zafirakou drives her students home from school when there are gangs lying in wait for them outside the playground, washes and mends their school clothes when others mock them for smelling, and runs weekend and holiday art clubs so pupils who find it hard being at home have somewhere to go. It is no wonder that the profession has a burnout problem. She watches many teachers around her give up; 15.3% who started working in 2017 were no longer in teaching by the following year...

Those Who Can, Teach is bookended by Zafirakou's experience of winning the Global Teacher prize, which provided her with a platform and the funds ($1m prize money) to enact lasting change in teaching. She has since set up a successful charity, Artists in Residence, which arranges for professional artists to spend time in schools across the UK...

(Lamorna Ash, The Guardian, 2021)

A great credit to the teaching profession.

                        Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me – Kate Clanchy

Catechising in a Scottish School, 
George Harvey (1806-1876)
Photo credit:  Leicester Arts and Museums Service [CC BY-NC-SA]

…She begins in a small town on the east coast of Scotland in the early 1990s, aged 24, when she has a temporary job in charge of 13-year-olds at Blastmuir High School. The year before she has taught chatty multi-racial London students; these almost exclusively white Scottish children will barely talk to her and are either abjectly naïve or too knowing. During a lesson about Aids they refuse to open a book on the subject.

“Mrs Clanchy, we cannae read this. We dinnae want to catch Aids,” says one student. Clanchy adds, “It wasn’t a nasty joke: they genuinely thought the book might infect them.”

This leads to some urgent sex education classes and one of the funniest, sweetest exchanges in the book.

“Mrs McClanchy?” said Callum.

“Yes?”

“Whit wis the name for men and men?”

“That was homosexuality, Callum.”

“Aye. And whit wis the name for women and men?”

“That’s heterosexuality, Callum.”

“Aye well, when I grow up, I’m no’ going to have either o’ them. Ah think Ah’ll just have a big dog.”

On to a new sixth form in Essex – “a place that had grown as fast as Blastmuir had shrunk” – where kids traditionally left school at 16. She finds that her old London icebreaker of asking children where their name comes from (she remembers a Nigerian girl: “My name is Osla. I am the last of seven children and my name means ‘Enough’”) doesn’t work in this suburban sprawl, where kids want to appear, above all, “normal”, which might mean hiding your Jewish or Irish roots.

…Among the children’s stories are Clanchy’s views on Education policy: exclusion (so often done to preserve school ratings, rather than with the pupil in mind); mixed ability teaching – or “Miss Debility” as one pupil pronounces it. She thinks streaming is the lesser evil.

She is clear-eyed, never preachy and admits her hypocrisy. She rages at the good comprehensive that kicks out students at the end of Year 11 to make way for private school sixth formers with better results. Then she adds that her son, who, until 16, attended the state school where she teaches – “the opposite of exclusive” – moved to that good school for A levels.

This is a book that will appeal not just to other teachers and parents, but to anyone who cares about education. Her classroom anecdotes are inspiring, mortifying, energising and moving. I’d give her an A*.

(Alex O’Connell, The Times, 2019)

Give her a B+. That means she will try a little harder with her next piece of work.