Oranges and Lemons: Life in an Inner City Primary School

For a year Wendy Wallace, a leading educational journalist, spent one day per week in a school; observing and analyzing how tough life is for teachers, pupils and parents and assessing how schools really operate in the current educational system. The result is this heartfelt description of the life of one school that could really be any school, showing not only the problems schools encounter but also how creative solutions can fit around an educational system that all too often can be seen as a straitjacket. Detailing the highs and lows of school life, this behind the scenes look is an intimate account of how people in one unique inner city primary school approach issues facing schools and communities everywhere. Focusing on the progress of individual children, and the enormous pressures placed on members of staff, this book illuminates contemporary school life and provides a human and touching account of major and minor successes and failures. By turns both highly entertaining and surprising the authorincisive journalistic eye focuses on how individuals cope with government initiatives, the needs of pupils and of the community at large. As the author says, while some children go to school to top up the life they are already leading at home, others go to get a life. Yet although what actually occurs in schools is a matter of incessant public debate few people know much about what real life is really like within them. That is until now.