From the whistle-blowing teacher behind the headlines: one inspirational teacher, one extraordinary year, hope and heartbreak on the front lines of an inner-city school, To Miss With Love by Katharine Birbalsingh is the remarkable and eye opening exposé of our education system.
A third of teachers leave within their first term on the job. This one wouldn't quit for all the world.
Meet Furious - sixteen, handsome and completely out of control. Nothing frightens him and no one can get through to him. Now meet Munchkin - a sweet kid with glasses who's an easy target and needs protecting. Then there's Seething and Deranged, two girls who are brimming with bad attitude; Fifty and Cent, who act like gangsters but are afraid of getting beaten up; and Stoic, a brilliant young mind struggling to survive. In the midst of them all, there is a bodyguard and bouncer, a counsellor and confidante, a young woman whose job it is to motivate and inspire them and somehow keep them out of trouble: their teacher. None will make it through the year unscathed. Some may not even make it at all...
Spanning a year of shocking truths and hard-won victories, of fights and phone-thefts, teenage pregnancies and the dreaded OFSTED report, this is the remarkable diary of an inner-city school teacher. Revealing the extraordinary chaos, mismanagement and wrong-thinking that plague our education system, it is a funny, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking journey from the frontlines of the classroom to the heart of modern Britain.
'The constant frustration, the struggle to hold on to your ideals in the face of a broken system - this book is the story of contemporary state education. It's both heart-breaking and inspiring' Toby Young
'Everyone should read this book and do a bit of re-thinking. Straight from the chalk-face - a book which explains why our kids have been failed by State Education' Rod Liddle
'The teacher who laid bare the chaos in the education systems. . . by delivering some brutal home truths. . . articulate and inspirational' Daily Mail
'Charismatic. . . .electrifying. . . This remarkable woman has neatly identified the problem with education' The Times
Katharine Birbalsingh is Britain's most outspoken and controversial teacher. Educated at a comprehensive school, she earned a degree in philosophy and modern languages at Oxford university and has taught for over a decade in inner-city schools. To Miss with Love was for several years an anonymous blog that exposed the reality of inner-city schools and the problems with the education system. She now writes regularly for the Telegraph and has given evidence at the Commons select committee for education. Her views have sparked a national debate. www.katharinebirbalsingh.com
