Exams, grades, league tables, Ofsted reports. All of them miss the point of school and together they are undermining our whole approach to education.
What is school for? In theory, it equips young people to become independent and productive, to get jobs and forge lives, perhaps to be ''good citizens''. In reality, it means one thing: exams.
By focussing on the grades pupils get in neatly siloed, academic subjects, we end up ranking them and our schools into winners and losers. Some pupils are set on a trajectory to university - the rest are left ill-equipped for the world they actually face. Meanwhile, the ''good'' schools become middle-class enclaves and the most disadvantaged lose out.
Drawing on his twenty years as a teacher, hundreds of interviews and his experience on the UK Government''s Social Mobility Commission, Sammy Wright shows that schools are - and should be - so much more than this. Filled with funny, tender encounters and an unflinching fo
