Matthew Godfrey's Education Blog

Matthew Godfrey, who is retraining as an English teacher, reports on the great class divide This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on 10 June 2000 THE PAST year, during which I have trained as a secondary teacher of English, has been dazzling, not least because my 25 weeks of teaching experience have been split between two completely contrasting types of school. The first - Hurlingham and Chelsea in south-west London, which I wrote about on this page four months ago - is a co-educational inner-city comprehensive where just 18 per cent of pupils pass five or more GCSEs at grades A to C. The second - Trinity, in Croydon - is a prestigious independent school for boys where 100 per cent of the pupils meet the same criterion and virtually all go on to leading universities. So, over the past year, I have taught pupils who have difficulty reading and pupils preparing for Oxbridge. I have taken mixed-ability classes requiring widely differentiated work, and classes whe...