Book review: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, by Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy is a poet, teacher, novelist and journalist, Scottish by birth, with an English father and Irish (Catholic) name: Edinburgh school, Oxford University. She taught briefly in Scotland, left after writing an article in The Scotsman which was critical of the GTC’s registration policy. Since then she has taught in England, first in Essex, and for the last nine years she has been writer-in-residence at Oxford Spires Academy. She has worked mostly with children from immigrant families, many refugees, and with others from white unemployed working-class backgrounds. After more than 30 years she still loves teaching and believes in the redemptive power of education, and especially of poetry and English literature.