On the Edge

'I cannot count how many times I have been told to f*** off by a pupil.'


Charlie Carroll is a successful young teacher in a great school. He loves his job but wants to see the tougher side of British education. So he hands in his notice, takes to the road in a beat-up old camper van and spends a year travelling round some of the UK's most deprived areas supply teaching in dozens of the country's roughest comprehensives.


Carroll is battered and bewildered by what he finds; pupils threaten to abuse him, deal drugs, flash knives, surf the internet for porn and fight in class. Often, lessons are more about riot control than learning.


He's almost broken by the experience, but just occasionally - in the most surprising of places - he comes across inspiring kids who are battling against the odds.


This is his frank, funny, frightening and true story of a journey to the edge of modern education. 


Charlie's book is well worth a read if you can stomach the constant misery of his existence as a supply teacher. Like some kind of educational suicide bomber, (he) loads up his van and scours the British Isles in search of adventure, or death... one is never quite certain... Even with my ''inner city'' experience I didn't quite realise just how terrible some of our schools are. It made me feel positively wretched, especially in light of my recent escapades, arguing with half of Britain, trying to persuade them that the system is indeed broken.

''Just read Charlie Carroll's book!'' is what I want to say, but I know they'll just laugh and tell me that his experiences aren't representative of the whole. Too right they aren't. I have never worked in schools like the ones in his book. It is as if Charlie's schools jumped straight out of a horror film, only that the true horror is that they are just down the street from where you live.

Charlie Carroll not only taught in them he found the energy and dedication to write about his experiences. Why? Because he wanted us to know the truth. No doubt, like me, he naively thought that if he could just tell them, and that if he could just let people know what's happening, someone might do something about it.

Little did we realise that great numbers of people would turn a blind eye and deliberately ignore the truth because it is easier to believe the lie. Charlie Carroll still works as a teacher. His real name remains a secret. Lucky him. He's still entitled to his life as it was. He wasn't as foolish as me to get up at the Conservative Party conference and shout the truth out loud. Instead, he has written it in his book, On the Edge. If you want to know just how bad our schools can get, On the Edge is a must-read.

Katharine Birbalsingh, Daily Telegraph