In The Boy in Striped Pyjamas when Bruno dons his striped uniform, he notices that it smells. He wears the clothes of a dead prisoner, timeworn and never washed. His authentic self is masked and he is doomed. Each teacher, unless alert to possibilities of what might be, can become lost in a moral morass of policy and pedagogy, blindly donning the cast offs of a system that has never worked and is failing faster and more spectacularly than ever before. We are sold a line that the clothes just need starch. We need new clothes. We need them now. Immorality and deception. Arrogance and greed. Misconceptions and misguidance. We have allowed powerful institutions to manipulate the fear of parents and teachers to the extent that neither can see how to proceed without being told what to think. The book explores how the so-called accountability and quality systems in our country - Ofsted and exams - have been used to straightjacket teachers into compliance, even when flying in the face of emerging knowledge and understanding about learning. But this is a narrative of hope. Of how the system could be different. It offers tales from within the classroom of learning in spite, but without spite. Of hope, of laughter, of gentle subversion.
