Satire

Otto English

as Katharine Birbalsingh

Back to school season takes me back. It all began when David Cameron approached me at the Conservative Party Conference and told me about his first visit to a state school.

“It was honestly like Lord of the Flies,” he recalled. “The children didn’t wear starched collars or robes and sat in circles expressing their own opinions. There was no wall game, no rowing song, the pupils called each other by their first names, and there was a total ban on fagging. No wonder I’m having to build so many prisons.”

I’m afraid it came as no surprise. During my years as a teacher, I had seen everything he was describing and worse.

‘Miss Snuffy’

The school I worked in was like a war zone. A playground full of laughter. Children routinely forgetting their pencil sharpeners. On one occasion a boy threw a paper airplane at a bin. Then there was the Year 13 girl who corrected my pronunciation of ‘hyperbole’.