ABSTRACT
Ninety per cent of the pupils at Lumley were born in the depressed industrial area in which the school is situated. They live and spend most of their leisure time there: it is ‘home’. In contrast, only one of the teachers lives in the area, and a small minority lives inside the town boundaries. Most of the teachers live in the residential suburbs outside the town, where the grime and poverty are less apparent, and from which they travel to school each morning by car. Although many are natives of the town, and although some are working-class in origin, their educational experience tends to be that of a Grammar School and University or Training College. Their attitudes and values are naturally those of settled middle-class adults, whose lives are rooted in the town and its environs, but in a contrasting social setting to that of the pupils.
