The Harpole Report

"J L Carr was another amazing human being. I have devoured every novel he has ever written, all superb and very idiosyncratic. The Harpole Report is a very funny satirical novel, very short. It captures what is eternal about a state-funded school system and also a time that seems almost innocent in the degree to which schools were left alone to do whatever they were doing. There’s also the endless war between the layers of the hierarchy, the teachers and the head, and then the head and the caretaker. I talked to one newly appointed head of a large high school in the States who said, ‘The first thing I do in any school is to sack the janitor, and that way I have lots of friends from day one.’ The Harpole Report is brilliant on that, brilliant on back-covering at every level, on how to write effective memos to the local authority. But it also makes you feel amazingly nostalgic because this a school in which they are not employing, as they would be now, three full-time administrative assistants just to collect data to send back to Whitehall, and in which there are inspectors, but Ofsted has not been dreamt of. It is a combination of the everlasting and the, ‘Oh my God, was it really like that?’ It was almost Eden-like if we’d only realised. I was educated long enough ago, at a state primary school in a small town in West Berkshire, for this to be not completely unfamiliar to me. We had streams, there was the 11-plus class and then the other class, which is why I hate the 11-plus. But it was actually a wonderful school and it was in the middle of a newly built council estate with a great head and fantastic teachers. It was probably all right even if you were in the B stream. We learnt a lot, we had very old-fashioned teaching but we also had expeditions and we did plays. And I look at what year 6 is like now and really – I mean, being a top junior was the best year of my life!"