Product reviews for The Working Class

“Synopsis: Ian Gilbert is an award-winning author and editor, a leading educational speaker and an entrepreneur and a man who the IB World magazine named as one of its top 15 educational -˜visionaries'. He established Independent Thinking in 1994 as a platform for leading practitioners to share their work in bringing the best out of ail children.

In The Working Class: Poverty, Education and Alternative Voices, Gilbert unites educators from across the UK and further afield to call on all those working in schools to adopt a more enlightened and empathetic approach to supporting children in challenging circumstances.

One of the most intractable problems in modem education is how to close the widening gap in attainment between the haves and the have-nots. Unfortunately, successive governments both in the UK and abroad have gone about solving it the wrong way.

The contributors to The Working Class are not telling teachers or schools leaders how to run their schools, their classroom or their relationships the field is too massive, too complex, too open to debate and to discussion to propose off-the-shelf solutions. Furthermore, the research referred to comprising The Working Class is not presented in order to tell educators what to think, but rather to inform their own thinking and to challenge some of the dominant narratives about educating the feckless poor. “The Working Class” is about helping educators to ask the right questions, and its starting question is quite simple: how can we approach the education of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in a way that actually makes a difference for all concerned?

Written for policy makers and activists as well as school leaders and educators, The Working Class is both a timely survey of the impact of current policies and an invaluable source of practical advice on what can be done to better support disadvantaged children in the school system.

Critique: An impressive body of work, The Working Class: Poverty, Education and Alternative Voices is an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections. For personal reading lists, teachers, students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject should be aware that The Working Class: Poverty, Education and Alternative Voices is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $16. 73). It should be noted that all royalties from the sale of “The Working Class” will be used to support the education of children living in poverty in the UK.”