Comprehensive Achievements: All our geese are swans - Softcover

It's essential reading for anyone who cares about state education, both its past and, more vitally, its future. (Zadie Smith)

This extraordinary text conveys the far-reaching effects of professionals who care. As English education policy moves toward narrower definitions of school success, through ‘core knowledge’, the accounts in this unique book provide inspiration for those who seek to understand how rich and extended provision changes lives. They show us compellingly how complex, extensive, and necessary such provision is. (Professor Anna Craft University of Exeter and the Open University)

I have always considered myself extremely lucky to have attended Hampstead School, a fact hard to explain to the sort of people whose interest in a school begin and end with its league tables. To me, it was an exemplary inner city state school for reasons that sometimes included those league tables but more often stretched far beyond them. It was more than an education; it was an experience – one of the most fulfilling of my life. It's a pleasure to be able to hear so many former students expressing the complexity of that experience; what it meant to them to be in a school that believed everyone deserved at least the same opportunity – whatever their ability, class or race – and for free. It was by instilling this belief in their students that the school hoped to give us the sense that we were nothing if not pure potential. Of course, not everyone took up the opportunities offered. But many did, far more than seem possible or likely. (I was one of the unlikely ones.) This book, initiated by our headteacher, explains how it was done, and how something similar might be achieved elsewhere. It's essential reading for anyone who cares about state education, both its past and – more vitally – its future. (Zadie Smith)

The accounts in this unique book provide inspiration for those who seek to understand how rich and extended provision changes lives. (Professor Anna Craft University of Exeter and the Open University)

An inspirational book (Maureen Cruickshank ASCL)

...every chapter is inspiring. (Helen Hunt The Teacher, Spring 2014)