‘Every Child Matters’

This chapter considers the New Labour ‘Every Child Matters’ policy of the early 2000s as a blueprint for schools to be ‘holding environments’, offering protection and support (including through counselling) and shaming environments, through increased surveillance of staff and adolescents. While counsellors emphasise the potential for the integrated therapist to hold the school community together, stories chart the experience of shame in the school system. Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal is about the shaming of Sheba Hart, a teacher who engages in sexual activity with an underage pupil. Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys looks back to the late 1980s and a group of grammar school sixth formers in Sheffield being hot housed for Oxbridge entrance. Though ‘about’ the tension between knowledge and skills in education, the play is shot through with the sexual shame of Hector, the boys’ General Studies teacher. Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is a satire on ‘safeguarding’ culture in education and a celebration of the aspirational, and in some ways boundaryless, head, Janna Curtis and the real life ‘super head’, Marie Stubbs, whose story inspired Cooper’s novel.