In the late 1950s, I was working in the sales office of a huge Rotherham steelworks. Straight out of National Service, already earning more than my dad. I enjoyed being at the heart of a world-beating operation, rooted in our industrial history, with a global customer network; we had two enormous melting shops, one of which, with 21 open-hearth furnaces, was the biggest in Europe.
But I was also deeply interested in social issues, and so it was that I came across a newspaper account of the new Kidbrooke School in South London, an early example of a non-selective secondary school, labelled “comprehensive”. I read the article and thought about my future.
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