Susan Elkin: Please Miss We’re Boys

Speaker: Susan Elkin

Susan is a well-known journalist and author, and taught secondary school English for 36 years in five very different schools. Since 1990 she has developed a second career as a writer.  She has written extensively for most of the national dailies and dozens of magazines and websites, She was education editor at The Stage for 11 years. Susan has 54 books to her name including English text books, how-to books for teachers, education titles and memoir. Please Miss We’re Boys, which is the background to her talk on 14 February, was published in 2019.  Her new book All Booked Up publishes on 28 March 2024. Now widowed, Susan lives in South London..

Synopsis: When Susan started teaching in a challenging all-boys school in Deptford in 1968 there was a great deal wrong with education and she was woefully naive. Classes were huge. There was effectively no child protection. New teachers weren’t properly supported. Training was not fit for purpose and there was almost no CPD. Moreover it was very unusual for anyone of the “wrong” sex to teach in a single-sex school.  This talk discusses how things used to be – in an anecdotal way because Susan is a writer and former teacher rather than an academic or expert – and argues that although education is still fraught with problems, in many ways things are much better than they were 56 years ago.

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