Skipper

I was brought up by a very strict school-teacher mother whose methods sometimes owed more to the Victorian age than the post-war one into which I was born. Personally I reacted against such strictness though always felt approaches to teaching had swung hopelessly the other way during the sixties and seventies. My own brief experiences of teaching secondary school kids from urban areas further convinced me that strict, structured teaching is what such young people respond to best.

Support for this 'tough love' approach now comes to us from across the Atlantic. We learn that a new breed of small 200 pupil academies:

Some call it extreme education: 10-hour days, parental contracts and zero tolerance behaviour policies in small, 200-pupil academies. The result, seen in an evolving breed of US school, is 100% college acceptance, test scores to rival private schools, and south Bronx teenagers who play the viola like their Manhattan neighbours.The small school movement has been accused of undoing decades of progressive education. But its greatest proponents claim to be part of a new civil rights movement working to free America's urban underclass from a cycle of under-achievement.

Recently a group of British teachers travelled to see how the scheme works in Newark, New Jersey. Parents queue up to get their kids into these schools but have to sign a three-way contract with children and principal, promising to participate fully from their angle like ensuring homework is completed on time and attendance does not slacken.

When a child's homework isn't handed in by 8am there is a phone call home. When the parent doesn't turn up for a meeting, their child is not allowed back into school until they turn up. Signs telling them "No excuses" line the walls. "I was working until 11 last night. I'm tired, but I know I've got to [work]," says one 11-year-old, as she finishes up a "brain food" worksheet over breakfast. "Even my mother's gone back to school since I've been here."

Lord Andrew Adonis, the Schools Minister, is quoted in favour of this tough love approach. So am I and so, I'm sure, would have been my gifted teacher of a mother. I would love to see experiments with it over here and if they worked a stream of small academies introduced in all the big urban centres where so many kids end up without hope, prospects or awareness of what transforming delights education can provide.