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BBC Radio 4 Extra

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: To Miss With Love

Book of the Week: To Miss With Love: Episode 5

To Miss With Love

Episode 5

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, To Miss With Love, Episode 5

A third of teachers leave within their first term on the job. This one would not quit.

A third of teachers leave  within their first term on the job. This one would not quit for all the world. Read by Adjondoh.

Written by Katharine Birbalsingh.

A third of teachers leave within their first term on the job. This one wouldn't quit for all the world.

Meet Furious - sixteen, handsome and completely out of control. Nothing frightens him and no one can get through to him. Now meet Munchkin - a sweet kid with glasses who's an easy target and needs protecting. Then there's Seething and Deranged, two girls who are brimming with bad attitude; Fifty and Cent, who act like gangsters but are afraid of getting beaten up; and Stoic, a brilliant young mind struggling to survive.

In the midst of them all, there is a bodyguard and bouncer, a counsellor and confidante, a young woman whose job it is to motivate and inspire them and somehow keep them out of trouble: their teacher. None will make it through the year unscathed. Some may not even make it at all.

Spanning a year of shocking truths and hard-won victories, of fights and phone-thefts, teenage pregnancies and the dreaded OFSTED report, this is the remarkable diary of an inner-city school teacher. Revealing the extraordinary chaos, mismanagement and wrong-thinking that plague our education system, it is a funny, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking journey from the frontlines of the classroom to the heart of modern Britain.

Katharine Birbalsingh has been teaching in the state school system in London for over a decade. Her dream is for all schools to become interesting and exciting places of learning, where children feel safe, happy and free to aim to be the best that they can be.

Read by Adjoa Andoh

Produced by Clive Brill
A Pacificus Production for BBC Radio 4.

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

The diary of inner-city school teacher Katharine Birbalsingh, read by Adjoa Andoh

The remarkable diary of inner-city school teacher Katharine Birbalsingh, read by Adjoa Andoh

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