backgrounds come together naturally; against this background, racial attitudes and sex
roles can be examined, and both these topics were of new importance in the 1970s.
Gene Kemp’s The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977), set in a state primary school, won
the Carnegie Medal; the reader assumes from the evidence that Tyke is a boy and only
at the end of the book does it become clear that she is a girl. In the late 1970s Mabel
Esther Allan began a series of books about Pine Street primary school. Samantha
Padgett, bright and intelligent, a natural leader at Pine Street, moves on to a secondary
comprehensive in First Term at Ash Grove (1988) and has to prove that she can cope
with the new challenges. The setting may be different; the message is the same.
In 1976 Anna Home, in charge of children’s drama programmes at the BBC, was
looking for a series which would reflect contemporary school life rather than ‘the
traditional worlds of Bunter and Jennings’ (Home 1993:102). Grange Hill School, created
and peopled by Phil Redmond, proved an ideal vehicle for looking at contemporary
issues such as bullying, serious illness, death, broken homes, teenage pregnancy,
smoking and drugs, while presenting a rounded picture of school life. When Grange Hill
was first shown, it was seen as anti-authoritarian by adults; skilfully crafted, its
underlying purpose is to look at school from the child’s viewpoint and while reflecting
the real world, it supports traditional values. The popularity of the first series led, not
only to its continuation but also to books, based on the series, by Phil Redmond and Jan
Needle, while Robert Leeson used the characters in original stories.
Since the 1970s, writers of school stories have had to take account of the fact that
children mature earlier and are more worldly-wise. They tend to write about pre-pubertal
children and concentrate on either boys or girls. In Flour Babies (1992), Anne Fine
writes humorously about boys engaged in a school science project; in Goggle-Eyes (1989)
she creates a traditional girls’ day school as a framework within which to examine
contemporary problems such as divorce and conservation. Set in the same sort of
schools, Jean Ure’s Peter High books and Mary Hooper’s School Friend series reflect the
continuing popularity of series among girl readers and make good use of traditional
themes while showing awareness of the realities of life in the 1990s. Allen Sadler’s Sam’s
Swop Shop (1993) finds boys raising money for essential school equipment rather than
charity as would have been the case in the past, but some problems are perennial. The
Present Takers (1983) by Aidan Chambers and, a decade later, Jan Dean’s Me, Duncan
and the Great Hippopotamus Scandal (1993) both show that bullying, a theme which
provided a memorable scene in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, still looms large in the lives of
many schoolchildren.
In stories about older children, school may provide a background for light romances
as in the popular American series such as Sweet Valley High. Adèle Geras, on the other
hand, faces the problems of growing sexuality head-on in her Egerton Hall trilogy. Set in
the early 1960s, this tells the stories of three friends who have gone through a girls’
boarding school together and, now in the sixth-form, are preoccupied by sex and
impending adulthood. Each of their lives parallels that of a fairy tale heroine (Geras
1990:20–21). Megan, heroine of The Tower Room (1990) is the Rapunzel figure; Alice in
Watching the Roses (1991) is Sleeping Beauty, while Bella of Pictures of the Night (1992)
is Snow White, complete with wicked step-mother and the apple which nearly chokes
354 SCHOOL STORIES