Austerity, the pandemic and now the cost of living crisis have left many schools in a parlous state. How hard do staff have to work to give kids the chances they deserve?
Take a short bus ride south-east, from under the dome of the Queen’s College on Oxford High Street, past the aloof spires of Magdalen College and beneath them the tourists wobbling in their rented punts, past the botanical gardens, the cricket fields and sculls of Magdalen College school, the Iffley Road sports grounds where Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile, past a sign for the City of Oxford Rowing Club, and the city begins to thin into green surrounding hills and a view, as Cardinal Newman once wrote to a friend from his rooms in Rose Hill, “too good for me”.
