?it hurts not to see you.

Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain and growing up. About all the things that poems are always about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving, they are also immediate – they go straight to the heart like a text from a friend.

Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: some students’ poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times.

A donation from the sale of this book will be made to the charity Asylum Welcome.

‘The best book on teachers and children and writing that I’ve ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying’ – Philip Pullman

Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career.

Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school ‘Inclusion Unit’, trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance.

While Clanchy doesn’t deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn’t be.

Oxford Spires Academy is a small comprehensive school with 30 languages – and one special focus: poetry. In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in the Guardian (‘The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group’), and the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary.

In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of a thousand voices. In England: Poems from a School, you will find poetry is easy to read and hard to forget, as fresh, bright and present as the young migrants who produced it.