Oranges and Lemons: life in an inner city primary school Wendy Wallace Routledge, 160pp, £12.99 ISBN 0415359090

Most books about education are unreadable. They are stuffed with phrases such as "learning outcomes" and take a top-down approach to their subject. Most are written to support one or other of the competing ideologies - to prove that privatisation is either a good thing or a bad thing; or to add to the phonics versus real books debate. The names of politicians and education bureaucrats appear frequently, but you read little of pupils and teachers.

By contrast, the cast of this short, luminous book are Sean O'Regan, headteacher, and his staff and pupils at Edith Neville Primary, an inner-city school in a deprived area of London known as Somers Town. If I had to recommend one book to explain what has happened to Britain's schools in the past 20 years, this would be it.

Like all the best writers, Wendy Wallace builds a picture from details. Here is her description of the head's morning conference: "Later in the day the head will be attending a child protection conference, he tells his staff. A couple are applying to have their daughter removed from the at-risk register. 'She's still covered in bruises,' interrupts a teacher, clearly upset. 'She's still dirty. Still hungry.' Her mobile phone goes off inside her bag and she reaches down into it with both hands, flustered."

Or here is a little girl: "Maharun's brown prosthetic eyes are so realistic that when she focuses her attention on someone she appears to be looking right at them. But her blindness is total; born without eyes, she has no real concept of seeing . . ." Wallace provides a clear, detailed description of the ways in which the class teacher changes her method of teaching to include Maharun.

There are messages for policy-makers in this book, but Wallace sticks to the principle of the best storytellers and teachers: show not tell. She does not tell us in general terms that such schools are kept pitifully short of money. Instead she writes:

"This year the amount they have to spend is down in real terms by about £100,000. 'Please pay Joan for your personal phone calls,' reads a notice on her wall. But the minor economies in place all over the school - staff paying for their own tea, coffee and personal photocopying, buying materials for projects out of their own pocket - are not enough. They have balanced the books this year by not replacing a departing teacher whose job was supporting children with English as a second language . . ."

She does not tell us that the policy of handing school meal provision to the lowest bidder results in children getting an unappetising and unhealthy diet. Instead she provides a description of the food, and the way it is served, which made me feel ill; and she tells us how much money the school is permitted to spend on what is, for many of these children, the main meal of the day.

Any book about education that gets trashed by the former Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead (who complained in the Sunday Times of Wallace's "soggy liberalism") must have something to be said for it, so I approached Oranges and Lemons with high hopes. Wallace exceeded them. Like me she has been writing about education for years, and like me her daily work probably requires her to look at it from the top down. You only understand it when you look at it from the bottom up. One day soon, I hope to do something similar in secondary schools. I hope I convey the truth as well as Oranges and Lemons does for primary schools.

Francis Beckett is the author, with David Hencke, of The Blairs and Their Court (Aurum Press)

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