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While academies and free schools proliferate, middle-class parents are concerned with just one thing – keeping their kids away from Dave Mania. Ex-teacher Fielding advises… In my roles of moral icon, sage, clot and dotard, I have been asked many questions. The most frequent goes thus: “Can we send Hugo/Rhapsody/Electra to your school?” “Yes! Turn right at the lights. Multiple assassins and wolf children apart, we are fiercely inclusive.” But this is no time for levity. For this is the great question. The white-knuckled, middle-class, bad-faith and very tedious question. What they really want to know is: “Can nice middle class children cope in the inner-city comp?” “Can they meet the naughty working class and still end up at a Russell Group university?” “Should we rather leg it to more leafy climes, or get religion, or build our own academy – or bottle it completely and go private?” They are wracked with worry, gripped by gaudy nightmares. The comp is seen as a sort medieval leprosarium, or a hippy Strangeways. At my old school, there were tabloid rumours of vice rings, and skinny-dipping in the sixth-form pond, and grocers’ plurals, and daggers and dealers in skunk-fogged toilets. Marvellous. Parents drove by in their Chelsea tanks and spotted my little charges chillin’ on corners, talking in tongues, gnawing on dogburgers, when they should have been at home reading Jane Austen or conjugating Latin verbs like they did at St Custards. This lot looked like something from The Wire. Can I offer solace? Wise words? I want to quote the Lovin’ Spoonful’: “Your worst nightmares are their cartoons.” But it’s not that simple. There are no easy answers. We’re all caught in a complex, crossfire of class and culture. Like Luke in year 13. He lives in Paddington with his single mother, a leftwing lawyer. How has he survived for seven years? A few nice chums, death metal music, skateboarding, some fabulous teachers – and a terrifically sane mother. He did go half daft in year 8, but who doesn’t? He did get clobbered by Dave Mania for being too clever by half and having a rich interior life, but that’s all part of an English tradition of decking intellectuals. Now, he’s mostly fine. He ducks and weaves and has moved on to Vampire Weekend and Albert Camus and writes quite appalling verse. “Why am I surrounded by such fucking dickheads, sir?” sighs he. “It will stand you in good stead for later life.” It just might. Does this exemplum offer you solace? Hope so. He’s bright as pins and replete with A*s, Oxbridge-bound and inner-city sussed. So relax. Urban comps can reach those parts the leafy boroughs can’t. And that’s my final dotard word. Schools Secondary schools Pupil behaviour Teaching Fielding guardian.co.uk