Bernadette was just ten years old when her father packed her off to a convent school in Dublin. Seven gruelling years later, she returned home to Liverpool at the start of the swinging sixties. Bernadette had dreamed of being a teacher ever since she was a little girl so she promptly began a course at teacher training college, determined to give children the sort of education she wished she'd had.
Bernadette got her first job at 21, teaching five to seven year olds in a school in one of Liverpool's toughest slum areas. The poverty and deprivation she saw at the school shocked her to the...