In 1973, I started my teaching career as a probationary teacher at Golden Hillock School in Birmingham, a school that has been much in the news recently. The school serves a relatively poor community and had difficulty in recruiting teachers. To encourage applications, the then minister, one Margaret Thatcher, designated such areas as "Educational Priority Areas" and, as a result, I received an annual salary supplement of £201, rising to £276.
Later, the allowance was frozen and it slipped off the radar by the end of the decade. Now, as often happens, long-forgotten policies are being resurrected, as the education select committee has called for the government to attract teachers to work in schools serving deprived, white, working-class pupils.
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