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About Giles 

After studying English at the University of Leicester, Giles taught for two enjoyable years in a preparatory school in South London whilst writing an unpublished and unpublishable novel.   These experiences convinced him that his future lay in teaching in state schools after first studying for a PGCE.   

His subsequent career took him to a variety of different types of school: King Edward VI Camp Hill Grammar School for Boys, Birmingham; Lliswerry High School, a newly built comprehensive in Newport, Gwent; King Henry VIII Comprehensive School in Abergavenny, where he was Head of English and a Senior Teacher; and the Cornwallis, a secondary modern (and Grant Maintained) school in Maidstone, Kent, where he was a Deputy Head.  Finally, in January 1992, he was appointed Head Teacher of St Edwards C of E Comprehensive School, Romford, in the London Borough of Havering.  Following his retirement he continued to work with the three London schools for which he had been the School Improvement Partner in his final years as a serving headteacher.  

St Edward's had developed over 300 years from an 18th century Charity School.  Giles suspected that over this period it had mirrored almost every important change in the development of the English public education system, and when he retired in 2008 he began to research this long history.  What he discovered about the school and its local and national contexts was even more interesting and certainly more surprising that he had anticipated, and twelve years later, during the period of the covid lockdown, he finally began to write up the fascinating story he had uncovered.

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