A glimpse of the young Allison Pearson

Back in 2005, only the second year of this blog's existence and before most of its readers were born, I blogged about continuous assessment in schools:

When I was in the early years of secondary school, geography lessons seemed to be dominated by middle-class girls whose families encouraged them to write to foreign embassies for information about the countries we were discussing. 

Being male and coming from a one-parent family with a busy working mother, I was never going to compete with them. (And if you want real street cred, I got free school dinners.)

Perhaps there was too much gender stereotyping there, but my reason for revisiting this old post today is that I have since realised that one of those middle-class girls was a young Allison Pearson.

Oh and they weren't geography lessons: they were 'combined studies' lessons. Well, it was the 1970s.