City rewards

"I was born in a pinstripe suit," a school friend of mine once admitted. He later became a director of a merchant bank.

We went to a boys' preparatory school and from the age of five wore ties and blazers. We even sat in order of rank in the classroom, with those at the top of the class at the back and those at the bottom at the front, so that the teacher could keep an eye on them. We were given good or bad marks for behaviour, and sporting success in team games was rewarded with "colours". We were being "prepared" to get into an elite public school and then to go to Oxford or Cambridge. Many Oxbridge graduates then continued their search for success in London’s finance sector.

Recently, I was reminded of how perfectly our education prepared us for the culture of the City when I read the UK bestseller Cityboy by Geraint Anderson. He graphically describes the competitive world of stock broking, hedge funds and massive bonuses which has come under so much fire in our current financial crisis. Anderson also has an interesting website.

I'm not suggesting that my friends made careers because they were overcompensating for their sense of insecurity after being bullied at school, or that they went in for the debauchery and substance abuse that Anderson describes. They were, however, certainly rewarded with enormous salaries in the City.

The first and last time my pinstriped friend talked about his salary was when he started. Even then it was at least twice what I could ever hope to earn as a history teacher. He retired at 45.

It's a question of what rewards you are looking for.

One of the most satisfying experiences in my career was spending a week in Tower Hamlets in London in one of the toughest schools in the country. We traced the history of the streets in which the kids lived in the former Docklands. The shop windows were covered in iron mesh, the school playground had been widened to provide access to police vans and the school had to be evacuated when a pupil tried to set light to the gas main. This was all a stone’s throw from the temples of finance in the City. Maybe it’s easy to say this when you have enjoyed a privileged education and are reasonably well off, but my reward was when, at the end of the week (which I was grateful to have escaped from alive), one of the children who had regularly told me to "fuck off" said: "Sir, are we going to do history next week?"