The Children is a state-school catastrophe novel about a high-performing London academy, a murdered teacher, a radicalized student, and the adults who keep insisting that systems, values, lessons, routines, and “high expectations” can save children from the chaos outside and inside them. It wants to be a thriller, an institutional satire, a post-Covid state-of-the-nation novel, a critique of academy culture, a meditation on teaching, a study of faith, and a warning about online misogyny and far-right grievance. Mostly, it is an overstuffed school inquest that keeps turning every classroom into a lecture about what the novel already knows.
The opening is strong enough to suggest a sharper book. A cheap school notebook lies open. One page contains ordinary GCSE notes: simultaneous equations, photosynthesis, Macbeth quotations, dutiful annotations. The facing page contains a cartoonish pyramid of skulls against a Union Jack, with the words: “London has fallen. The worse things get, the more urgent it becomes.” The handwriting looks girlish. This becomes the novel’s core ambiguity: the horror is not only in the obvious disturbed boy, but in the supposedly normal school culture around him, and in the children no adult quite sees.
The setting is The Corbett Academy, a flagship Bridge-to-Learning Trust school in South East London. Its headteacher, Gillian Underthorpe, is a celebrity reformer, known for exam miracles, iron discipline, and inspirational rhetoric about closing the gap between what children believe possible and what teachers believe. The school is all ritual: silent lineups, immaculate uniform, Latin house names, equipment checks, vertical hands, scripted teaching, “Profound Truths,” “Family Dinners,” Holst’s “Jupiter,” and the values Justice, Ambition, Responsibility stamped everywhere like corporate scripture. The place is meant to look like a miracle of order. It also looks, almost immediately, like a factory pretending to be a church.
