Education: School's out for ever: the teachers' story: I didn't see it as terrible . . .: Geoffrey Mott, retiring at 50, remembers how he had to keep his wits about him, or else

AT 15 I was thrown out of grammar school - for being a disruptive influence, I suppose. I had a band, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, in which I played guitar and did vocals. Some of its other members went on to London and became Pink Floyd and millionaires.

They asked me to join them, but I thought I'd do better in Cambridge. I did all sort of jobs, driving vans, labouring, and in the evenings I studied for O-levels. Then I saw an advert for mature students to be teachers - I was 20. So by 1972 I had a BEd, and I went to Aylestone High, a mixed comprehensive in Brent, to teach PE and sociology.

It had 1,650 kids: terrific. Really challenging, a vibrant, dynamic school in what they called an educational priority area. It was basically a black school, about 90 per cent Afro-Caribbean: a lot of the pupils had been born in the West Indies, and people put bad behaviour down to the culture clash. In my first year 18 teachers got hit, ranging from being pushed to being beaten about the head.

It was a testing school. One pupil set fire to a teacher's beehive. One teacher was thrown through a plate-glass window. At one point, two children were fighting and a parent came along with a knife. I had to break it up.

I didn't see it as terrible. I like action. A fair number of teachers were authority-minded, and a lot of the kids didn't relate to being told 'Hey boy, stop that'. It led to conflict.

I never treated them as silly little children. Having been disruptive myself maybe helped. I remember three or four kids wandering in off the street - you always had intruders. I said, 'You don't come to this school, do you?' and they started being a bit difficult. One said he betted I couldn't do a kung fu kick to the top of a door like him. I managed it, a bit stiff, but I did it. And they went away. That was inexperience: I'd been backed into a corner by them, it could easily have gone wrong. I found it all very enjoyable, living on your wits, you know, it kept you on your toes.

When I went there it was streamed. There were very few black faces in the top class and hardly any white ones in the bottom. It was a divisive system. By the time they'd got to the fifth year, the kids at the bottom had got used to being told they were bloody useless, and those were the ones they gave me. I took them seriously. We had mutual respect, we were friends.

The social-studies classes were taken up with kids other teachers didn't want. Within two years I had instigated getting rid of the streaming, and mixed-ability classes came in.

Brent was a looney-left borough, but I think its racial-awareness programme was good. Maybe it's something to do with Brent Council and the awareness of the teachers that we haven't had street violence in Brent like they've had in Brixton. This borough has the highest black population in the country, but there have been no problems, and you have to ask why.

Ambrozine Neil (the Brent councillor) was active then, with her black schools project. She used to come into school and teach my classes because, she said, there weren't many black teachers. I said, yeah, fine. It doesn't mean to say that black kids were riveted by black history. Some of them said it was awful, a waste of time - but still, it was worth doing.

About then I was mentioned by Roy Kerridge in the Daily Mail as a typical Brent sociology teacher who had been 'a mass of hair' in my youth and now spent my time telling the kids how much I disliked Margaret Thatcher. Well, kids want to know what you believe. I always told them, but I would add there are other people who don't believe that. I'm a paid- up member of the Labour Party, but I always put the other side.

I did an MA on urban education at King's College, London, on a year's secondment. I did my thesis on philosophical approaches to whether there should be black schools. When I went back to Aylestone, there was a feeling of great political change - of teaching being a question of profits and losses. I didn't want to be part of that. And demographic changes meant the school was down to 500 pupils, we were rattling around in it, and the kids had quietened down. More of them were born in Britain, they were more settled in. The fun had gone out of the place.

So in 1987 I left, when Brent offered the possibility of teaching in a permanent supply pool. I thought it would keep me on my toes. And I enjoyed it: one minute I was a stand-in head of department, the next working at a special school.

At the last school I taught in there was a little girl, her name seemed familiar. I said, do you know Bernard? She said, 'He's my Dad.' It made me feel old. There can't be any other job like teaching. You're still there when everyone else has moved on. I was frightened I might turn into a Mr Chips figure.

Then they closed the supply pool. We had to get permanent jobs again, and it was 'Been there, done that'. Streaming is coming back now, with the publishing of exam results. The politicisation means the pleasure has gone out of teaching. I got early retirement, which was possible because I was highly paid - pounds 29,000 a year if I'd stayed on.

I don't know what I will do now. My wife, Angela, and I have a boy aged 14. I can't live to the standard I did on a pounds 9,000 pension. But it's a challenge. I think I might work a bit on my guitar. Learn how to play it properly this time.

(Photograph omitted)