Two schools - both in leafy Larkminster, but worlds apart. The irrepressible Jilly Cooper turns her brilliant pen to the explosive world of education.
At Bagley Hall, fashionable alma mater to many dashing and glamorous denizens of Larkshire, including Rupert Campbell-Black's children, trouble is afoot. The ambitious and fatally attractive headmaster, Hengist Brett-Taylor, hatches a plan to share the highly superior facilities of his school with the students at Larkminster Compehensive - known locally, as 'Larks'. His reasons for doing so are purely financial, but he is encouraged by the opportunities the scheme gives him for frequent meetings with Janna Curtis, the dynamic new head of Larks, who has been drafted in to save what is a fast-sinking school from closure. Janna is young, pretty, enthusiastic, determined - and she will do anything to rescue her demoralised, run-down and cash-strapped school. The parents of Bagley Hall's rich and pampered children are none too keen on this radical move, but the students see it as a great opportunity to get up to even more mayhem than usual. And for the pupils at the comprehensive school, many of them struggling with appalling home backgrounds, violence and lack of any parental support (problems which are not unknown to some of the Bagley Hall pupils) mixing with the posh school up the road is often a mixed blessing.
