This publication gets to the heart of an old yet ever more pressing dilemma. How do you reconcile diversity, inclusivity and equality? In the body politic, it seems, we find it increasingly difficult - but schools have to tackle it every day. This is an account of how some of them do it: not rocket science, its editor says, “just strategies that have been found to work”.

One school has researched and built up to language college status - thanks to the multiple language abilities of its students. Another targets the disaffected students who seem determined to exclude themselves; yet another (a prestigious selective school) makes a principled decision to abandon its daily act of worship. And so on.

Schools that set out to help disabled, marginalised or disaffected pupils are often held back by the league-table culture. But there are, as this book show, some richly persuasive compensations.

MICHAEL DUFFY