After spending nearly 30 happy and successful years in book publishing, Ed Christie had a “road to Damascus” thought. “In a moment of inspiration (or madness) I decided to leave the corporate world to become a GCSE English teacher ,” he explains.

He had grown up in a house filled with books and had spent decades in marketing at Penguin Random House, where he helped propel Lee Child to become the UK’s best-selling thriller writer and worked with authors including Dan Brown, Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope. He was looking forward to helping students achieve success in their English papers and discovering what their generation was reading.

It hadn’t crossed his mind that they wouldn’t be interested in books – and had not heard of the authors he’d worked with. “A few girls came into the

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