“All adults are paper tigers”: pupil power in English schools, 1968–1980

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the formation of multiple school students’ unions in England, accompanied by a rich print culture. Young people retained absolute editorial control, even as they formed their work in dialogue with spaces constructed as belonging to the “adult” world. This article contends that youth-authored literature served a specific function for young people as a forum in which the meanings of childhood, youth, and adulthood were pulled apart and reconstructed. An emergent concept of age-based oppression–sometimes analysed in dialogue with other identities, including gender and class–provided the foundations for new political community.