Melissa Benn

Melissa Ann Benn (born 1957) is a British journalist and writer. She is known for her support of comprehensive education and criticism of many aspects of government policy on education. Benn setup the Local Schools Network in 2010, a pro-state schools pressure group. She has written two books on the subject; School Wars, a study of the UK's post-war comprehensive education system, and The Truth About Our Schools.

Career
After leaving university, Benn spent several years working at the National Council for Civil Liberties, as an assistant to Patricia Hewitt, later Secretary of State for Health in Tony Blair's government, and then as a researcher at the Open University, under Professor Stuart Hall, working on deaths in custody.

Benn then worked as a journalist for City Limits magazine. Subsequently, she has written for other publications, including The Guardian, The London Review of Books and Marxism Today.

Her first novel, Public Lives, published in 1995, was described by writer Margaret Forster as "remarkably sophisticated for a first". In 1998 Jonathan Cape published Benn's Madonna and Child: towards a modern politics of motherhood which caused some controversy. The reviewers for The Guardian and The Observer criticised the book, while the Literary Review called it "a reflective, rich and rewarding investigation into the ...conditions of mothers' lives". The Guardian featured Benn as one of a number of Britain's leading feminist writers at the time.

Benn co-edited, with Clyde Chitty, A Tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and Democracy (2004), collecting various papers relevant to the campaign for comprehensive education, an issue on which her mother had been a prominent campaigner. In recent years, Benn has become an advocate for comprehensives and a critic of many aspects of government policy on education. In 2006, with Fiona Millar, she wrote a pamphlet entitled A Comprehensive Future: Quality and Equality for All our Children, which was launched at the House of Commons in January 2006 at a meeting addressed by the former leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock and a former Secretary of State for Education Estelle Morris.

Her second novel, One of Us, a story of two families set against the backdrop of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was published in 2008.

Benn helped form the Local Schools Network in 2010, a pro-state schools pressure group. School Wars (2011) studies the UK's post-war comprehensive education system. What Should We Tell Our Daughters? was published in 2013.

In 2012, Benn won the Fred and Anne Jarvis Award, presented by the National Union of Teachers for her campaigning and work for the cause of comprehensive education.

In 2023 she was appointed, a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.

Personal life
Melissa Benn was born in Hammersmith, London to politician Tony Benn and writer-educationalist Caroline Benn. She has three brothers, Joshua Benn, Hilary Benn and Stephen Benn, 3rd Viscount Stansgate, making her a member of the political Benn family. She attended Fox Primary School and Holland Park School and graduated with a first in History from the London School of Economics. Benn lives in London with her husband Paul Gordon and their two daughters. In accordance with her support for the state education system, her children attended state schools.

Selected publications

 * Sexual Harassment at Work (NCCL pamphlet; 1982)
 * The Rape Controversy, with Tess Gill and Anna Coote (NCCL pamphlet; second and third editions only, 1983, 1986)
 * Death in the City, with Ken Worpole (non-fiction; Canary Press, 1985)
 * Courts and Sentencing (Children's Legal Centre pamphlet; 1987)
 * Public Lives (novel; 1995)
 * Madonna and Child: Politics of Modern Motherhood (non-fiction; Vintage, 1998)
 * A tribute to Caroline Benn: education and democracy (non-fiction; Continuum, 2004)
 * A Comprehensive Future: Quality and Equality for all our Children (non-fiction; Compass, 2006)
 * One of Us (novel; Chatto and Windus, 2008)
 * School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education (non-fiction; Verso, 2011)
 * What should we tell our daughters?: The pleasures and pressures of growing up female (non-fiction; John Murray, 2013)
 * The Truth About Our Schools: Exposing the myths, exploring the evidence, with Janet Downs (non-fiction; Routledge, 2015)
 * Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service (non-fiction; Verso, 2018, ISBN 978-1788732208)