It deals with the problems suffered by many smaller girls' boarding schools during the early 1990s recession, and makes use of metaphor and analogy in its critique of the John Major government of the day.
The inner-city children - four boys, Jason, Wayne, Clint, and Ryan, and one girl, Hayley (whose mother had committed suicide) arrive at the school and are, for the most part, viewed with hostility and a general lack of understanding.
One of the inner-city children, Clint (played by Glen Mead) seems to blend into the school environment (he is seen reading right-wing newspapers such as The Sun, The Times and the Daily Mail) and is little heard from in the film's later stages.
At Speech Day, Mrs Fry actually says that it had been a great success, had secured the school's future and had justified the government's cutbacks in public funding.
She herself had transferred to the comprehensive school that Hayley had come from, and she concludes by commenting that "I learnt that prize day that there could be no poetry for Jason and Wayne, and that ideals such as ours in the Higher Mortals had almost been abandoned.