The "Floodgate Street area" was a notorious slum district in the city of Birmingham in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article presents a case study, drawing on the rich archival sources available for this area, to examine the language that local authority and voluntary workers used to describe the local area, and their engagement with local children in terms of welfare provision and punitive measures. The work of teachers at Floodgate Street School is located within a local discourse of urban poverty, and within local attempts to improve conditions for the inhabitants of slum areas. Local activities and discussions are contextualized within broader debates concerning slums and patterns of welfare. This article places schools at the center of a historiography of urban poverty and welfare from which education is largely absent. It explores the possibilities, and limitations, of using the local archival record for this sort of analysis. (Contains 106 footnotes.)