Back to school.

Rather like Goldilocks my grandson has been to 3 different schools in as many years and I hope he’s settled now. The first was too small; not enough choice of friends and a new-to-it-all head teacher who was of the chocolate fireguard variety. She looked the part in pant suit and long, swinging Jennifer Anniston hair, using words like ‘bling’ and hip, street-wise descriptive nouns. When there was trouble she was excellent with the platitudes. Several children had to be taken away because a couple of bullies were not dealt with as they should be, and one rumbustious boy was dubbed a bully who shouldn’t have been. She just didn’t have the experience to deal with the parents, never mind the children.

The second school was too big. Segregated playgrounds didn’t stop the older pupils bullying the younger ones, and class sizes meant teachers were too harassed to see what was going on in front of their noses.

It wsn’t the bullying in either school that upset Sandy personally but he was aware of it happening and troubled by the bullying of others. His problems were the disturbance at home and therefore in his head. His world had fallen apart and he had no way of coping. That sort of emotional turbulence separates people from their peers at any age. There was no support forthcoming for him at either school; the teachers were too pre-occupied with meeting standards. Academic achievement was all they had focus for.

The other reason he couldn’t settle was simply that amongst his peers he didn’t fit the mould. I’m not sure why that happens, could hazard guesses but that’s all they would be - guesses.

The third school, a public school, has small classes and the ability to be flexible. It has its demands - Ofsted calls in there too of course - but there is more sport, art and music and other qualities are valued beyond the academic. Qualities of sportmanship in the oldfashioned sense of the word, comradeship, leadership and community. Tradition. The end-of-term service reminded me of my Grammar School when those leaving the family to go to the next level were appreciated and reassured that the good wishes of the friendly faces they were leaving would go with them. That sort of service doesn’t seem to happen in the state schools any more.

None of this should have to be the domain of the wealthy. The values have just got forgotten in the pressure of trying to meet government standards.

Something I’ve learned since Sandy’s experience has been there is that Public School children are not any more privileged than State School children. Often they have had a much worse time at home and feel far less rooted, their Forces parents continually moved from one base to another for instance. One of Sandy’s class-mates didn’t see his mother for 4 months because she was in Afghanistan. There are other reasons too. An ex-headmaster of this school gave a talk at the local Rotary Club recently and spoke of a boy who had been a primary carer for his mother whilst she struggled with cancer then when she died had been sent to the school by relatives. There were also heart-breaking cases of children whose parents didn’t want them at home and left them with ‘guardians’ through the holidays. The less wealthy classes just treat the poor kids with dislike and resentment so they stay out of the way.

I don’t think Sandy feels especialy privileged and I don’t detect any boastfulness amongst his friends. They struggle with the same things as any other child I suppose.

What their parents have had is an element of choice so that when the choice has been made for the good of the child they are one hundred percent behind the both the child and the school. That’s the difference and therein lies the problem with education in Britain - the lack of choice. How much does anyone value what is forced upon them? With small schools being closed and those that do exist getting inexperienced teachers because they are thought to be a soft option, what opportunity does any parent have to make a choice that either suits their life-style or that they have any confidence in?

In Denmark I believe it is easily possible to open a school and as long as the standards are reasonable to receive state funding for that school, which means there can be more Waldorf Schools, non-directive schools, schools with a bias toward one or another craft or art, ‘out-door’ farm schools - the list of possibilities is long.

We live in ‘blame’ culture these days. Blaming the school is a favourite. A certain type of parent happily abdicates responsibility for their child’s behaviour and hand it over to ‘the school.’ If schooling were to cease to be obligatory but a privilege how soon would that attitude change? No chance of that happening of course, so schooling continues to be a state-funded child-minding facility which is obliged to force learning upon its charges. Not good.

The ideals of teaching - of leading out the best from the child - have been lost too.

When I went to what was laughingly called a teachers training college the course was direly awful and unhelpful but the one good thing I took from the course was that the aim of a teacher should be to make learning enjoyable - to educate the children in ways which would make them want to learn more and give them the skills to do that for themselves. Somewhere that has been lost and the Victorian methods of pouring concrete into the poor bairns has been re-adopted.

Brief trip down memory lane here: The result of that college course was that those who were born to make good teachers left and made good teachers; those who were doomed to be bad ones struggled for a bit then left the career for ever. The only practical advice I remember being given was to hold onto the blackboard when feeling nervous in front of a new class.

Actually I found it helped to wear glasses which I didn’t need but which gave me much needed sense of separation from the little blighters. I didn’t do too badly in the secondary schools in Yorkshire where I began my brief teaching career, all things considered - one significant ‘thing’ being the cultural divide between north and south and the slap-round-the-earhole habits that the older teachers still used. Oddly I got on better with the real naughties, not so well with those earnest types who wanted to learn. The problem was we had fun but I didn’t teach them anything useful. I wouldn’t get past Ofsted today!

Anyway, to continue my soliloquy: Look at the results of force-feeding the children like Strasbourg geese. More and more leave school with degrees and there are less and less jobs waiting for them. They don’t leave with useful skills but with ‘Media Studies’ and an artificial sense of their own creative potential. They expect the world to give them a living for meagre talent. Then they find it isn’t going to happen. Shock.

Expectations - that’s what has risen. Even amongst those who don’t go to Uni but take the DSS option or have a baby at 16, expect that a huge screen TV, state-of-the-art (what the hell does that mean anyway?) mobile, Bluetooth, ipod and so on, should be, must be, theirs. A car and all the household machines if they have a house, and a wardrobe crammed to overflowing with designer clothes. These are what define a person in the 21st century.

How to get it? Well reality TV is one way and the evidence is that the ruder the contestants are the more publicity they get. Footballers get obscene amounts of money - and look how loutish their behaviour is. Jade rose to fame with loutish behaviour. There’s money and fame in it so loutish behaviour must be the way to go.

Values have become seriously twisted.