My thoughts on stuff

Year 2 parents evening and once again I was reminded about how the school system is set up for people like us. We hear nothing but praise. She works hard, excellent reader, a pleasure to teach. We flick through the maths and literacy books and see page after page of neat work with ticks and smiley faces all over it. About half the parents in my daughter's class will be having a similar experience. Generally (and there are some exceptions) we are all people who did reasonably well at school, not straight A grades and Oxbridge degrees but A-levels and degrees. The types who make up most of the white collar professionals in this country. And the types who decide how the education system should work. I then think of all my friends and relatives and their children. And the only ones who aren't having similar experiences are the handful who have a child with additional needs. We, and our children, are stuck in this positive feedback loop where our children are hitting the tar...

My mum, a retired reception teacher, recently told me that she had been chatting to the former headteacher of a school she worked in. They are both now grandparents with grandchildren in the early stages of primary education. The level of expectations and formalised learning methods that their grandchildren are experiencing are a world away from the 1975-2000 period of their teaching careers. They questioned whether they had done enough. As they live in the village they taught in, and have done for over 40 years, they of course know the families of the children they taught. And there are the full range of academic outcomes across them, some who have achieved highly, and some who left as soon as possible. So whilst it didn't seem to have had any noticeable impact (after all every other school would have been teaching in a similar way) they wondered what would have happened had they pushed us more. My own experience in that primary school was one of freedom and excitement. I rem...