NotSheep

I left a comment on someone’s blog about this recently ages ago, but thought I might put some thoughts here too then wrote a post about it and stuck it in my drafts and forgot about it. Now I’ve been sick for over a week, and haven’t written here much because I didn’t want to whinge, so, a bit later than planned, some musings on reading.

It seems to me that for a lot of us (home-educating parents, that is), one of our biggest concerns in the early days - by which I mean the couple of years after our children would have started nursery or school - is teaching our children to read. Certainly reading is an important skill - once a child is a fluent reader, a huge new world is opened to him. Without the ability to read, it’s much more difficult to become informed about an issue, to find out how to do something for the first time, to learn a new skill, to make plans… I would say that reading is as much a milestone in a child’s development as his first steps.

But most of the discussion about “learning to read” seems to be about skill, rather than enthusiasm. My feeling is that enthusiasm for reading is probably at least as important than technical ability - possibly even moreso when just beginning to read. There are lots of children who can read, but who never do so by choice - there are lots of adults the same! I suspect that almost all children who are enthusiastic about reading become fluent readers unless something puts them off. So the question is, I think, how do we impart the skill while encouraging the desire?

Watching a child learn to read is a marvellous thing. I suspect it’s a wonderful experience whether you choose a structured programme of teaching a child to read or simply observe the child’s interest and ability grow. I don’t know whether school-teachers realise this; I certainly haven’t heard any of them talk about it. But they are in a very different position to home-educating parents: they are expected to produce “readers” in a specific amount of time, without much one-on-one, and regardless of whether the children are ready. As home-educating parents, we are (yet again) in a much more pleasant situation, because we can do what works for our children, when it works for our children, without the pressure of curriculum goals and end-of-term reports and OFSTED inspections - and we can spend as much time on it as needed.

So…how to do it? The current trend in the education system seems to be towards synthetic phonics - in essence, learning individual sounds and putting them together. Despite a lack of consensus amongst educational experts, the government seems to have decided that this is the way all children in schools must be taught to read. I can see the advantages of synthetic phonics, and have one child who learned to read very quickly and easily using this method - but I have another child for whom the method held no appeal, and who would have been put off reading had he been forced to learn using it. What worries me about the way this is being implemented in schools is the lack of flexibility, the lack of respect for the individual child. No doubt it will work very well for many children - but for Every Single Child? I’m unconvinced. Fortunately I’m not constrained in the same way that school-teachers are.

I have three fluent readers and another child who is getting there. He’d have been in his second year of school now, had he gone to school, and I think he’d probably have been able to read by now, if that was the case. I think he’d also have been able to read by now if we’d concentrated more on teaching him reading skills over the last year. But we haven’t - because he’s been much more interested in doing other things. Now his interest in reading is picking up, and I expect he’ll be reading well within the next few months - and I do not think for a second that he has been damaged by not learning to read “at the right time” - which seems to be defined as “right after starting school”. In other words, like much of the education system, the timing of learning to read appears to be more about what’s efficient for the system than what’s best for the children within it. In my humble opinion, the “right time” to learn to read is when a child wants to.

Of my three fluent readers, one did start to read shortly after starting school. The timing was right for him - in fact he quickly became the most fluent reader in the class (and was so good at spelling that it was a topic of conversation in the school staff-room - it must have been a fascinating place to be ) I think the school probably used a combination of methods; certainly there was some look-and-say involved, some sounding-out. Looking back, I suspect he’d have learned to read when he did no matter what we’d done - whether he’d been in school or not, whether we’d provided any formal teaching or not. Perhaps he’d have learned even sooner if we had been actively teaching him ourselves, rather than “handing over” to the school. It doesn’t really matter though, for he acquired both the ability to read and a love of reading. When he was about six years old, he told me thoughtfully, “Reading is my destiny.”

He is the only one of my children to have been to school. When my next child reached “school age”, it fell to me to “teach him to read”. I was quite anxious about the whole thing and really wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I got lucky - I’d picked up a Superphonics book and he loved it. My luck wasn’t about having that book, but about it suiting my child so well. Long before we reached the end of it, he was a good reader. (We kept going to the end anyway, although he was just going through the motions by that time. I’m not sure why!)

A couple of years later and it was the turn of the next child to learn to read - and things were very different with him. He didn’t go for phonics at all. He had no interest in the Superphonics books. I’d heard people recommend “100 Easy Lessons” so I borrowed that - he hated it, and so did I. We both found it tedious and boring.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that at that time, we were having a very busy time as a family (moving countries, buying and selling houses, etc) and there wasn’t a lot of time to sit down and do formal work with him, because continuing to slog through phonics-based systems would probably have put him off reading altogether. Scratchy was concerned that he wasn’t reading yet - both his older siblings had been reading well by that age - but I could see the small steps he was taking towards becoming a reader. I could see him acquiring little skills that would, I knew, all fit together one day and become “reading” - and that’s just what happened. In June, he could barely read simple words; in the first week of August that year, he finished reading the first book of the Harry Potter series.

By the time he started to read, he’d have been in school for nearly two years (starting a year earlier here than he would have anywhere else). I think that if he’d been in school, one of two things would have happened. Either he’d have learned to read at the “right time” - about a year and a half earlier than he actually did - but he wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about it, or he would have struggled with reading and considered himself “no good” at it - and again, wouldn’t have been enthusiastic. Instead, he started when he wanted and when he was ready - and at a time when I was busy having a baby and my children were out all day making friends in their new neighbourhood.

Many parents who’ve observed their children learn to read (rather than just doing the homework sent from the school) describe a similar process - one in which one day, something just clicks. Learning to read is not like climbing a mountain. When you climb a mountain, you take one step after another, and each step takes you closer to the summit. Reading is more like learning to ride a bicycle - you acquire a variety of (often apparently unrelated) skills, then one day you start to put them together, and after a bit of wobbling, you’re off - flying down the road (or through the books).

So what’s the key? I don’t have a degree in education, but I do have three children who not only can read well, but do read - a lot - so I think we must be doing something right. I think what’s important is to use whatever method suits your child, when your child is interested, and to only do as much as your child is eager to do. Schools don’t hold some magical knowledge about the process that isn’t available to the rest of us; in fact, contrary to widespread belief, most people were able to read before legislation made educational provision compulsory. (In many places, literacy rates today are lower than they were then - I’d ask what schools are doing to screw up literacy, but I think it’s pretty obvious when you consider what I’ve said above about the key to success! If you’re still wondering, go and read Dumbing Us Down.)

(Out of interest, today I downloaded a “reading age” test and asked my three older children to take it. The child who is now 8 years and 5 months - who started to read nearly two years after he’d have started school - got a reading age on it of 12 years and 10 months. The child who is now 10 years and 4 months - who started reading shortly after his fourth birthday - got a reading age of 13 years and 10 months. The child who will be 13 years old next month? He got a reading age of 14 years and 1 month; he got one word on the test wrong, and to be honest I don’t know a lot of people of any age who would read “phthisis” correctly )

I had one of those conversations with someone who just doesn’t get it last week; every home-educating parent will know what I mean. It started as a casual chat, then the fact that we home-educate came up. The woman I was talking to mentioned that she was a teacher; I find that teachers are sometimes very positive about home-ed and sometimes very defensive. This one surprised me though; she just couldn’t see how it would work at all. The first thing she said that surprised me was, “Someone obviously comes and monitors what you’re doing.” - I know a lot of people ask if this is the case, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone before who assumed with such conviction not only that home-education was monitored by education authorities but also that it needed to be. When I questioned this, she told me - as have other teachers - that some parents just wouldn’t bother; I know this is true, but I suspect that the parents who can’t be bothered are very unlikely to take their children out of school; they’re too glad to get the free babysitting. I also suspect that the vast majority of parents would bother if there wasn’t a school system effectively saying “oh don’t bother - leave it to us, we’re the experts, you know nothing about education anyway”.

Then she asked how my children would ever get qualifications and I explained some of the various routes they could take. I tried to explain that I am not anti-teacher, nor even anti-school, but that I am anti-system: I do not believe a system can cater for the individual. She responded that there has to be a system; she seemed to see some of the problems with a system, but to be unable to accept that any child could learn outside one. She surprised me by saying that “some children are just lazy” - I tried to say that I thought that was very rarely true, that certainly some children weren’t interested in academics, that some children weren’t interested in working on specific things at specific times, but that in my experience, all children, when presented with something that interested them, were active learners. She just didn’t believe this.

Then “what will you do when they want to learn something you don’t know about?” - heh, that happened a long time ago. I talked a bit about how children learn all sorts of things without being actively taught, about how parents could learn alongside their children, about how people could teach themselves - and she disagreed. I asked if she believed that nobody could ever learn something without someone else teaching it to them; it seemed she’d never considered this possibility before, but that yes, she did think that. I’m baffled as to how anyone can think this for more than 20 seconds: knowledge would have come to a standstill very early in the history of mankind if it were true. How on earth did any of us over the age of 30 learn how to use computers?

She also questioned how someone with no “teacher training” could actually teach. I tried to explain that what I do is very unlike what a teacher in a classroom does. I asked her to try to imagine that when she returned to her school in September, she was told that she would have five pupils in her class, all of whom she cared about a great deal. There would be no curriculum requirements, no requirements for them to do SATS, no paperwork, no answering to the principal or anyone else. She would have absolute freedom to do whatever she felt would fulfil their educational needs. And she would have those five pupils right through their years in school, so she would get to know them very well.

She couldn’t imagine it. I don’t mean she thought it was beyond her imagination; I mean she said, “oh that would never happen”. Well, yes, I know it would never happen, but I was asking her to imagine how different it would be. But she just couldn’t. She was so firmly tied by the system in which she works that she just couldn’t see beyond the traditional approach of a school system at all. She just sat there shaking her head and saying “but it’s not going to happen”.

Then she started talking about how imminent changes to the curriculum are supposed to “stretch the brightest children” and “personalise” learning - but commented that while the theory was all very good, there was no additional funding for it, therefore it wouldn’t work, and that class-sizes needed to be smaller before the education system could improve anyway. I’m not sure I believe that class-size is relevant, really; I think the problems with the system are far deeper than that, but anyway…

(As an aside, I did read a bit about these curriculum changes and my reaction was twofold: first, the thought that the changes are meaningless within the context of a system, and second, horror at the grammar and spelling of the documents published on school and education authority sites: “teacher’s will become aware”???!)

Then came what I felt to be one of her most revealing comments, though I don’t think she realised it: “If I could have my way, I’d get out of school and be paid for going around to home-educated children and teaching them to read.”

Where to start with that one? Her subconscious admission that she doesn’t enjoy the system? Her assumption that children can’t learn to read without being actively taught to do so? Her belief that as a “qualified” teacher, she’d be better able to do it than a child’s parents?

I don’t want to give the wrong impression; the woman I was talking to wasn’t a stupid person, nor an unkind one, nor even argumentative. She just could not get past her unquestioned beliefs about schools: that they are essential, that parents are incapable of teaching their own children (and shouldn’t be trusted to do so even if they were), that children are incapable of learning without being led. Her attitude seemed to be that parents are incompetent and/or disinterested, children have no thirst for learning, and the school system, though not perfect, is the only possible way to provide education.

Every time I think of this conversation, a quote comes to my mind: “Once your consciousness has been raised, it cannot be lowered.” I wonder where her consciousness stands now?

Several people have added comments to this post about family size being an issue of personal choice. In case it’s not clear from my post - I agree. The purpose of my post was not to encourage people to have more children, nor even to complain about people’s attitudes towards larger-than-average families, but to talk about the odd (in my opinion) fact that people seem to be fairly accepting of families with four children, but unable to cope with the existence of families with five!

I’ve been meaning to write about a certain phenomena for a while, and a recent post on Katie’s blog reminded me about it.

When we had four children, I would get comments on the size of our family regularly, but most were reasonably positive, or at least not outright negative. Things like “oh you have your hands full!” (my response: “yes, isn’t it great!”) or “wow, you must be busy!” (my response: “yes, and I love it”). The occasional “sooner you than me!” (my response to that, sometimes, depending on the person’s attitude, was: “yes, probably better that way”). I sometimes heard comments about them all being boys too - which partly annoyed me, because we have never “tried for a girl”, and partly didn’t, because I love my boys to bits and think it’s fantastic having lots of boys.

But when Toby was born, and four turned into five, something changed. There is a very distinct difference between the reactions I used to get, and the reactions I get now.

“Now” being when I’m out with all five, of course. At the minute, with Barney in France, I’m only ever out with four - and the reactions have been more positive again. So the difference is definitely not because people’s attitudes happened to change around 2005, or because I look older or more tired than I used to, or because my children’s behaviour in public has deteriorated. It’s definitely about the number.

When I’m out with five, people don’t seem to say much. Instead, they look. I don’t mean they stare - although maybe they do: when you’re out and about with five children, you’re generally too busy to pay a lot of attention to whether other people are looking at you. What I mean is, they say “are these all yours?” or “five children?” and when I reply in the affirmative, they just… look. As if they can’t think of anything to say.

Is that what it is? That they just don’t know what to say? Maybe they assume we can’t really want five children, that we must have them for some other reason. Maybe they think we must have a religious objection to contraception and they’re afraid of saying anything else in case they offend me. Or maybe they think we must not be intelligent enough to handle family-planning and they don’t see the point in talking to someone so obviously stupid. But they’d be wrong: we wanted, and planned, every one of our children.

A few months ago, I mentioned an article which had appeared in the Tuscaloosa News, in which the (slight) trend towards having (slightly) larger families was discussed. One of the mothers interviewed for that article offered her reason for having more children: “Why not?” That was our reason for having a fourth and fifth child too. But it was also our reason for having a first child, and a second and third: we wanted to, and there was no good reason why not.

I never understood how people could, before they had children, say “we want two” or “we want three” - because how do you know what having two, or three, is like, until you’re there? I suppose I always felt that I’d like more than two, and worried about the one-left-out syndrome that often seems to accompany three, so I was going for four - but I never, in my mind, limited it to four. When I had four, I knew I loved it and I’d like more. But I didn’t know I was going to feel that way until I got to four, if you see what I mean. I always figured that when I felt it was right to not have any more children, I’d stop, whether it was because of the number I already had, or my age, or whatever.

Maybe the reason people react differently when you have five is that they can imagine having four children, but not five. I suppose that makes sense, if they have three - most of the women I know do occasionally harbour moments of thinking that it would be nice to have another baby. And even people who don’t have three probably know lots of people who do - since three is quite a common number of children - so they can imagine one extra child in those families.

A sociologist quoted in the article said, “No matter how much money the parents have, most think each of their kids should have their own place and time,” he said. “More than four — that’s when people start thinking you’re crazy, that you’re shortchanging the ones you already have.”

Maybe people do think that. Those of you reading who have one or two or three - do you think that? (I promise not to be offended ;-)) I don’t feel that way, any more than I feel that having a second child means the first will be short-changed. I remember a conversation with Scratchy, when Barney was only a few months old, in which he expressed doubts about having a second child, and said “I just don’t know if I’d love another child as much as I love him.” He got over those doubts - obviously - and although I haven’t asked him, I’ve seen him with all the others, and I know the amount of love isn’t an issue. Love isn’t something you get a finite amount of, as any parent with two children knows.

It’s different with time and money, of course - you don’t get more of either just because you have more children - but you get better at managing both. You find ways to save money - and in some ways it’s no more expensive to have five than it is to have four anyway. We’d still drive a seven-seater vehicle if we had four (and we know lots of families who do even though they have three or two children, or even just one). We wouldn’t live in a smaller house if we only had four - most of our neighbours live in houses similar in size to ours, and most of them have just one or two children - so we wouldn’t be saving on housing costs. When it comes to time, you prioritise differently and drop some of the non-important things from your life. I do notice, however, that it’s very often the parents who have more children who are the ones who volunteer to help out with things like Scouts - so it would seem it’s about attitude, rather than the amount of time available.

And how could you ever even start to factor in the extra time and attention a child gets from his or her siblings. Toby gets masses of both - and of love - from his brothers, and they get a huge amount out of his company too. Maybe there’s another blog-post in that.

The Tuscaloosa News article said that in some American suburbs, a large family is a status symbol. One of the mothers interviewed for that article said she was aware of that notion, but that “I thought it was kind of funny…most people who have a lot of kids don’t have the time or energy to care what about others think.”

She’s right, but alongside not having the time or energy, I suspect most of us with more-than-four also don’t have the inclination to care about what others think. If we did, we probably wouldn’t have more-than-four in the first place.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I only ever get negative reactions to having five children. What I do find interesting, however, is where the positive reactions come from. They are nearly always from women whose children are older and who then tell me that they had four, five, six, seven children - and they always say how glad they are that they did. I’ve yet to meet anyone who said they wished they’d had fewer children - which, I suppose, is as good a reason as any for having more

A few months ago, during a conversation with a friend, I realised I’d never written anything on this blog about why we started home-educating. I’ve been meaning to write a post on the topic ever since, and coming across this post on my rss feeds reminded me.

We never planned to home-educate, but when George was very small, I realised that he would have to start school when he was just two months past his fourth birthday - and I mean proper school, sit down at your desk and be quiet and have you done your homework school. His nursery year would start two months after his third birthday. And I knew in my heart that it was not right for him. I had no concerns about his academic ability, but he’d always been an intense child, a spirited child - and I was sure that if he was forced into a formal school environment at that age, one of two things would happen: either he would be squashed, lose his spirit, lose who he was - or he would fight it, not fit in, be labelled a troublemaker and who knows what else. I didn’t want either of those things to happen.

He can’t have been much more than a year old when I started to try to find a way to delay his school starting-date by one year - that’s all I wanted; I felt that year would make a big difference to him. I spoke to people in various government departments, some of them more helpful than others. I discovered that there was absolutely no flexibility in school starting dates here. And I realised that the only way to legally avoid sending him to school at four years and two months was to home-educate him.

Barney had been through two years of pre-school and while he was in his first year of school - two years before George would have been due to start - I spoke to the school’s head teacher. She felt strongly that children were starting school too young, particularly boys, and was all in favour of our plan to delay George’s entry into school. We realised that there was a possibility that George would not be able to go into the first year of school when he was five, that he might have to go directly into the second year; it was all going to depend on the wording of the admissions documents that year. The head teacher was willing to work with us and give him a place in first year if it was at all possible - but the school was heavily over-subscribed and we knew we were taking a chance. We also knew that even if he started in first year, he might have to skip a year at some point, in order to be moving to secondary school along with all the others born in the same academic year - something the Education Department would insist on. We didn’t like that idea, but decided that we couldn’t make decisions based on worry about it. We didn’t know how things would work out - but we knew that sending him to school soon after he turned four was a recipe for disaster. We decided we had to do what was right for him at that time, and worry about the future when the future arrived.

George would have been due to start school in September 2001. In the early part of 2001, Barney was in his second year of primary school. He was doing well and seemed to be happy - although looking back now, I can see the early signs of boredom and discontent. And we always seemed to struggle to get him ready and out the door in the mornings - most days I almost had to pry the books from his fingers to get him into his school uniform. One day, sometime around April, Barney said he wanted to be home-educated too. I was surprised; we’d never even mentioned the possibility of that. But we said we’d give it a try over the summer holidays and see how things went.

One Monday in early June, we were having the usual morning: “Barney, please go get dressed… Barney, we need to leave in ten minutes, get your school uniform on… Barney, put down the book and get ready!… Barney, we need to go in two minutes, go get dressed!” And Barney said, “I want to be home-educated!” I replied, “I know, and we said we’d try it out over the summer - now please get ready for school!” And he said, “I want to be home-educated now.”

I argued that it was silly to refuse to go to school right then - there were only three weeks left until the end of term. And then I realised: there were only three weeks left until the end of term. What was he going to miss? Even if home-education was awful and didn’t suit us, what would he have lost? What would they do in those three weeks that he couldn’t catch up on? Was it worth arguing with my child about this? Was it worth making him feel that his feelings weren’t important to us? Of course the answer was no.

And that was the day we started home-educating Barney. Because I didn’t know what he’d done in school since September, we went back to the start of the curriculum for school year. In the next eight weeks, we covered the entire year - and the next year. By mid-summer, it was clear that we were going to be home-educating for a while. George could hardly wait to get started too. Freddy was two years old; he would sit at the table with crayons and “work” too

At the time, I felt that it was terrible that the system was so inflexible that children had to start school even when their parents were firmly convinced they weren’t ready. I still think that - but I’m also glad of it, because otherwise we might never have moved in the direction of home-education. Six years on, I’m convinced we made the right decisions. I have absolutely no doubt that, had we sent George to school six years ago, it would have destroyed him. Perhaps that sounds melodramatic, but it’s not intended to be; it’s just the truth. I also believe that if Barney had stayed in school we would, within the next year or so, have witnessed him change too, would have seen more problems related to boredom.

I’m sometimes asked if we’ll always home-educate or if our children will go to school in the future. I say I don’t know, which is the truth. I never expected to be home-educating now. All I know is that we have all gained a huge amount from home-educating for the last six years, and that it continues to be best for us right now.

Long promised - and also just plain long - thoughts, half-way through Henry’s six-month stay with us.

First I should say that Henry is a really great kid, and that I think a lot of the success of his stay so far has been because of that. From the beginning, he made a huge amount of effort to fit in, to be helpful, to learn - and that has all paid off. His English was minimal on his arrival, but now, after just three months, he’s reading Artemis Fowl. He still struggles with much of his maths and has told me that he hasn’t understood a lot of what has been covered in maths in school in the last two or three years. We’re spending a lot of time on the basics of concepts like decimals and fractions. I’m aware that he will be returning to school in France in March and will be expected to sit exams that term, but I think he really needs to spend time on these basics before we cover the rest of what he’d be doing in school right now.

Because he needs more input from me than the others (apart from Jack), home-educating is currently more difficult for me. Whereas I can sit Barney or Freddy down to a page in a maths workbook and quickly check it once it’s done, I need to check every question that Henry does, right after he does it. But then he also helps around the house, so on balance I’m not losing out

When we started thinking about this exchange, I thought more about what it would be like for one of our children to go to France, and didn’t give a lot of thought to how we would find having another child in our home. Things are usually busy around here anyway and our house is always open to friends - and I’ve been a childminder too, so I suppose I imagined it would be just like that, only more. And in lots of ways that was right. When we met Henry’s French family, we were amazed at how well everyone got along, and how quickly we all felt like friends. We have similar philosophies on family life, even though we have quite different lifestyles. That has made it easier for Scratchy and me, because we’ve been able to treat Henry just as we’d treat our own children - the exchange organisation emphasises that you must do that, but I suspect that sometimes it’s easier than other times.

A friend said she wouldn’t want a stranger in her home for six months - a statement that surprised me, because I’ve never thought of Henry as a stranger. I suppose there really wasn’t time to think of him that way before he came, and once he was here, he just became part of the family very quickly.

At the beginning, Barney and Henry spent most of their time together, but I think now they both see that they need some space too. Henry has become good friends with N, who lives across the road from us. N and Barney were already friends, but I think perhaps there’s more of a connection between N and Henry, and I think that’s been a bit difficult for Barney.

At one point Henry asked to move into the small bedroom where Barney used to sleep, but I wouldn’t let him - partly because I was concerned that he might “hide away” rather than participating in family life, but also because part of an exchange like this is learning how to get along with other people who might be quite different from yourself, cooperating and making allowances. Barney is a messy person: clothes only get picked up when he puts them back on, he’ll cheerfully share his bed with a dozen books and several Bionicles, etc. Henry, however, is tidy and methodical. He has a place for everything and everything is always put in that place. His clothes are neatly-folded and put away, the pencil he keeps in his room has a specific place to live, etc. I talked with both of them and asked them both to consider the other person. The result is that Barney is actually getting better about putting things away (though he’d still be happy to wear the same clothes for a week if you’d let him), and Henry - well, he doesn’t seem as bothered by the small amount of residual mess. He certainly hasn’t complained about it, and I know he recognises that Barney is making an effort.

I think life as part of a “big family” has come as a bit of a shock to Henry sometimes. There’s quite a difference between having one sister and having five brothers He does sometimes disappear to listen to his CD player (English music only ;-)) and I think he probably wants more downtime, more peace and quiet, than he gets. But it wouldn’t be fair to expect everyone else to tiptoe around him, and it wouldn’t encourage positive feelings towards him if I did that either - so while he does occasionally get some quiet time (like this afternoon, when he chose to stay at home rather than go swimming with the others), he’s mostly just having to get used to it. There have been times when I’ve been worried that he’s unhappy and perhaps wishes he’d never stayed, but he always says he’s glad he’s here, and he says that the time is going “too fast”.

Having written all of the above, I asked each of the boys for their thoughts.

Barney says that he’s glad we did this, because Henry likes him and is good to him. He says that when Henry is unhappy, it “shows quite a lot on his face”, and “I can comfort him”. He says he’s glad Henry is here because he has made a good friend and also because it’s fun. He says that sometimes Henry is annoying; I asked when that would be and Barney answered, “when he insists I turn my light off” He says Henry asks for permission to do a lot of things (like go on the computer); I suspect this is because he’s used to being at school and following rather than initiating activities. Barney says he likes sharing a room with Henry and thinks he has learned to be more tidy and more considerate. When asked what the best and worst things about the exchange were, he said the best thing was making a friend, and the worst thing was that I was busier now (though when I asked if he felt that he needed more attention, he said no).

Henry says that the beginning was very difficult because he understood nothing, but that the more you go on with an exchange the better your English gets and it becomes more fun because you understand more. He says that sometimes it’s difficult to be in a family with so many children when you want to be alone. When he first read our file, he said he liked that there were so many brothers, and I asked how he felt about that now; he said that it’s good to have so many brothers to play with and he’s not bored. He likes living “in a street” instead of the countryside because he can go see friends and doesn’t need to go by car. He said that an exchange is not easy. I asked, “If you had a time machine and could go back to August, would you still come here or not?” and he said he definitely would, because “it’s very cool, you make new friends and have new brothers”. I also asked what he’d do if he had a choice between going back to France tomorrow or staying the full six months; he said he’d stay, because he will miss us when he goes back.

I asked him what was the best thing about doing an exchange, to which he replied, “You have a brother and you know his address and you can visit him afterwards.” The worst thing about an exchange is “being homesick” (no surprises there). I asked if he was homesick every day, but he said it was mostly when his parents phone from France (about one time in every two calls, he said) and also sometimes in the evening when he thinks about France. He said that starting an exchange was like going to a new world.

Interestingly, he didn’t say anything at all about home-education or school until I specifically asked him about it. He thinks it would be more difficult if he had gone to school here, because with home-education he was able to improve his English before tackling other things, but in school that wouldn’t be possible (I taught him a new phrase at that point: “in at the deep end” :-D) He says that he prefers home-education and I asked if he would still prefer to be home-educated if he was going to live here forever and he said yes. I asked what he thought were the best and worst things about home-education: the best was “if something is easy you can do it at a more difficult level” and “you have more time for yoursef”. The worst was “there’s nothing that is bad… sometimes if you have nothing to do… but there is nothing bad, absolutely nothing!” I also asked if he’d prefer home-education or school when he returns to France, and he very enthusiastically said “home-education” - but I made sure to tell him that wouldn’t be happening, so his French parents can breathe a sigh of relief

George said he was glad we decided to have Henry here “because Henry’s really good”. When asked what he meant by “good” (at cycling? well-behaved? good fun?) he replied, “good behaviour and good fun”. The best thing, according to George, is that Henry is “really friendly”; the worst is that “I like speaking French but I have to speak English all the time when Henry’s here”

Freddy said “it’s great Henry being here because he’s funny.” The best thing is “Barney might go back to France with him” - no, wait, you have to hear the end of the sentence! - “and get better at French and teach the rest of us.” He said there were no bad things “except that Barney takes up most of Henry’s spare time”. Bad Barney

Jack said having Henry here was “good because I like Henry”. The best thing? “He’s my favourite brother.” I asked if that meant Jack liked Henry more than Toby, at which point Jack dived on Toby and said “I like them both the same… yes, you’re my favourite brother too!” The worst thing about Henry being here is “he’s mad”. That’ll be why he’s fitted in so well then

For years, the “socialisation” question has been thrown at home-educators: how will our children learn to participate in society if they don’t go to school. The answer most of us give is that school is not the best place (or even a good place) to teach social skills. Putting large numbers of children of the same age together and expecting them to learn appropriate behaviour from each other is optimistic at best. Children develop good social skills by being around people who already have good social skills - that is, usually, people older than themselves. Home-educated children have more opportunity to do that than those who are in school for long hours, then cooped up doing homework for more hours and spending the few remaining hours with friends who are the same age as themselves (because that’s who you get to meet in school). In recent years, there’s been a push towards schools offering childcare before and after school; many schools are now open from as early as 7 a.m. and have after-school clubs which run until 6 p.m. or later. Schools are being encouraged to offer even longer hours: there’s a school near us which runs a youth club from 6.30 to 9.30 every weekday evening. When are children supposed to spend time with their parents, their siblings… in fact, anyone other than their peers? School, say home-educators, is an artificial environment in which good social skills cannot be expected to develop.

With that in mind, go and read this and this.

The IPPR report isn’t published yet (it’s due for release next week), but here’s a taste of what it will say:

Nick Pearce, from IPPR, said these figures pointed to an “increasing disconnect” between children and adults.

He said youngsters were learning how to behave from one another instead of from adults.

“They are not learning how to behave - how to get on in life - as they need to.”

The researchers concluded that the lack of adult interaction has left British teenagers increasingly vulnerable to failure.

In Britain we have come to both demonise and fear our teenagers: the yobs, the hoodies, the street gangs - the Asbo generation which terrorises neighbourhoods.
…
Such gloom is in contrast to evidence that there has never been a better time to be young.
…
More British teenagers leave school with good qualifications and go to university than ever before. Youth unemployment has fallen dramatically in the last 25 years. Today’s parents are richer than ever before and young people have access to an extraordinary range of activities and opportunities undreamt of even a generation ago.

And yet the mental well-being of our adolescents is among the worst in Europe.

In contrast to their European counterparts, they spend far more time with their peers than with adults where they miss out on the development of what are called “soft skills” - the social and personal development which is increasingly vital in a country built around service industry.

The conclusions are obvious - but far from easy. We need to repair the disconnect between our adolescents and the adult world.

It seems that home-educators were right all along (again): the best place for learning how to get along in the real world is (surprise!) the real world.

…when (most) kids go back to school. Lots of stuff in the media about preparing them for the new school year or for transferring to secondary or for starting school, lots of people talking about the cost of uniforms - and the thing that bothers me most: lots of parents saying they can’t wait.

I know that not every parent wants to spend all day every day with their children. (Some don’t want to spend any time at all, but I’m not linking to that bored woman’s article again; it’s too depressing.) But isn’t it sad that so many parents find the school holidays so difficult? A mother I know recently said she couldn’t imagine home-educating because she couldn’t imagine spending all day with her children. She’s a nursery teacher. Why is it so much better to spend all day with other people’s children?

Barney attended primary school for nearly two years. In the August after his first year, there were a couple of weeks when the children (three then, aged 5.5, 3 and 1) were making me crazy. My mother said this was normal, that everybody found the school holidays difficult and it would all settle down once they were back in school. That seems to be the accepted wisdom.

When Barney was in his second year of school, George was in a nursery group for 2.5 hours a day. He finished at 11.45, and I often used to find myself hurrying to pick him up - even if I was early. I just couldn’t wait to get there to see him again. And then, approaching 2 p.m., I’d do the same when going for Barney. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have the prime parking space outside the school - I was nearly always one of the first parents to arrive!

I love spending time with my children. I like getting a break sometimes, but most of the time I’d much rather be with my children than without them. So why do so many parents seem to feel so differently?

Are most children really so unpleasant to spend time with? And if they are, why?

Are parents unable to connect with their children? And if so, why?

What has happened to make it so hard for parents and children to enjoy each other’s company?

A few months ago, I wrote this.

Looks like someone stirred the pot.

Speaking of cauldrons pots being stirred… I can think of a few other lines from Shakespeare (besides my title) that might be appropriate. This could be a fun game. I’ll start with one from Macbeth: “Out, out damned spot”. Anyone got any others?

(Yes, I know this post is completely surreal. My mind just kind of wandered off on numerous tangents, you see. But since this post is no more surreal than the situation on which it comments, I think I’m entitled.)

…and the question is: What planet is he on?!

Testing ’should be intensified’

The pressure on England’s teachers to get pupils through tests and improve school results should be intensified, said Education Secretary Alan Johnson. Mr Johnson told a committee of MPs league tables were “absolutely the right thing” for raising standards. Teachers’ unions have repeatedly called for an end to “high stakes” testing and to the compilation of league tables. Mr Johnson told the education select committee he backed “the whole kit and caboodle” of school accountability. That included Ofsted inspections, national tests and exams and league tables. He added: “If anything, we need to intensify that rather than relax.” He said standards of reading, writing and maths had improved dramatically in primary schools since Labour came to power.

This is a week old, but I’m just getting a chance to write about it now:

Children “should sleep with parents until they’re five” - Sunday Times - Times Online

ONE of Britain’s leading experts on children’s mental health has advised parents to reject years of convention and allow children to sleep in bed with them until the age of five.

Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, says the practice, known as ‘co-sleeping’, makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.

Sunderland, author of 20 books, outlines her advice in The Science of Parenting, to be published later this month.

She is so sure of the findings in the new book, based on 800 scientific studies, that she is calling for health visitors to be issued with fact sheets to educate parents about co-sleeping.

“These studies should be widely disseminated to parents,” said Sunderland. “I am sympathetic to parenting gurus - why should they know the science? Ninety per cent of it is so new they bloody well need to know it now. There is absolutely no study saying it is good to let your child cry.”

I love that last line, but what I wanted to say about this - apart from nya nya nya told ya so - is that I didn’t need “800 scientific studies” or a “leading expert” to tell me that physical contact between mums and babies was good for them. I already knew. Maybe I’ve known it my whole life, but certainly I knew it when I became a mother. I just had to learn to listen to what I knew.

When Barney was a baby, I wondered why he wasn’t sleeping through the night when all the other babies his age seemed to be - at least, that’s how it seemed. So I went off to the library in search of help. The only book about babies and sleep that I had ever heard of was Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems (Ferber), so I looked that up in the card catalogue (see how old I am? ;-)) and went to find it on the shelf. There were a couple of other babies’n’sleep books on the shelf too, and I borrowed all that was available.

I read Ferber, and it made no sense. The whole argument that a baby will be confused and upset if he wakes in a situation different to that in which he fell asleep - that was nonsense, as far as I could see. Babies fall asleep and wake up in different places all the time - they fall asleep in the car (well, some of them do - Toby doesn’t!) and wake up at home, they fall asleep in one person’s arms and wake up in another, etc. I just didn’t buy Ferber’s reasoning, and much of what he wrote felt harsh. His advice to essentially ignore a child who’d cried until he threw up horrified me. But more than that - it just didn’t feel right to ignore my child’s cries. It made my head hurt, it made my gut feel scrunched up, it made my heart pound, it made me feel terrible.

Now I know why a baby’s cries make his parents feel so awful - they’re supposed to. The whole point of a baby’s cries is to get a parent’s attention and presence - the baby relies on those things for his life. Now I wonder how we can expect our older children and teenagers to talk to us, if we spent the first few months/years sending them the message that we weren’t going to listen anyway, even when they’re trying to express their most basic needs.

(Ferber later - a lot later - said that his methods were only ever intended for babies who had been diagnosed with genuine and severe sleep problems, not for babies who just didn’t sleep as easily as their parents might like them to. And he said he wished he’d never written that co-sleeping was “not a good idea”, because he no longer believed it.)

But I digress (heh, there’s a surprise). One of the other books I picked up at the library that day was Three In A Bed by Deborah Jackson. I read it after reading Ferber, and my reaction to it was very different. I said “yes, of course!”, I nodded, I thought “that makes sense”… and it changed what I thought about co-sleeping.

That night, instead of guiltily bringing Barney into my bed as a last resort, I picked him up as soon as he woke, cuddled him beside me, and nursed us both to sleep. I no longer had the goal of getting him back into his own bed as soon as possible - or even the goal of getting him to sleep longer, because there was no need for me to be more than semi-awake while he nursed so I could put him back to his cot.

And for the first time, he slept six hours straight - though it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t, because that wasn’t the purpose of doing it.

When George came along, intense child that he was (and is), he absolutely could not sleep anywhere except my arms or my bed. If he’d been my first baby, I’d have been convinced that I was doing something wrong. Barney hadn’t been “a good sleeper” as a baby, but George took it to a whole different level. He was over a year old before he ever slept for more than two hours at a stretch. I’d have lost my mind if we hadn’t been co-sleeping.

By the time Freddy came along, the notion of putting him anywhere other than our bed never even entered our minds.

Now I know there are some babies/children who are easy to sleep beside and some who aren’t. I know some thrash and kick etc. I think that can be worked around - a three-sided cot by the bed, for example, can give everyone the space they need and prevent bruises and broken noses. I know that some parents feel very nervous about co-sleeping - but I think that’s a product of our culture rather than an instinctive fear. In cultures in which it is the norm for babies and mothers to sleep together, nobody seems to worry about the safety of it. And I know that some parents fear that their child will never leave their bed. To them I say this: Don’t worry. Your baby will choose to sleep in his own room before he starts trying to sneak his girlfriend into the house. I promise

The article I’ve quoted doesn’t address whether co-sleeping is good for parents, other than mentioning the maternal exhaustion that can be the product of having to get up frequently to see to the baby - though the book might talk about it, I don’t know. But when I look down at my sleeping or nursing baby, snuggled up beside me, I feel a surge of “this is right” - not just for him, but for me. This is where my body wants my baby. This is where it needs my baby.

I recently heard someone say that there is no such thing as “a baby”. There is always “a baby and someone”. A baby is always part of a relationship, dependent on another person, not quite an individual entity. That makes sense to me, and fits well with what we know about human babies being born so much more dependent on their mothers than the young of just about every other animal. Our babies are programmed to want to be close to us, and we are programmed to want to be close to them.

The point of all this (see, there’s a point ;-)) is that my instincts said “respond to your baby’s cries” and “sleep with your baby”, and I’ve never regretted following them. We seem to have gone through a few decades during which parents were expected to ignore both their instincts and their babies. I’m glad that articles like the one quoted above are starting to appear in the mainstream media, that “experts” are starting to give their stamp of approval to co-sleeping. I just wish it wasn’t needed.

There are lots of very good answers to the “socialisation” question - the one that comes from people who assume that kids can only learn social skills by attending schools. But here’s yet another answer to add to the list: it turns out that schools don’t do such a great job on teaching social skills anyway. Who knew?

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Schools special reports | Call for schools to teach social skills

Children in one of the most deprived areas of Britain who can barely talk in sentences or read by secondary school desperately need to be taught basic social skills, Nottingham MP Graham Allen will tell a Westminster debate today.

…it’s about bloody time, isn’t it?

We’ve known this for years - and they’re only just figuring it out. If we’re lucky, they’ll do something about it in a decade or two.

Bah.

Mothers got wrong advice for 40 years - Sunday Times - Times Online

BREAST-FEEDING mothers have been given potentially harmful advice on infant nutrition for the past 40 years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has admitted.

Charts used in Britain for decades to advise mothers on a baby?s optimum size have been based on the growth rates of infants fed on formula milk.

The organisation now says the advice given to millions of breast-feeding mothers was distorted because babies fed on formula milk put on weight far faster.

Edited, to add another example!

Survey ignites school age debate

Research by Glasgow City Council has found that boys in particular could be put off learning for life if they go to primary school before they are ready.

Children and teachers in 50 primary schools were involved in the study.

The author of the report - educational psychologist Alan McClean - said no child should start school before the age of five.

He also suggested that boys start school at the age of six, a year later than girls.

It’s even worse here: they start school - proper school, that is, sit-down-and-do-your-work school - at four. In fact it was my conviction that it would destroy George’s spirit to be forced into a classroom at four years and two months that led us to look for an alternative, and that’s how we found home-education.

You know that rule that says that if you have a bad day, it’s followed by a good day? Well, I’m here to tell you: not necessarily.

And that’s just talking about my family. Then there’s the world, which seems to be getting scarier by the minute.

Have you noticed the various announcements today about the ID card and database?

Sheila Kitzinger tells it like it is

A few choice quotes, in case you’re in a hurry (but if you’ve got five minutes, do go and read the whole thing):

The new parenting is a style of baby management aimed to prevent children interfering with adult social life, sexual activity, or career.

Good mothering is seen as taming and training of the feral young

The essence of these advice books is that they treat the baby as an enemy. It is a hostile invader. The mother must arm herself against her baby in order to train it effectively.

And Kitzinger’s summary:

Babies are social beings from birth. They seek touch, human scent, and warmth, are fascinated by their mothers’ facial expressions and movements, and respond to these in a lively way. It is not enough merely to service them - to change diapers, feed and bathe them, and leave them lying under a plastic mobile. “Sleep training,”"controlled crying,” and other disciplinary techniques can make life easier for adults, but because they turn babies into objects of management, may deny them the rich sensory and interactive environment in which personalities unfold and they are able to give and receive love.

As a social anthropologist I have observed mothers and newborns in many different cultures, and have been struck by how women take it for granted that they keep their babies close and put them to the breast when they are restless, cradle them against their bodies with an easy unselfconsciousness, and helped by other women in the community, who are always ready to hold and soothe a baby. The evidence from history, and from cultures all over the world, is that, by and large, ordinary, spontaneous, loving mothers who are alert to their babies’ needs, and who are supported by other women, do better than all the experts put together. Our babies are not our enemies. You don’t need an MBA in baby management to be a good mother.

Good stuff.

The Guardian reported recently that teachers’ organisations rejected plans to introduce weekend detentions:

Forcing unruly students to spend weekends in school detention was a “ridiculous” idea that would only serve to increase teachers’ workload, a union has warned.

The deputy general secretary of the NASUWT says:

“There is also the irony of teachers losing their own spare time to punish the misbehaviour of their own pupils.”

But wait! There’s more irony - even if he hasn’t noticed it:

It is also understood that parents whose children were excluded from school would be called in for compulsory interviews to plan their children’s return to the classroom. If they allowed their children to skip detention, they could be issued with parenting orders, which include £1,000 fines.

And then of course there’s the irony that he hasn’t noticed the parallel irony to the irony he remarked on…

My head hurts.

A few interesting education-related tidbits in the news this week:

The Telegraph reports that more able students are being discouraged in maths by teachers who can’t - well, who can’t do maths. After providing several examples of such howlers, the author comments:

Kurt Vonnegut has a story about a perfectly egalitarian Utopia in which all the fast runners have weights chained to their ankles and fast thinkers have to wear headphones that send a regular buzz through their brains to sabotage all coherent thought.

Under the guise of numeracy, our schools are tending to hold back the hot young mathematicians and lock them up with a numerical ball and chain so that everyone else can catch up. And buzz their brains, every so often, with manifest absurdities.

Philip Beadle writes in the Guardian of the absurdity of expecting effective individualised learning plans within a school system:

Assessing students’ learning styles, keeping the data and using it to plan lessons is, like the rest of the cod-psychological tosh on the web, a bucketful of nonsense. You cannot take a snapshot of someone’s preferences on one day and use it to plan their whole future, as their responses are dictated by mood. Tomorrow, perhaps, I may be feeling more entrepreneurial, more kinesthetic, more political, less intuitive. My answers, and consequently my profile, will be different.

The notion of personalised learning has excited many in the education world. It strikes the Department for Education and Skills as a way forward. It worries me. No teacher in the world has the time or technical ability to plan a lesson that is differentiated 30 ways. And you can have all the data in the world on a class: it doesn’t mean you will be able to teach them.

Finally there’s the news that a primary school has banned pencil sharpeners after some children smashed them to remove the blades.

There’s been a bit of discussion around the blogring this week about the proposed legislation that would protect breastfeeding women from harassment. I’m going to look at it from a slightly different point of view.

Let’s say I’m in a public place - a cafe, or a museum, or on a bus, or a park bench. That okay? Should it be okay for someone to harass me for just sitting there? Is it okay for someone to make nasty comments about me just sitting there, or to make me go and sit somewhere else just because they don’t like something about me?

………

What if I’m breastfeeding?

Should the act of breastfeeding a child reduce my basic rights to sit in a public place?

It seems that a some people think it does - and those are the people who make nasty remarks and tell breastfeeding women that they have to move. It shouldn’t be necessary to explicitly protect breastfeeding women, but it appears that it is.

I know it doesn’t happen very often - but it does happen - it has happened to me (in an art gallery, of all places!) and it has happened to others. And I know - from having provided peer support to breastfeeding women on post-natal wards, and from having spoken to antenatal classes about breastfeeding - that anxiety about breastfeeding in public really does put women off breastfeeding, and it does make them choose to stop sooner.

I know there are lots of other things that we, as a society, could be doing to encourage breastfeeding. But you know what? We don’t have to choose just one. We can do many things. Better training in breastfeeding support for healthcare providers would be great. So would longer maternity leaves, more baby-friendly hospitals, and lots of other stuff. But you know what this one, this little bit of legislation, has in its favour over all of those? It’s easy. It costs nearly nothing. And that makes it more likely to happen than all those other initiatives. And once it’s in place, and women know that they can breastfeed Martini-style (anytime anyplace anywhere, wasn’t it?) - there’s absolutely nothing stopping us for pushing for all those other things.

So why not?

That’s the opinion of Steve Biddulph, quoted in today’s Sunday Times.

He warns that

“placing children younger than three in nurseries risks damaging their development” and that “instead of subsidising nurseries, which do a ’second-rate’ job, the government should put in place policies to enable mothers to stay at home with their babies.”

He’s not the only expert in childcare who says this. Penelope Leach agrees, as do many childcare researchers.

The education department says this:

“We are not telling parents what to do but we are trying to provide them with choices,”

and:

“We want to make sure every parent has access to high-quality, safe, stimulating and affordable childcare, so they have greater flexibility in how they balance their lives.”

“Not telling parents what to do”, hm…. no, not straight-out. But here’s certainly government support for parents who go out to work - subsidised daycare places, tax credits, etc - and a distinct lack of similar support for parents who want to spend their children’s early years with them.

“Providing choices” is all very well, but true support for parents would require equal support for both options.

An article in the Sunday Times discusses parents’ “right to know” about various aspects of their children’s lives. I’ve been thinking about this all week.

Last week we had the story of a 17-year-old pupil at a fee-paying school in London, caught trying to use a photocopied travel pass. The school knew that she was prosecuted, and indeed provided a teacher to accompany her to court, where the girl pleaded guilty to theft and was fined £100.

The first her parents knew about it, however, was a year later, when their daughter was being threatened with the bailiffs over non-payment of the fine. They have now publicly expressed their fury with the school for not telling them of the girl’s plight.

I think the school acted correctly here, for a couple of reasons. First, the offence took place outside school premises. The school had no right to know, so how could it be obliged to inform the parents? Presumably the girl approached the school for support - would she have done so if she had believed the school would inform her parents, who she clearly did not wish to know? Had the school been required to inform the parents, it seems likely she wouldn’t have told the school either.

Second, a 17-year-old could quite legally be living independently, earning her own money and paying her own rent - and many do. A 17-year-old could even be a parent herself (or himself). I don’t think such a person’s parents would have any right to know about a criminal charge or conviction, and I don’t think it makes much difference that this particular 17-year-old was still studying and living at home. Being a pupil should not remove a person’s rights.

I hope, of course, that if my children ever need support, they’ll feel able to approach their father or me. If they didn’t, however, I’d much prefer that they had access to other sources of support, rather than having to handle problems alone out of fear of lack of confidentiality.

Parents now do not have the right to bar their children from having sexual relationships even if they are minors; and as Sue Axon from Manchester discovered in a High Court ruling last month, parents also do not have the right to ban their children from receiving confidential advice on contraception and abortion.

I’m a great believer in answering children’s questions about sex whenever they ask them. I think that most, if not all, children who ask for information about contraception are probably served better by giving them that information than by withholding it. Refusing to allow a child to get such information from a responsible source will only result in them getting it from somewhere else - probably somewhere less accurate, and quite possibly their would-be sexual partner.

It seems even more extraordinary when you consider that, while parents are having crucial information about their children’s health, behaviour and wellbeing denied them, they can now, thanks to Tony Blair’s Respect agenda, be sent to prison for their children’s misdemeanours - such as bunking off school or breaking Asbos.

Indeed it does seem extraordinary - but the problem here, in my opinion, is that you have one person being punished for the actions of another. That’s not how the justice system is supposed to work.

In the early years of this government Gordon Brown said that “all new rights will be matched by new responsibilities”, but instead we have a situation in which children have new rights without responsibilities and parents new responsibilities without rights.

Parents have been rendered as powerless by the state as Plato would have wished in his Republic, even if they are still allowed to bring up their children. The attitude of the state seems to be that parents can never do as good a job as professionals - whether these are doctors, lawyers or head teachers.

The last sentence sums it up. From the minute a woman gets pregnant, she is told that the experts know best. She can’t possibly know better than the midwife or the obstetrician; they will tell her what to eat, how to behave, where and how to have her baby. Then they’ll tell her what to do with her baby, and then the health visitor will take over. And soon - as soon as possible in Blairland - the child will be off to daycare and then nursery and school, where teachers will of course know best. And after a dozen or so years of being told that the experts know best, if something goes wrong, parents are suddenly told that it’s all their fault.

How can parents be expected to take responsibility for their children if, from conception, they are told they can’t possibly know how to parent unless they have a team of experts telling them what to do?

The reason I’ve been thinking about this all week is that while I believe that parents have rights (despite the state’s attempts to disempower them), I also believe that children have rights. The problem, of course, is determining when the rights of one over-rule the rights of the other. But I don’t think denying information, support or confidentiality is going to help anyone.

…but apparently they can’t take it: teachers in a school in Wiltshire are upset that Ofsted wrote to the children in the school telling them their teachers “must try harder”.

Why is it “really inappropriate” to use such “very damning language” when talking about teachers, but just fine when it’s applied to pupils? Sort of sums up how the whole respect-in-school things works, doesn’t it?

A new survey “reveals” that “Young people are not being adequately prepared for the world of work while they are at school”.

The survey found that the education system failed to equip young people with practical skills that are necessary for the world of work - skills like working in teams, communication skills and punctuality.

I think we should be fair on schools. How could they prepare young people for the world of work, when the similarities between the two are so few?

Unless, of course, you plan to work for Nike. In that case there’s a school in Wigan where you can learn quite a bit about being a good corporate employee

A school in England has introduced a new sports kit - nothing new in that, but they’ve decided to use brand-name kit. Nike, to be exact.

Some of the parents are complaining, because they reckon ?80 is a bit steep for a school sports kit. They’ve got a point.

The school has defended itself by saying that the outfits are not compulsory, that students can still choose to wear the “traditional” sports kit.

Now hold on - isn’t one of the most common reasons given in support of school uniform that it makes everyone equal? Takes away the pressure to wear brand-names and expensive stuff? Stops students who don’t have the money for trendy clothing from feeling left out?

I don’t happen to agree with that argument - I’m not in favour of school uniforms at all and don’t think any of the arguments in their favour are true - but if you’re going to have a uniform, shouldn’t it be a) the same for all, and b) something everyone can afford?

The head teacher’s reply is as good a bit of politician-speak as I’ve heard in a while: the school “is delighted that there is such an interest in one of the strategies initiated to further improve pupil participation, learning and enjoyment in PE.”

Bwaahaahaa.

And: “Pupils may still wear the traditional kit, however the school is delighted that the uptake of the new standard kit has been so high.”

Right. No pressure to buy the expensive kit then.

What planet are we on again?

There’s been quite a bit of talk this week, both in the media and on some home-ed email lists, about the “new” teaching-reading strategy. I have a child who was naturally oriented towards phonics and learned to read quickly and easily with a very phonics-based approach - but when it came to his brother, phonics didn’t hit the spot at all. He was much more interested in look-and-say than sound-it-out. Both are now enthusiastic and fluent readers.

Thus the bit of all this that bothers me is that the government “has said it will scrap the official “searchlights” model which, to oversimplify, urges children to use a variety of methods to decode words.”

Well we couldn’t have children using a variety of methods, could we? I mean, it’s not like children are at all different from each other, is it?

According to the BBC, “This has worried those teachers who say that children learn in different ways and that there is no “one sizes fits all” in learning to read.”

No wonder. Frankly I have difficulty understanding how anyone who has spent more than half an hour with a group of children could possibly not understand how different children’s learning styles are. I’m astonished that anyone is stupid enough to think that insisting that all children are taught to read using the same technique is a good idea. And I’m very glad that my children have the opportunity to learn to read in the way that fits them best, rather than chopping and changing every time some new theory comes along (which seems to be every week).

There’s a certain irony in the latest plans: there’s no consensus among the “experts” about what synthetic phonics actually is, much less whether it’s a good idea. So they don’t all think the same - but they expect children to do just that.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a government elected after a campaign of “education, education, education” might have got it sorted by now. Or that they might at least have got a clue.

But you’d obviously be wrong.

BBC NEWS | UK | Schools ‘in denial’ over bullying
“Almost every child is affected by bullying and is growing up in a society that sees violence as “the norm”, the children’s commissioner has said.

Professor Al Aynsley-Green argued that, despite good work in schools, there is still denial about the “existence, severity and effect” of bullying.

He told the Observer that violence had become the norm in the workplace, on television and in the home.”

Yet another good reason to home-educate. We can’t protect our children from bullying for their entire lives, but we can at least allow them to grow up in a safe environment rather than learning that bullying is normal.

There’s been a lot of talk this week about the government’s proposal of a “National Curriculum” for children aged birth to three years. BBC News Education Correspondent, Mike Baker, writes that “this does not amount to extending the national curriculum to babies. It is simply a requirement on childcare providers not to leave children sitting in front of the television but to ensure they are talked to, stimulated, and encouraged to express themselves and to play.”

Government shouldn’t be pretending it can offer any guarantees about childcare, because it can’t. And it shouldn’t. Part of parental responsibility is making sure that your children are well cared-for when you’re not there. The registration system offers a false sense of security, and this proposal will increase that, while doing nothing to improve the quality of care. Good childminders already ensure children are talked to, stimulated, and encouraged to express themselves and to play - and they don’t need the extra paperwork.

But I’m not so sure it’s the thought of babies doing worksheets which has caused the backlash.

Mr Baker goes on to say: “I suspect most parents, and carers, would welcome that and would hardly regard it as a Big Brother exercise.”

Maybe, in itself, a “toddler curriculum” doesn’t smack of Big Brother, but I think a lot of people are realising the extent of the control of government of various aspects of their lives, and are starting to resent it. It’s this, rather than the “toddler curriculum” itself, that is getting under people’s skin. I think people are starting to object to being told how to manage more and more of their lives. They’re feeling that the government doesn’t trust them. Parents don’t want to be told what’s best for their children.

So while those who’ve written this week to criticise the proposals are focussing on the idea of testing very young children, I think it’s the general too-much-control feeling that’s triggering their feelings about the whole issue.

If so, that’s a good thing. If the government has shot itself in the foot with these proposals, and the result is that the population as a whole wakes up a bit more and starts asking more questions about exactly how much government intrusion into people’s lives is justified, that, in my opinion, it’s a great result.

This piece is titled, A classroom revolution unfolds

Referring to the news that teachers are to get more planning-time, it says:

“The workforce reforms are seen by ministers as a prerequisite for a bigger change to the teaching and learning in schools. It goes by the name of “personalisation”. This is the buzzword in government policy circles.

The “personalised curriculum” is one where teaching and programmes of study are tailored to suit each individual child.”

Hm. Sounds a lot like home-education.

“It requires careful monitoring of each pupil’s progress, week by week and term by term. It means collecting and analysing data of performance in reading, writing, maths and other subjects.”

I don’t formally collect and analyse data on my children’s progress, but home-education inherently involves what could be called ‘careful monitoring of progress’. Doing it formally isn’t necessary, because I don’t have 30 kids to keep tabs on, and I don’t get a new bunch of 30 unknowns every year.

It also requires that teachers have the time to check each child’s progress, to diagnose their needs, and to devise the best teaching plan.”

Still sounds a lot like home-ed.

“They will also have to make this information more readily available to parents who, in turn, will be encouraged to demand the appropriate action plan for their child.”

Information about my children’s learning is already “readily available” to me (because I’m with them most of the time) and their father (because he can ask us any time he wants).

“Yet that is not all. This “personalised curriculum” also requires a new form of teaching. It cannot work if the class teacher is standing at the front of the room all day long.”

Absolutely. My experience shows me that doing stuff with my kids is far better than standing in front of them talking at them.

“Instead the teacher becomes a facilitator. Like a bespoke tailor they measure, design and plan each child’s educational suit. They will set work, monitor progress, and assess outcomes.”

Sounds more and more like home-ed to me. Not all home-educators “set work” (we do, but it’s certainly not a requirement), but you can’t help but “monitor progress” and “assess outcomes” when you’re with your children for large chunks of time.

“While they are doing all this, someone else has to be the constant presence in the classroom. Someone else has to prepare the classroom wall displays. Someone else has to collect the dinner money or do the photocopying.”

Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about collecting dinner money and doing photocopying

“It is a potentially radical step-change to teaching”

It might be radical in classrooms, as the title says, but it’s not radical to those of us who home-ed - we’ve been doing it for years!

A few quotes from this report from the BBC:

“Trainee teachers are having to resit basic tests in maths, English and IT two