If only the problem was attendance. If only the real issue was just that children aren’t at school, and so they can’t learn. For then the solution would be so simple. Get them back to school and let the magic happen. No matter how hard it is. ‘Every day counts’ as they sometimes say (in which case, I’m stuffed, I missed an awful lot of school).
Totally agree with what you’re saying from both sides of the fence - as a parent and an ex-teacher. We now homeschool our children as the school system failed them. However, I don’t know if people are aware of how many teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to do the best they can with draconian measures imposed on them by management and the government, all of which makes their life difficult. I know I stayed in teaching far longer than was good for me because of trying to make a difference to those children who were trying to communicate their distress and not being listened to by ‘the system’, but as a teacher constantly being told by management to have ‘stronger behaviour management’ - i.e. tell them off rather than build relationships, do what is expected of the school policies rather than what you know the young people need, and your pay is dependent on how much you succeed ticking the boxes imposed on you. I’m not trying to justify the current school system - I left and we removed our kids - but I think it’s important to make sure people are aware that the vast majority of teachers are doing their best with a very broken system that they are powerless to fix from the grass roots level. We need to start listening to our children and overhauling the system to update what we want children to get out of it rather than maintaining the status quo just because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Take away the physical punishment and swap it for emotional punishment, take away the blackboard and swap it for a whiteboard and you’ll find little change in attitude from Victorian times. We still think that if a teacher stands up and tells children what they will learn that they will learn it despite the masses of research showing that kids need to have autonomy in their learning and be curious about the world to make learning stick. I hope that the calls for school reform following the pandemic and recent news stories will affect real change rather than just a new set of rules.
"What if the more pressure we put on, the more our children bend and some of them break?" This is happening to so many children. Some of them never recover. It's a scandal in plain sight.
Exactly. I can't even listen to the news right now and all this "missing the point" discussion that's going on. My child freaks out at the sight of school, she feels "unwell" thinking about it, she feels "unsafe" in school. She loves the people there - her friends and her teachers. But she can't be in that environment any more! We are being forced to Home Ed because there is no viable alternative to 100% attendance. She recently said: But in lockdown they sent through these lessons (20 minutes lessons which she could take 2 hrs over, pausing to think, rewinding bits she didn't understand) and it was great - I got it all. But when I went back to school it was too fast, everything was too hectic, I couldn't stop the teacher to ask her to explain again what she'd just said when I her needed to. I started to struggle. I fell further and further behind and I started to hate school.
From the Mouths of Babes!
Many of us (as well as being anxious about COVID and everything that was happening) allowed our nervous systems to drop as there were not so many demands on us... we went for walks in the local park every day, we shopped only for essentials when we had to, we did more things with each other at home, we didn't go out much, we stopped being in crowds of people. Our nervous systems dropped a notch from our previously high stress on-the-go lives. Nowadays, I know I am not able or willing to go to large events any more - I like peace and quiet. Yet we expect our kids to go back to 30 a class, several hundred or thousand a school. All day 5 days a week. With no catch up on what they've missed - it's been too overwhelming for many, including my daughter. The fall out from an previously broken education system and then covid is happening now. ... and they talk about attendance as if we were all living in a parallel universe where none of this had ever happened. Unbelieveable.
Unfortunately this has been the experience of all three of my children. I am also one of the increasing number of ex teachers, who has turned to home education and it's philosophy to nurture them back to any level of well being. The only part of my ex teacher status I am proud of is the 'ex'. As I reflect on the insane workload and emotional burden of being a teacher, it has occurred to me that most of my effort was actually going towards preserving the very structure that causes the problems. This includes needing children to have one to one support, when a different structure may have preserved their independence, self esteem and right to develop at their own pace. As a teacher, I thought I was an advocate for children. As an advocate for my own children now, I have no idea why I held that belief, I certainly didn't have the skillset. I can only assume it was a convenient line I was spun by the structure I was working within. I feel duped.
Oh Naomi you just get it. My daughter is so unhappy- she has been struggling for a few years. We jumped through all the hoops to improve her attendance-she lived with her dad for a while and he got her into school-she recently came back to me and her attendance has dipped and now she’s burnt out-wants to be Home Educated (she doesn’t know I can de register without her dads permission) we are both scared of him he won’t remotely consider it an option and my older boys still live with him so I have a lot of contact with him. Thank you so so much for this stack.
Totally agree with what you’re saying from both sides of the fence - as a parent and an ex-teacher. We now homeschool our children as the school system failed them. However, I don’t know if people are aware of how many teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to do the best they can with draconian measures imposed on them by management and the government, all of which makes their life difficult. I know I stayed in teaching far longer than was good for me because of trying to make a difference to those children who were trying to communicate their distress and not being listened to by ‘the system’, but as a teacher constantly being told by management to have ‘stronger behaviour management’ - i.e. tell them off rather than build relationships, do what is expected of the school policies rather than what you know the young people need, and your pay is dependent on how much you succeed ticking the boxes imposed on you. I’m not trying to justify the current school system - I left and we removed our kids - but I think it’s important to make sure people are aware that the vast majority of teachers are doing their best with a very broken system that they are powerless to fix from the grass roots level. We need to start listening to our children and overhauling the system to update what we want children to get out of it rather than maintaining the status quo just because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Take away the physical punishment and swap it for emotional punishment, take away the blackboard and swap it for a whiteboard and you’ll find little change in attitude from Victorian times. We still think that if a teacher stands up and tells children what they will learn that they will learn it despite the masses of research showing that kids need to have autonomy in their learning and be curious about the world to make learning stick. I hope that the calls for school reform following the pandemic and recent news stories will affect real change rather than just a new set of rules.
"What if the more pressure we put on, the more our children bend and some of them break?" This is happening to so many children. Some of them never recover. It's a scandal in plain sight.
Exactly. I can't even listen to the news right now and all this "missing the point" discussion that's going on. My child freaks out at the sight of school, she feels "unwell" thinking about it, she feels "unsafe" in school. She loves the people there - her friends and her teachers. But she can't be in that environment any more! We are being forced to Home Ed because there is no viable alternative to 100% attendance. She recently said: But in lockdown they sent through these lessons (20 minutes lessons which she could take 2 hrs over, pausing to think, rewinding bits she didn't understand) and it was great - I got it all. But when I went back to school it was too fast, everything was too hectic, I couldn't stop the teacher to ask her to explain again what she'd just said when I her needed to. I started to struggle. I fell further and further behind and I started to hate school.
From the Mouths of Babes!
Many of us (as well as being anxious about COVID and everything that was happening) allowed our nervous systems to drop as there were not so many demands on us... we went for walks in the local park every day, we shopped only for essentials when we had to, we did more things with each other at home, we didn't go out much, we stopped being in crowds of people. Our nervous systems dropped a notch from our previously high stress on-the-go lives. Nowadays, I know I am not able or willing to go to large events any more - I like peace and quiet. Yet we expect our kids to go back to 30 a class, several hundred or thousand a school. All day 5 days a week. With no catch up on what they've missed - it's been too overwhelming for many, including my daughter. The fall out from an previously broken education system and then covid is happening now. ... and they talk about attendance as if we were all living in a parallel universe where none of this had ever happened. Unbelieveable.
Unfortunately this has been the experience of all three of my children. I am also one of the increasing number of ex teachers, who has turned to home education and it's philosophy to nurture them back to any level of well being. The only part of my ex teacher status I am proud of is the 'ex'. As I reflect on the insane workload and emotional burden of being a teacher, it has occurred to me that most of my effort was actually going towards preserving the very structure that causes the problems. This includes needing children to have one to one support, when a different structure may have preserved their independence, self esteem and right to develop at their own pace. As a teacher, I thought I was an advocate for children. As an advocate for my own children now, I have no idea why I held that belief, I certainly didn't have the skillset. I can only assume it was a convenient line I was spun by the structure I was working within. I feel duped.
Oh Naomi you just get it. My daughter is so unhappy- she has been struggling for a few years. We jumped through all the hoops to improve her attendance-she lived with her dad for a while and he got her into school-she recently came back to me and her attendance has dipped and now she’s burnt out-wants to be Home Educated (she doesn’t know I can de register without her dads permission) we are both scared of him he won’t remotely consider it an option and my older boys still live with him so I have a lot of contact with him. Thank you so so much for this stack.