Hot house schools are burning out kids
THANK you for your huge response to last week’s thoughts on the miserable state of our education system. Courtesy of a Michael Gove-inspired pressure cooker regime, our kids are now automatons, constantly under stress from exam bombardment.
I have to admit I shed a tear over one message in particular. Straight from the coalface, Gary, head teacher of a Middle School in West Yorkshire, wrote to thank me for highlighting the effects that the battery hen-type education of our kids is having on their mental health and happiness.
“The pressure we have to place the children under is immense,” he says. “We are forced to push them as hard as we can, otherwise we are judged to be failing.”
He attached a letter from a parent, which, he said “greatly pains me”. It’s from a mum at her wits’ end because her 10-year-old son, “for the first time ever in his school career… attempted to feign illness so that he could be absent”.
She says: “A happy, fun-loving, kind, empathetic human being has been transformed into an angry, disaffected young person who frequently describes himself as THICK, STUPID or DUMB.”
“He is NONE of those things,” she states. “But why does he believe it to be true?” She concludes: “The answer for
We’re forced to push kids hard... or we’re judged to be failing
him, and presumably many others, is of course KS2 SATs.
“The pressure to succeed by passing these tests is tantamount to abuse.
“Training and cramming is not education. Introducing GCSE-standard work to a 10-year-old brain does not make them 16. It just produces frustration and anger.”
She adds: “To see our son, a happy bright light only a few months ago, try and make himself vomit in order to skip school has been a real shock.
“How many other lights will be extinguished before their 12th birthday?”
Many I fear, if the current regime – described by head teacher Gary as “the pernicious environment in which pupils and teachers have to work” – persists.
He says education should be “a thing of beauty and joy, not an exam factory which reflects self-satisfied glory on our politicians” or is used to “hold teachers to account for simply trying to open the eyes of our children to the amazing world in which they live and to encourage them to make a positive difference”.
Gary very kindly thanked me for being “one of the few voices in the media who regularly stands by teachers”.
It is my pleasure to stand beside a profession which is hugely overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated. As Gary heartbreakingly told me: “Teaching can be a very lonely place.”
For their hard work and forbearance, their dedication in the face of government ignorance, for providing our precious kids with the essential building blocks for rich, creative, fulfilling, happy lives, teachers deserve to be lauded, not lambasted.