When finding a decent school turns parents into criminals
Getting your child into a decent secondary school is, I am reliably informed, a bit like giving birth. Agony at the time, but the moment it’s over you forget the pain. I console myself with this thought as I puzzle over the league tables with the concentration of a Bletchley Park code breaker, trying to untangle the Attainment Scores from the Progress Scores, the Ebaccs from the Key Stage 4 destinations. It feels so urgent right now, trying to find a safe repository for my tender, dreamy little boy. I can see how it leads to madness.
Some parents have apparently been getting their children into grammar schools by sending older relatives to take the 11-plus. Andy Williamson, former head of Wilmington Grammar School for Boys in Kent, says he first suspected something fishy when one of his pupils, who had sailed through the entrance exam, couldn’t keep up in lessons. Williamson dug out the boy’s exam paper, compared the handwriting to his schoolwork, and realised they had been written by two different people.
Such audacious family conspiracies are, he says, quite common. Candidates arriving to take the 11-plus often look much older than ten – and not just in Kent. Until recently, there were so many older cousins and siblings sitting the 11-plus in Slough (I like to imagine rows of hairy men squeezed behind diminutive desks in the exam hall) that schools had to introduce photo ID for every candidate.
This isn’t just mad. It’s also breathtakingly, almost thrillingly, bad. What moral turpitude – or is it actually sang froid? – it would require to not only cheat, break the law and steal a school place from a more deserving child, but to make your own children accomplices to the crime. How would you even propose such a plan in the first place? “Mummy and Daddy have decided you’re too stupid to sit this exam, so we’re sending your brother to impersonate you.” I am agog at such perfidy. And also, perhaps, a tiny bit in awe.
Ilove my husband and definitely don’t want him to leave me. And yet… there might be compensations. When Janet Hoggarth’s husband walked out, leaving her with three small children, she was miserable for a year. But then her friend Vicky got dumped too, and came to stay in Janet’s spare room with her baby daughter. Not long afterwards a third friend, Nicola, became a single mum. Although there was no room left in Janet’s house, Nicola became a daily visitor.
For the next two years, the three mothers helped each other out with childcare, housework and moral support. “We had a kind of invisible rota. We cooked proper dinners for each other every night. We had roles,” says Janet, who has written a novel based on the experience, The Single Mums’ Mansion. “It was like a marriage, only better.”
Every time I go on holiday with my sister or my friends, I am amazed by the pleasure of cohabiting with women. Housework gets done with effortless, almost balletic, synchronicity: as one woman moves towards the sink, the other takes up a tea towel, maintaining a stream of interesting conversation all the while. No nagging. No competitive tiredness. “Childcare” becomes an excuse to sit and have a gossip while the children play.
No doubt single motherhood can be a nightmare. But communal motherhood would be a dream.