Gove’s Reforms are for Gove not Children

So Micheal Gove wants to increase the school day and shorten holidays. Specifically he would like the school day to run until 4.30 and to have a four week summer holiday instead of six in an attempt to “catch up” with East Asia and be “family friendly”. Good job I was on the train when I read this or I would, once again, have choked on my cornflakes. It’s rare that I agree with a Union but on this occasion I have to agree that he seems to be making this stuff up on the fly. So let’s take the reforms one by one.

Firstly running the school day until 4.30. For older children, especially those doing GCSE and A levels I can actually see this making sense. It gives the children more time in a focussed environment to concentrate on study and revision rather than relying on them doing it at home. But as soon as the children are younger than this then it does seem to be, well, monumentally stupid. Very little children certainly cannot study until 4.30. Boy is in Year One at the moment and he is regularly shattered and pale when he’s picked up. In reception some of the kids are still 4 at the end of the summer term and, when I did the pick up as I do once a week, you could see that at 3pm they were on the verge of meltdown.

Finishing at 4.30 for little ones would see them going home in the dark every day in the winter whereas the current day end allows them to get home before dark even in winter. Whenever a proposal is made to get rid of the idea that our clocks change one argument is that children further north would have to go to school in the dark. Now we seem to be quite happy to send them home in the dark. Is it more dangerous or not?

But the worrying thing about this is the desire to emulate East Asia. The exam focussed learning there goes back to the 1890s and before – exactly the reason Gove says the school day needs to change. In Imperial China your best chance of a good job in the civil service depended on your ability to pass exams, each one harder than the next, that you could in theory take unlimited times. Long after Sun Yat Sen and Chiang  Kai Shek’s revolution the Chinese culture of cramming remains but is it healthy? I lived in Taiwan for nearly three years and the children there, while ostensibly focussed and studious, are actually only that. They are not children. Huge pressure is put on them to succeed so that the stress of their education and a lack of role model has led to a notoriously high teenage suicide rate. Not having a role model  may not seem connected but, of course, if your thinking is purely based on cramming and how to pass an exam, you may not have the creative ability to understand what it is that you want to do with your life. This is something they are starting to understand in Singapore for, ironically, as Gove wants to make us more like Singapore, Singapore wants a more creative and holistic education system.

Ultimately though, and most importantly, I think that children should be children rather than little adults. To have time to play, explore and be with their families.

Now the holidays. Do you like going away to somewhere foreign and sunny in the summer holidays? Because under Gove’s proposals you’d pay a lot more for doing so and have less chance of having your leave approved. In my day job I manage a team of three people and all of us have school age children. Every summer there is a balancing act that needs to be done between ensuring the staff have a break with their family and that work continues without the quality suffering. This is hard enough to organise in six weeks. Trying to cram four people’s trips away in to four weeks would be harder still. Your two weeks in the sun, if you have school age children, may be about to become one.

That may be ok though because it will also become far more expensive. We all know how much more expensive flights and hotels are in the summer holidays right? Well now that demand is going to be spread over not six but four weeks if Gove gets his way. The simple law of supply and demand dictates that the price will rise.

So a more competitive society with cleverer kids? Or a more rigid and tired society, prone to depression, and with a government supposedly committed to wealth imposing another indirect cost rise as a result of policy?

I can’t help but think that if you thought about it for more than five minutes you can see that this reform is not about the children at all and as such loses any claim to be ‘family friendly’. So if it’s not for the children who is it for?

I am sure that deep down many Tories think of teachers as lazy, militant public employees working 8.30 to 3 and doing nothing in their huge six week holiday than rolling out of bed late and catching up on Jeremy Kyle. How UNFAIR they cry when employees in the private sector are pulling 13 hour days EVERY DAY for the love of it! Taking aside the fact that teachers are actually marking and lesson planning, and preparing and hosting parents evenings, again what is so healthy about the alternative? You’ve watched The Apprentice right? Where in a rush of testosterone and duty (especially the girls) the teams roll their sleeves up and pull an all nighter for the good of the task. The task of course goes horribly south because it’s being carried out by people who are tired, inexperienced and unnaturally competitive. They all head back to the boardroom to remark on what a spectacular failure it’s been and to turn on each other like savages. Not quite how I want my kids’ teachers to behave.

But I don’t even really think this is the motivation behind the changes. I think the real reason is that Michael Gove goes home at night and imagines people in ten years time referring to ‘the Gove reforms’. He’s after fame, not improving your children.

Should Under 3’s Be Banned From Infant School Nativity Plays?

Boy has just turned 6 and has a (very small) speaking part in the school Christmas Play. So proud of his rehearsals have I been and so eager has he been for me to go that I have booked that afternoon off work to attend. However, as it stands, only one of us will be able to see it.

The school has banned under 3’s from attending. Whirlwind is under 3 (and appropriately named believe me). They have also stopped running a crèche. This leaves our options thus:

1)      I go and my wife stays home with Whirlwind

2)      Wife goes and I stay home with Whirlwind

3)      We find a babysitter

4)      We participate in a baby sitter swap scheme being unofficially organised by the parents group

Option 3 is harder than you would think. None of our parents live in the same town as us and our friends all have school age children who they would either be watching in their own plays or collecting at that time. Option 4 may yet work only you a) need to be CRB checked (I am but my wife isn’t and she’d be doing the reciprocal baby sitting) and b) the times of the other class’s play clashes with Whirlwind’s regular play group.

To be honest it’s all become a bit of a pain in the arse.

One part of me is really annoyed. Banning under 3’s would be fine if you still ran the crèche. Getting rid of both at the same time puts many parents who’s older child is performing in a difficult dilemma and directly discriminates against parents with toddlers. Whirlwind certainly wouldn’t be banned from similar events elsewhere. Certainly not at, say, the local church’s carol concert (I am atheist, my wife is Christian, neither of us bang on about it).

The school have done this to give each child the best possible chance to perform without interruption. Now I know that Boy would much rather do his play to ALL of us than have perfect silence when he did. On the other hand he only has 2 lines. If both of them were obscured (or he was put off) by someone else’s toddler I would spend the entire remainder of the play staring at said toddler and their parents hoping my eyes would turn in to giant lasers and temporarily burn out their tongues. So I can see where they’re coming from.

Ultimately, though, I feel the decision has not been fully thought through by the school. It is not in the most salubrious of areas. There will be parents who cannot afford a private baby sitter. There will be single parents. The choices for them will be much harder than our dilemma. Hopefully they can get a partner in the baby sitter swap.

Am I only annoyed because I feel that it’s us who are being singled out? Is the school right to provide a perfectly silent environment for what is, after all, a play? Or is it better to have the whole family present and make it the family’s responsibility to look after their under 3 and to take them out of the performance is they become upset or badly behaved?

I’d love it if you could tell me what you think in the comments thing down there because I have absolutely no idea if my slightly miffed feeling is justified or selfishness.

May Contain Traces of Nuts

So it’s #sunfun Sunday funny day this week hosted by actuallymummy where you can link up whatever makes you laugh. Events this week had already caused me to write the below but I thought I’d save it up for Sunday……

*Puts up ‘Rant Alert’ sign*

This week one of the Mums at Boy’s school got in trouble with them. She is a good Mum. Her school-age daughter’s name is prefixed by the word ‘lovely’ by everyone from the teachers to Boy (who may have a secret crush on her) while her younger daughter goes to the same toddler group as Baby. They’re the sort of family you’re glad to have as friends and yet the telling off was a serious one as she transgressed something that had Previously Been Put In Writing. Specifically she put a peanut butter sandwich in her daughters packed lunch.

Now I grew up in the 70s and I’m not about to write a long essay about how we should return to an era when football violence, sitcoms based on casual racism and guitar solos were socially acceptable. However I am about to write the ultimate fuddy-duddy phrase. This wouldn’t have happened in my day.

When I was at Infant School there were only about 3 kids who had packed lunch and each of them brought in a fish paste sandwich and a packet of Monster Munch because that was what constituted packed lunch in the 70s. The rest of us subsisted on grey gristle, vegetables that had been boiled since yesterday and semolina. When I moved on to Comprehensive school and could choose my own food I had chips and baked beans for lunch every day for 5 years. At no point did Jamie Oliver pop up over my right shoulder and offer me a tasty mousaka, nor did the school write home to our parents despite the dangerous afternoon methane levels and noxious classroom odours. And I’m pretty sure at some point there would have been a nut or two around.

When I got home there certainly was. Almost every day of his working life my Father (who was a music teacher) would celebrate the departure of his last pupil with a can of Webster’s Yorkshire Bitter and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. The dangerous lunatic bastard. Except not really since I’m still alive and writing this.

Boy’s school is Ofsted Outstanding. One thing you will come to learn should your children be lucky enough to attend one is that you get a LOT of information from them. Everything needs permission. Newsletters come out twice a week and you drown under your own weight in text messages. The ‘no peanut butter’ missive came out in September and we are now in February. How people who are generally juggling work (or trying to find it) with demanding little ones are suddenly supposed to remember all this shit when they get up after 2 hours sleep with only Peanut Butter in the larder is anyone’s guess.

But it’s good right? We’re protecting vulnerable kids aren’t we? Nut allergies are potentially fatal. Well I sort of agree and sort of don’t. The only way you can fully protect children from peanut related peril is to ban them altogether – at which point, of course, the Columbian cartels would ditch the marching powder and start cultivating legumes. The rule exists mainly to protect the school and the local authority from being sued by ambulance chasing lawyers. Yes I know in the most serious of cases the allergy can be triggered by touching a peanut but then isn’t the danger of that present anywhere and everywhere? Perhaps one of the properties of an ‘Outstanding’ school ought to be to properly supervise lunch times so that children who don’t have allergies don’t share their food with children who may? Just a thought.

I’m not advocating the ditching of Health and Safety per se. Lots of it is very necessary and little of it falls in to the stuff reported in the likes of The Sun, most of which is apocryphal. Just reading this back makes me feel I’m being a bit David Cameron and this makes me want to hit myself with a hockey stick. But are we in an era where greed and paranoia are getting a very good parent in to trouble for something mine wouldn’t have thought twice about?