A Response to TES Daily Blog
Monday’s blog post from John Severs, the editor of TES, was certainly quite ‘triggering’ for me, as the young people say now. https://t.co/kYosRmprTN It was an excellent article that succinctly summarised the position of many head teachers, and ex-head teachers in my case, although the down side was that it did serve to remind me of several incidents from the last few years I had previously managed to bury in my subconscious.
For me, the heart of his post was his description of a “a shift in perception of education towards it being a service.” and the fact that any perceived failure on the part of the school in the eyes of a parent is seen as a failure of the head teacher.
This idea that an increasing number of parents have, that schools are working ‘for’ them, rather than with them, is a thread that runs through a number of the most challenging experiences I have had in the past few years. Now that John Severs has reminded me of them I thought that I might share them here as a kind of therapy, in the hope that they might then disappear back into the darkest corners of my personal library, and stay there.
The first incident that I recall concerns a child with significant needs who joined us in our reception intake post covid. We could quickly see that there were significant issues with this child, so appropriate support was put in and advice sought from other professionals. As is usual, there was no funding initially accessible, so we do what schools have to do and found some money from our budget to provide another adult to support this child. The parents were unhappy that we felt this was the right course of action, as they felt their child did not need the extra support, and the upshot of all this was that they removed the child from my school and enrolled them elsewhere.
The next incident occurred a few years back. We had noticed that there was a greater than usual gap between the most able and least able children in a particular year group, I think it was year 3. The teachers were really challenged by this so we agreed to trial streaming the year group for mathematics, to see if it was going to improve our provision. Well, you would have thought that we were attempting to convert the children to Paganism by the response of some of the parents! Meetings were demanded and the results were that a several children were taken out of our school and enrolled elsewhere. Can you see a pattern here?
The final incident involved a child whose parent came to us with concerns that their daughter was not making as much progress as her step sibling of the same age who attended another school. We resisted the urge to talk to this parent about genetics and inherited intelligence but explained that all children were different and they progressed at different speeds, but she was unhappy with our reasoning and … took her child to another school.
Now Mr Severs mentions that he feels ‘the very best heads’ can claw things back, and I do not profess to be one of those, and I think that in fact the situation is even worse now in smaller schools such as mine. Parent power is out of control and schools need support, and most importantly a strong and supportive governing body, to wrestle things back to where they were. I believe this to be a societal issue, rather than a school one, and although more responsibility than ever is in the hands of the teachers, I fear that societal change is beyond our remit.
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