Last night I sat through an hour of listening to a teacher lecture a load of parents on why attendance is so important. A few weeks before, I sat through the same lecture for my other child’s year group.
The main focuses were: Attendance, standards of uniform, OFSTED, homework, results.
Not one mention of Mental Health / wellbeing / wanting the children to be happy … one teacher even said “If your child is ill, make sure you think, are they really too ill to be in school?”
They also displayed the percentages of attendance for each class. I was sat with my daughter who then said “that’s my fault” because her class was at 95%. It angered me, because she has been through months of challenges with attendance previously, moved schools and since has absolutely smashed it, overall the school seem to be a better fit. Every single day she has got up and gone in on time, even when she has found it really really difficult. On one day she was full of a cold and felt really lousy, so I said not to push it and spend the day resting as you could tell she felt really rubbish. She was back in the next day.
Yet she has to sit there and look at a big screen in front of her whole year group knowing she was partly to blame for that 95% - which is not good enough apparently as below 97% is just not acceptable.
I obviously do the opposite for my job, educating professionals on how a therapeutic approach makes a difference for all children, so sitting through a parents night like that is excruciating for me at the best of times, but this was too close to my heart. We need to get with the 2024 programme. More than ever, schools need to understand children of this century, not try and educate in line with the 1950’s.
This is a different generation. These kids need to be prepared for the real world, not to work in factories - that’s not what this world is anymore (which is how the original education system was set up and is still the same to this day).
Let’s stop expecting our kids to conform to society’s old fashioned expectations, and try adapting the environments around them and OUR behaviour as adults, try a therapeutic approach instead of a Sergeant Major one and maybe they’ll actually WANT to attend!
This system needs to change, and it will, if it’s the last thing I ever do!
