protection

It's 1980cough and I'm walking to school with my bezzie mate. We eat dairy milk chocolate bars - yes on the way to school - and chat about the England football players or members of INXS we're going to marry. We go to school, then at 3.30 we repeat the whole thing again.

It was all so simple then.

Prepping the eldest for the solo walk to high school I allowed the occasional bus journey to meet me on the high street. This was to encourage a bit of streetwise confidence and to stop me embedding a microchip in her neck whilst she slept. I needed to release the apron strings a millimetre or two and this seemed like the best way.

First few weeks of the new high school term I managed not to follow her down the road whilst she cycled or walked and all was good. Until the desperately sad news about the young teenager who was abducted on her way to school and endured an horrific attack before she was discovered knocking on residential doors four hours after her ordeal.

Stop the world I want to get off and I'm taking my daughters with me.

Yes miserable things happen every day but after hearing this news one school morning it took every ounce of strength not to knit an new umbilical cord and live life like this for ever more. 

Discussions about when do we let our children walk to school alone surface every year and having lived a pretty sheltered life I had aimed to nurture more confident kids on the street, not street corners mind or in the middle of shopping centres, just kids who have good street awareness.  But now I'm considering self defence classes and pointing out hazards along the school route yet will this stop me worrying or indeed reduce the dangers of the outside world. No, no, no.

I have heard parents on the radio saying how they wouldn't let their kids walk to school alone but then realising they are primary school parents, I'm thinking whether they will seriously maintain this attitude with their Year 10 son or daughter. The balking of a walking teenager may be placated by a drive-by parent drop but then are we creating a generation of lazy chauffered kids who will cower in a ditch come the first sign of trouble; unaware or unconfident of their options in a crisis.

So how do we protect and prepare our tween/teens for the outside world without frightening the socks of 'em?

Answers on a postcard please.

do you know where you're going to?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago on the thoughts as the family took tentative steps onto new ground : visiting schools during open evening season. Fired up I was determined to search and destroy through every school in order to ensure our first born was given what she deserved. 

After a trip to the first school  I noticed BigL hanging back behind me; questions posed by highly enthusiastic teachers were bounced to me via her anxious eyes. This wasn't like her at all - the usual defiance and independence had somehow disappeared.  I thought little of it until GeordieLad took her to the next school open evening and was pleased to be regaled with tales aplenty of gruesome science experiments and the like. Completely different he said - couldn't hold her back, asking questions, getting involved. 

It became apparent that I was the difference between the two visits. Without meaning to, my stress levels and teacher-parent angst was spilling over into her experience. Friends may not have agreed with my decision to leave the rest of the school visits to GeordieLad and BigL (after all as a teacher surely I would recognise the signs of a good school vs a bad one?); but I realised that this wasn't about me. Look at my second sentence at the start of this post - there was absolutely no way I could hold back those feelings - that's who I am (no apologies - it comes in so very useful at other times) but I needed to back down and let these evenings be BigL's event. I think being teacher-me, somehow, got in the way of being parent-me; for her and for me. Plus I could check out the schools myself on open mornings. 

Anyhoo six rounds of schools visited and laden down with a forest full of prospectus packs she was done. Decisions discussed and ranked in order. So off she went to France with the school and here we were stuck with the online application.

The primary school process seemed a doddle so I thought I'll knock this out in half an hour ready for a glass of wine in front of the telly before I knew it.

Not so.

What a palaver. I can't even bear to relive it here. Suffice to say here are some nuggets of advice from my experience.

1. Keep your username and password close by - it's not something you'll ever remember and the amount of times the damn thing logs you out, you'll be calling it out in your sleep.

2. Save and save and save. Every time you stop to have a think about anything. Save. After re-reading and retyping our reasons for preferring the chosen school (optional) the system had kicked us out without warning and we lost all our prose.

3. Read each school's admission guidelines prior to starting the application and don't be naive enough to think each school within a borough or city would be as daft enough to have the same guidelines. Ha. We didn't - and hour one online passed slowly.

4. Have any arguments about which school should go at number 3 and 4 (or 5 and 6) before you log in. School admission systems do not wait for parental conflict, they just log you out. Wine was now poured despite being mid-application.

5. Hire a writer to scribe your (optional) reasons for choosing preferred school. That way you won't sound like a crawling licky-bum type arty-farty parent who will bully their way onto the school governors' board, when all you want to say is - "look you have a great school, my kid's great and I think they'll do really well at your school so please, please, please take her". Failing that type it out on a word document, save it, leave it a day, come back to it, pop it on the application form, SAVE it and forget about it until March.

By the way this whole October application, response in March deal. I wonder if I can apply for compensation for the amount of wine and chocolate I will consume in that time in order to 'forget' about said process?

one way or another

Well the proverbial cat is certainly having larks with puffed up pigeons this week as news arrived about the opening expansion of a new grammar school. I have yet to come down from the fence that divides supporters believing that grammar schools allow for social mobility as entry is based on meritocracy and protesters proclaiming that it favours the middle-class throng who can afford private tuition to gain the majority of  places.

My experience is within the state sector; grammar schools weren't on my radar until I started tutoring primary school children in English and discovered an army of hard-working-class parents paying for multiple tutors to support their children with literacy, numeracy, science and 11 plus practise until their eyes and fingers bled. It was almost fanatical. Children in year 3 being tutored three times a week or a year 6 approach SATs having five evenings tuition followed by weekend practise tests exams.

The families I worked with were usually non-British with first generation British born children, living in clean and tidy, sparse, two bedroom apartments in West London tower blocks, They were extremely involved in their child's education and I suppose the tuition was their way of ensuring they were supporting their child the best way they knew how. Ecstatic when their children gained places in grammar schools ten miles away they were desperate to maintain the tuition in order for their children to keep up with school requirements. My immediate thoughts were of sympathy for these exhausted children who didn't know what was going to hit them in secondary school - hours of homework after a round trip of twenty miles a day in mostly dark and damp mornings and evenings - only to be faced with hours of tuition after school. It's a gamble - on the one hand here is a possible first generation university application ; on the other a child who's love for education wanes by the time they are in year 8 resulting in a possible exit from the grammar school they busted their arse to get into in the first place.

So is there the chance of true social mobility in grammar schools? A chance..yes... achieved by  a minority. Can these grammar schools offer more than just a playground for the middle-classes? Not everyone agrees. 

And then there's the state secondary schools on the high street that are left with all the people who don't care, don't want, can't afford alternatives to the local comp. What are they left with? Well, usually a shamble of a curriculum that is tinkered with by egomaniac Education secretaries, a hard-working and talented tribe of teachers desperately attempting to enable their charges to leave school with qualifications and skills to live their lives and a bag of responsibility that these children must use to determine whether they want to achieve or not. 

But the main issue here is the loophole that Weald of Kent girls' grammar school created when it claimed it was expanding its ten mile away new site, which will be grabbed with both hands by other grammar schools and, despite Nicky Morgan's denials, I expect we will see further 'expansions' in years to come.

There are soundbites aplenty about the advantageous benefits and noxious repercussions of the grammar school system yet as always it's the parents who will vote with their feet. Is it right to stifle the educational desires of aspirational families in favour of fairness for all? What does all the derision about selective schools suggest about the state schools  - that they are bursting at the seams with society's silage kids?