by When I was very little, I succeeded at school. I liked it. I was the one who was given a notebook to “write my poems in”, and my classmates learned to copy their names. I marched through the hot biscuit corridors like a kind of king. Elapsed time. I was average and then less than and then bad.
By the time I got to secondary school I had six or seven chips on my shoulder and forgot how to learn. I was the only Year 7, they told me, stiffly, who got detention in their first term. I hate school. It was a bleak place for me, disappointment and panic, and hysterical boredom, and the smell of Dewberry body spray covering all kinds of teenage horror. But it never occurred to me to stay at home. Maybe this is a lack of imagination on my part, or fear of authority, or maybe I continued because it was just what you did. Something has changed since then. England’s Chief Inspector of Schools claims parents and pupils are now ignoring rules they once accepted, such as daily attendance, and headteachers say they agree. The Department of Education’s adviser on transport policy said it was Covid that “broke the spark”.
When I read this, for some reason I felt shivers. There are so many spells, growing up. So many social contracts that we must implicitly adhere to. Some are important, some are strange, some need to be revised, and some are, it is clear, so unbreakable that they can be broken in months, dissolving like soap. A series of stories about the state of the schools showed the terrible trouble they are facing. More than 700,000 pupils are learning in classrooms in need of “renovation or major refurbishment”, according to a parliamentary inquiry. Absence rates have increased significantly since Covid – more than a quarter of secondary school students are now defined as persistent absences, missing at least 10% of classes, and the same number of primary school students. The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said that this persistent absence is “one of the worst threats to children’s life chances”.
I hated school, but it didn’t happen to me to stay at home
And teachers are struggling, too. An inquest into the death of headteacher Ruth Perry, who killed herself shortly after an Ofsted inspection of her primary school, downgraded it from “outstanding” to “inadequate”. Her sister, discussing the pressure and mental toll these inspections take on staff, said, “We had to speak out, because Ruth wasn’t the first headteacher to take her own life after an Ofsted inspection.” The pressure is also coming from within the walls: pupil behavior at one Kent school has deteriorated to such an extent that teachers have gone on strike over fears for their safety, complaining of attacks and threats of violence.
When the education secretary called for a ban on phones in schools to improve that behaviour, school leaders said the announcement was a “smoke screen” that would distract from real problems, such as underfunding, teacher recruitment and provision for pupils who have special educational needs. Over the summer it was reported, unsurprisingly, that teachers in England were leaving the profession in record numbers: 40,000 teachers will quit state schools in 2022, almost 9% of the teaching workforce, and the highest number since the Department of Education began. the data will be published in 2011. The teachers’ unions blame poor working conditions and the long-term erosion of wages. Since Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement, Rishi Sunak has promised to recruit more teachers, but failed to specify how he will pay for them. Meanwhile, private schools get tax breaks estimated to be worth more than £3bn a year.
Schools are now places that no one wants to be. But these are places – these are places – where children learn not just how to count or spell, but how to make friends and be curious, to be a person, how to build a society. If schools fail like this it seems to reflect what is happening in the wider world – the most vulnerable pupils being failed or forgotten, links within communities weakening, a kind of social disintegration. And when someone falls out – when he/she hits, or gets sick, or goes wrong, or when the system fails them in tiny but devastating ways – there’s nowhere else of them to land. The spell is truly broken.
I don’t know how to solve it – as I mentioned, I don’t have the answers (or the poetry) since the late 1990s – but it seems that our government has failed our generation of children, responding to the public opinion. the teacher pay dispute, the dismantling of arts, education and welfare services, their funding vacuum for pupils with additional needs, their inability to fund a Covid recovery package and, of course, the buildings with concrete roofs collapsing, also a metaphor. bald that bears repeating.
It is clear that students should be listened to. What would a good school look like for them? What do schools need to do to rebuild trust with families? What would it take to help students want to show up? I was no genius at school, but even I can see how to connect the dots.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
