Stemming the Tide

In the new world of mastery learning, what’s it like to be parent who’s consistently told your child doesn’t make the grade, asks Nancy Gedge...

I am regularly infected with a case of Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time. It is an unseen by-product of teacher training. Baby swimming lessons are a perfect example. When Sam was a baby I got carried away by all the hype and took him to classes, where he proceeded to catch every bug going and regularly puke in the pool, much to everyone’s delight, I’m sure.

Later, I took him to pre-school sessions and came to the conclusion they are funny things. Unlike swimming at school that happens behind mysteriously closed doors, far from the prying eyes of parents, these take place in full view of everyone. Every week for a year I sat, slowly melting, both eyes glued to the pool; fascinated, disquieted.

It’s always interesting watching someone else teach your child. For a start, there is the ‘I wouldn’t do it like that’ factor (another by-product of the PGCE). It’s so easy when you are on the outside looking in, and when you have a good bank of years teaching primary-aged children, to see the little one daydreaming in the corner, or to notice the way the initial explanation was glossed over. It’s easy for you, who hasn’t got the responsibility for a large group of children in your hands, to see how certain behaviours can be misinterpreted. How the bouncing around and looking the other way that your beloved little one is doing is anxiety and fear, not deliberate naughtiness.

As a teacher, the individual becomes so easily blurred, disguised amongst the other 29 children in the class; we become used to grouping them in order to make our lives and our classrooms manageable. We set across schools, or within the class, and segregate our children by academic ability. Parents are usually supportive of this, believing fondly that their children will be in orange group, or circles, or whatever name they believe denotes top set. Teachers often support it too, for it makes their planning lives easier. We have become used to telling the parents, and the children, the levels at which they are working.

But now levels are no more, and we are mid-consultation about their replacement. In an educational age of measures we have to show that children are getting better at doing the things we are teaching them. But the discussion as to how we do that is wide open. Our Great Leaders seem to favour some sort of system whereby we compare the children to a national standard and report to parents as such. Which is fine if you’re reporting about the one achieving ‘mastery level’.

But what if they aren’t? What if your child is told, year after year, that they aren’t an Acceptable National Standard Child? What if you must write a report that says, yet again, they are Below Expectations? How does it feel when, instead of being top of the tree, it turns out they are bottom of the heap?

You see, I think we have a tendency to assume that our children won’t be the ones caught looking out of the window when they ought to be looking at the teacher. It’s never our children sent to the head’s office to answer for their childish crimes. It’s never our children struggling with spellings. As teachers though, we know that no-one is immune. Everyone has a bad day. Every child steps out of line at least once in his or her school life.

It can be hard to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes – teacher, parent, whichever we are – but I think it’s something we need to do every so often. Because in a system of mastery and national-standard children, where we rather unimaginatively give our children, as well as our schools, a mark out of four, only one of which is acceptable, the vast majority of our children will be there, at the bottom, marked as failures, or defective, from their earliest years. And you don’t have to have a child with Down’s syndrome, like me, for that to happen.

About the Author

Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com