Childhood is safe in our schools
Roy Blatchford

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Roy Blatchford, Director of the National Education Trust, argues that children and young people do not behave as the media would have us believe.

The cover of iconic TIME magazine recently asked the question whether Britain’s young people were ‘unhappy, unloved and out of control’. In the six-page spread within, an investigation claimed that ‘an epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young’.

Writing in The Times this month, no less an expert than Dame Jacqueline Wilson is equally concerned that children are growing up too fast. The best selling children’s author has spent twenty-five years writing about divorce and single motherhood. She has championed teenage characters who are precocious, worldly-wise, and wear hip-hugging jeans. Should she be surprised?

Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of The Children’s Society, parallels her worries. He believes that young people are continually subjected to pressure to achieve, behave and consume like adults at an even earlier age. ‘It’s essential that as a society we allow children to enjoy this crucial time in their lives’, he says.

Politicians of every hue continue the cry. Not a week passes without a party spokesperson denouncing some aspect of Britain’s toxic childhood, whether knife-carrying, delinquent behaviour in shopping malls, or gorging out on alcopops.

Half-baked polls conducted to promote celebrity books report silly and misleading statistics: 55 per cent of parents believe childhood ends at 11; 35 per cent of girls aged 12 and under have been allowed to pierce their ears; 71 per cent of parents allowed their children to drink alcohol at home before they were 18. Do these vacuous figures really mark the demise of childhood as we know it?

As Director of an independent foundation committed to improving education, I spend my life visiting, viewing and inspecting the nation’s schools and colleges. I am with young people many days of the week in the classrooms, corridors and canteens where they spend a good proportion of their waking hours.

And I’m here to report that the childhood and adolescence I witness first-hand are a long way from the media-driven images of today’s youth.

Bob Reitemeier is right of course that there is pressure to achieve. Successive governments have pursued doggedly a target-driven culture in state primary and secondary schools. Meanwhile, the independent sector thrives merrily on not having the targets.

Young people sit an excessive number of formal tests. These tests are not largely for the benefit of pupils’ learning. They produce league tables of doubtful value, except to the editor in search of a story in which one school’s glorious success can be pitched against another’s shaming failure.

The first question a headteacher is asked by an OFSTED inspector is: ‘What is your school’s contextual value added score?’ The very phrase seeks to frighten. Worryingly, it risks reducing children and young people to mere data fodder.

Schools across the land are preoccupied by their value-added, by the progress in numeracy and literacy which their children make. Standards in the basics matter profoundly, but not to the exclusion of all else. That is why confident schools talk with equal enthusiasm about values-added.

What do they mean by values-added?

Education policy and practice in recent years has been driven by the Every Child Matters agenda. This agenda is focused on five key outcomes for children: staying safe, keeping healthy, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution, and securing economic well-being.

Schools now pursue the Every Child Matters outcomes with a vengeance. Many rightly say that they have done so for generations, albeit under different headings. It is in pursuit of these outcomes that a very different picture of the values and commitments of young people emerges from that evoked by childhood doom-merchants.

First, almost every child I interview testifies to how safe and secure they feel in the school environment, well supported by their teachers. During the average school week there is plenty of physical education; sports halls I enter are rarely empty. Canteen menus and lunchboxes reveal a keen awareness of healthy eating, happily at odds with much press stereotyping.

Second, the overwhelming majority of young people speak highly of their enjoyment of lessons and extra-curricular activities. Schools are places of purposeful fun and natural laughter that no office environment I’ve encountered can begin to match.

Third, from an early age, youngsters are engaged in buddying schemes, charity fund-raising, and volunteering both within schools and extending generously into their local communities. Many, many secondary schools are actively twinned with schools in the developing world.

Yes, there remains a decreasing minority of schools to which you wouldn’t entrust your child’s education. Yes, standards of basic English and mathematics in some classrooms present an unacceptable obstacle to young people’s economic well-being. And yes, a few children eat intolerable amounts of chips and chocolate at breaktimes.

Yet the majority of youngsters feel positive about themselves. They articulate values of genuine altruism, treat one another with dignity, and are proud to be young citizens of a multi-cultural Britain.

Paul Collier’s seminal book ‘The Bottom Billion’ is a contemporary clarion call for forthcoming generations to end the grinding poverty and starvation of one-sixth of humankind. Believe me: based on significant evidence and away from the media gaze, the current generation in our schools and colleges are of a mind-set and predisposition to change the world for the better.

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