We do everything to escape the rat race. Then we inflict it on our kids

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/14/sats-adults-escape-rat-race-inflict-it-on-kids

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Heads droop, feet drag, even rucksacks seem to sag beneath the weight of expectation. It’s not hard to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a primary school kid in Sats week. But this is only the start of exam season for many families, with GCSEs and A-levels looming next. My son’s teenage babysitters stagger into our house beneath piles of revision folders, no longer even bothering to ask where the TV remote lives. The nights are long and light now, but that’s no use to the thousands of kids hunched up inside revising.

At the school gates there’s no bigger topic of conversation than the pressure-cooker nature of it all; the way homework starts aged five, the endless cycle of tests and mocks and exams, the fear that instead of getting children excited about learning we’re funnelling stuff into them like little foie gras goslings. Odd, then, that none of this ever featured in the election campaign. We heard a bit, briefly, about how schools should be funded and new schools created. But there was deafening silence on what schools are actually supposed to do.

Yet exam stress, it emerged this week, is now responsible for 34,000 calls a year to Childline; school worries are among the top 10 problems for which children anonymously seek help. More than half of 11-year-olds, according to another survey published this week, admitted worrying about how Sats would affect their still so very distant futures. It’s not just exams themselves that upset children – the chest-tightening feeling that even adults get at the sight of long rows of desks, which is natural enough – but the deeper fears beneath. Will your parents still love you if you screw up? Are you, deep down, just not good enough? Success and failure are hard enough to get into proportion at 16 but friends report primary school kids lying awake at night worrying about pressures they can’t fully articulate, and aren’t emotionally mature enough to manage. Conservative proposals for children who don’t reach the expected level by year six (the end of primary school) to resit Sats in secondary school must surely risk increasing the pressure on those who struggle – but bright and conscientious children, being entered for higher papers meant to stretch them, can get just as anxious.

What’s heartbreaking is that it was never meant to be like this. No child can pass or fail a Sat, in theory at least, because it’s a test of the school’s performance in getting the child to the required level rather than a test of the child. But clearly that message isn’t getting through to many children. Just as setting targets in the NHS only encouraged some doctors to game the system in ways that didn’t help patients, national testing has unintentionally had harsh consequences for some of them.

No matter how often you swear that you don’t care how they do, if you’re lying your kids will sense it

Does it have to be this way? My son’s school handled their year two Sats so discreetly that most of the kids didn’t even realise they’d done it, let alone get stressed. That’s largely because these tests for seven-year-olds are carried out by their own teachers, in class, with no fuss or drama. (By contrast, 11-year-olds do their papers in an exam setting; many primaries hold Sats booster classes at lunchtimes or before and after school; and kids are often only too aware that doing badly could hurt their school.)

But it’s also perhaps because like many schools, ours refuses to tell year two parents exactly when Sats will be taken. The truth is that the pressure on kids doesn’t only come from teachers with Ofsted on their backs or from education ministers banging on about how Singaporean kids excel at maths. It sometimes comes – directly or indirectly – from the very people who worry about it most.

Why are children tested so unrelentingly often? Because parents want underperforming schools to be identified and tackled; they want to know both that kids are leaving primary school having mastered the basics, and that when they move on to secondary school their teachers will already have some idea of their strengths and weaknesses. National tests were a logical, if imperfect, political response to these wholly reasonable parental demands.

And where, apart from in school, do children get the idea that doing well in these tests is crucial? Ahem. Let’s just say that no matter how often you swear that you don’t care how they do so long as they do their best, if you’re lying your kids will sense it.

It’s natural to want your children to be high achievers, both so that every possible door in future life is open to them and – be honest – for that tiny, shameful thrill of vicarious pride. But the puzzling thing is that in holding our kids’ noses to the grindstone we are diligently preparing them for a relentlessly competitive, high-achieving working life about which we ourselves are often conflicted.

Many working parents quite reasonably object to an always-on corporate culture of 3am emails and impossible targets; despite enjoying rights to flexible working that our parents never had, we still often hanker secretly for more time. When a CEO or politician rejects the top job in favour of something less pressurised and more emotionally significant to them, we tend to cheer. We argue that giving people more control over their hours and the way they approach their work actually boosts productivity, regarding the more driven culture of working life in many tiger economies with suspicion.

Yet for our kids, somehow we accept the opposite: longer hours than we ever put in at their age and an increasingly didactic, unimaginative curriculum that threatens to squash the life out of good teaching (albeit in an attempt to lift the bad). If going to school were a job, would you want to do it?

Realistically, there will always be a tension in education between what Muriel Spark, via her creation Miss Jean Brodie, famously called “the leading out” of the qualities that are already in a child and the necessary stuffing in of the knowledge that is not. There’s no going back, either, on schools being accountable to parents, which means some way of publicly measuring children’s progress is non-negotiable.

But it’s hard to believe there is absolutely no better way of doing that, and no better balance between Brodie and Gradgrind. When children are this anxious about letting adults down, it isn’t them who have failed, but us.