For a truly educational experience, visit your neighbourhood primary school. Watch the goings-on in the playground: tiny tots rushing around in nappies, pushing and shoving one another, tantrums puncturing the air. You can’t understand what most of them are saying because they mumble – inarticulate and mostly incomprehensible. Say hello to the ‘Covid babies’ – in our classrooms and out of order.
Teachers up and down the country are welcoming to their Reception classes the babies of the early months of the pandemic – only to find that this cohort is like no other.
A survey out today of more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of Reception-aged children in England and Wales paints a scary picture. Scary, because their parents seem to ignore both symptoms and consequences of a devastating development – the transfer of responsibility from family to school.
The survey, by Kindred Squared, reveals that 90 per cent of parents say their child is ready to enter Reception class, yet teachers say one in three (33 per cent) children are not.
- Less than half of parents think a child needs to know how to use a book before starting school.
- Almost half are unconcerned if teachers are changing nappies.
- More than three out of five parents don’t care that teachers are explaining to children how to play or sit still.
Worse, instead of facing up to their failure in parenting, mothers and fathers are blaming everything on the pandemic.
Our child can’t speak properly? What can we do, she’s a ‘Covid baby’. Our son can’t use cutlery, not even hold a spoon? Don’t blame us, he’s a ‘Covid baby’.
This shoulder-shrugging flies in the face of the data showing that parenting in a child’s early life has more impact than wealth, education or class.
Children who fall behind in these early years struggle to catch up: on average, the Education Policy Institute found, ‘the poorest children start school four-and-a-half months behind all others and leave school at age 18 a staggering 18.1 months of learning behind their more advantaged peers.’
Yet parents are not stepping up to the plate, forcing many teachers to feel they must compensate – for example, by spending £40 million of their own money on buying their pupils’ hygiene products or having to play therapist to needy, unhappy pupils despite lacking formal training.
Trying to be all things to all people on a salary that averages £31,000 cannot be great for morale, and teachers are showing their frustration in a succession of strikes – past and future – and by leaving the profession in droves, usually after a mere five years.
Parental irresponsibility is bad news for teachers but even worse for children, whose development is now crammed into the eight hours they are in Reception rather than the 16 hours they spend at home. No wonder schools are noticing a slump in communication skills, self-regulation and hygiene among their youngest intake.
‘We often need to do more to get them to where starters would have been some years ago,’ Martin Blain, headteacher at Galleywall school in east London, says. ‘This includes basics like toilet training or just how to sit and listen. I have also noticed across the piece a heavier reliance on schools and their staff to help with matters outside education, everything from the school uniform to fixing housing issues: the role of schools has grown!’
Educationalists worry about the long-term impact. As Dr Deborah Bell, strategic director of education policy at the City of London Corporation, warns: ‘As well as practical life skills, like being able to use cutlery, the confidence of children, and their parents, to wave goodbye each morning to each other, is less apparent than has been the case in the past. Never have the benefits of education in the early years been more important. Social skills, practical skills, confidence and getting a step up in terms of learning are solid foundations for children … and serve them well throughout childhood and beyond.’
Recognising the crucial role of Reception, the government has set a target of 75 per cent of children being school-ready by 2028. That target will be unattainable as long as parents feel that schools’ role is to parent as well as teach.
No one doubts that parents want the best for their children. The problem is that now they want too much from their teachers.
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