Fear and loathing at the local school – going backwards isn’t going to turn back time, so how about accepting that society, not schools need fixing?

I’ve always been proud of the fact that my children go to a progressive school. They don’t wear school uniform and they call their teachers by the first names. Well, at least they did…

I felt it was refreshing, modern and inclusive. But apparently the powers that be now see it as detrimental to discipline, and backwards steps are being taken.

Over the past year, a new senior management team has drafted in a whole bunch of new rules. When the school doubled in size, apparently the gap between the highest achieving students and the lowest achieving students began to rise. And so, it seems, tough new rules are seen as the answer,  implemented by a new-ish executive head who oversees three schools in the borough (whose actions, frankly, remind me of Dolores Umbridge’s in Harry Potter). From walking in silence on the left (last seen in the terrifying Pileforth Academy in Three Men and Little Lady) – from back when “academy” was a rather rarer concept) to keeping kids in at playtime if they don’t finish their work or misbehave, or just because, according to Jonah who is now vitamin D deficient; to asking kids to come in a quarter of a hour early to grab some extra practice time of nonsense words like ‘Rhellis’ and ‘Disnuck’, to dishing out homework to the primary years.

It’s little wonder that Ava tells me daily she hates school, almost in tears on a Sunday night, because of ‘all the rules’, and Jonah has terrifying school nightmares of a Minecraft-style massacre (“they respawn Mum!”). I have to say, I fear the worst (by which I mean to say, I might have to pull them out.)

Now, it seems first names for teachers are being phased out, and uniforms will be installed next, I shouldn’t wonder. Perhaps it’s fitting, in these days of global inequality that our children should be prepared for the workhouse as these rules seem to suggest, but I for one wholeheartedly object. What is the point of making our children hate school so much? Is it to teach them conformity – that in order to get by in life, they have to keep their heads down, be anonymous, blend in, and do what they’re told? In today’s political climate, I actually think it might not be a bad thing to be taught, and taught young. But that’s not to say it’s right. Although I secretly think they’re better off getting used to it before they join the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ mentality of the modern Academy system.

I know teachers have their hands full trying to control a bunch of kids from disparate backgrounds, whose parents have very different ideas about what constitutes a good education and upbringing. However, I think repressing the young has rather the opposite effect of creating a lifelong love of learning. If, what Gove and his ilk (because that’s where these ridiculous, regressive measures no doubt stem, though ironically, here he is as Education Minister saying what a fabulous school it was before anything changed) want from the nation’s youth is a bunch of twentysomethings tearing up towns centres and vomiting in street gutters to celebrate completing their education, he’s preparing them very well for it by forcing them to conform in their childhood.

When I objected to this raft of recent changes on Facebook, my ex-Airforce stepbrother commented  “well that’s what we all did when we were young, and we haven’t turned into a bunch of cowering simpletons”. He offered up his own nuggets of wisdom, no doubt garnered from years of doing what he was told or face court marshal, that children need to be ‘taught respect’ and that school children’s behaviour these days is ‘out of hand’.

But this bunch of hackneyed clichés is a bunch of bullshit thrown down by the governing classes to enforce control. And as a policy it’s completely flawed. Why do children rebel against their parents (or any institution for that matter)? Because they have been repressed. Why do kids get shitfaced in the streets of Magaluf when they escape their parents for the first time? Because they have been repressed. Why do young Muslims, like Shamima Begum, run away to Syria? Because they have been repressed and want to escape. It’s not that hard to understand how repression as a child leads to rebellion as a teenager!

School kids do not need goosestepping and saluting to make them respect their elders. They simply need to like going to school. And none of these measures is increasing the amount my kids like going to school. In any case, the rules are simply window dressing, to make parents believe teachers are doing something – anything –  about the fact that the fabric of society is ripping apart because most people are too busy to think, let alone spend quality time with their children, doing with love what teachers are now forced to do with discipline.

If schools want better behaved children, then parents need to be enabled to have happier homes by being less stressed. I guess that starts with a fairer society all round. So creating more equality might be a much better way to get kids to do what teachers want. After all, what’s the point of learning if you’re only going to get a shit job, or a lifetime of corporate servitude anyway, no matter how much you pull your socks up?

And if you don’t believe me on the repression issue, remember the scene in Three Men and a Little Lady when bluestocking headteacher Elspeth Lomax of Pileforth academy jumps on poor old Tom Selleck, and you might understand why so many women are so keen to wear next to nothing in Shagaluf. Catholic girls’ schools don’t have a reputation for nothing. And don’t even get me started about public school boys. But then our government is full of them.