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Letting children out of school early isn't a reward, but a punishment, for parents

Letting children out of school early isn't a reward, but a punishment, for parents

Anyone who must suffer the wretched school run will know the rate at which the minutes seem to speed up in the run-up to 3pm, and just what a daily trauma getting to the gates on time can be. Imagine, then, receiving a letter home advising you that as a reward for good behaviour, your little darling will be allowed out 10 minutes earlier than his or her reprobate classmates. In other words, the virtue of the child ends up being visited as a punishment upon their mother – and you’re supposed to pat them on the back and say “well done”.

Yes, I’d be livid, too. But that is precisely what seems to be happening at Castle View School in Essex, with teachers washing their hands of the good kids at 2.50pm, while keeping their less angelic counterparts behind. Several parents have complained to the press about the chaos it will cause at picking up time. They point out that anyone with two children at the school will have to hope that both either play up or play nice on the same day – otherwise, they’ll have to hang around, come rain or shine, however well-behaved one has been.

Others moan that, like me, they find it hard enough to get to school on time as it is; how infuriating to break your neck meeting the daily chucking-out deadline, only for it to prove to be arbitrary. “Ah, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” the school insisted on its website this week, after the news broke in local and national newspapers. Before declaring, like the consummate politician, that this hoo-hah was actually a “non-story”.

Rather than leaving at 2.50pm being considered as a reward for the good, the 3pm finish is a punishment for the bad, a statement explained. It all rather smacks of semantics to me. Especially when I know of no other school that turfs its pupils back out on to the pavement quite so early. Anyway, if you’re going to have any kind of working relationship between parents and school, the point at which loco parentis changes hands ought surely to be cast in stone in both directions. I don’t imagine Castle View’s senior management team would take kindly to parents dropping pupils off 10 minutes late for class as a reward for them having cleared the breakfast pots and loaded the dishwasher that morning.

Thank God my 10-year-old’s head teacher limits rewards to trips to the cinema and chips on a Friday, and all within the sacred boundaries of the school day. But that’s not to say my girl is precluded from a cohort of youngsters I fear will become dubbed the “what’s in it for me” generation. I caught a glimpse of this in her the other day: she drew up a tick chart of chores that she’s happy to undertake in return for her pocket money, which she chirpily stuck on the fridge. As I took it down, my own smile somewhat forced, I pointed out that she who pays the pocket money dictates the terms. It’s a lesson I’m at pains to see that my daughter learns, if not in the classroom then at home. Because the goings on at this school in Essex reflect a modern pedagogy of providing an endless supply of carrots when it comes to motivating good behaviour. So much so that I fear our children are being set up for a dreadful shock when they eventually enter the workplace.

Industry is running on ever-tighter budgets; shareholders, bosses, customers, all consistently demand more for less, and this will only have become more entrenched by the time today’s schoolchildren become tomorrow’s workforce.

As a child of the Seventies, I’m not about to suggest returning to the ways of our teachers, who motivated us to be good by whacking board rubbers across the back of the heads of those who were not. But schools should remember that there are no end-of-term prizes for getting into the office on time; you don’t get a trip to theme park because you completed your timesheets and met your annual targets.

Fail to meet your employer’s expectations of you, and the punishment meted out will be far more catastrophic than an extra 10 minutes tagged on to the end of the working day – in the real world, you’ll lose your job. Teachers do our children no favours if they wave them off at the end of their school careers having instilled in them a sense of entitlement simply because they did what was expected of them more often than not.

As adults they will have to get the job done in exchange for nothing more than an ever-decreasing standard of living – unfair, yes, but also a harsh reality far too many are going to have to take on the chin.