Who is school for?

 Let's forget the automatic responses and actually consider the question logically.

We have three invested interests involved in a child's education; the school, the parents and the child. 

For ease, the label of "parent" here encompasses all primary caregivers and when discussing "school" it is as an entity not it's component parts so appropriate phrases would be: it is school policy to, the decisions we are making are, the school feels, we feel...  

You as an individual be may be opposed to actions taken by the school but the expectation will always be to back the decisions of your management.  

With the idea that the School entity is the stakeholder not you, answer this quick question: 

Which of these Venn diagrams best illustrates the power dynamic within the school, parent and child relationship?

Which did you choose? 

If it was either of the first two options you might as well stop reading now. 

To be clear, any relationship dynamic where the school has huge decision making power is one that obviously has failed and may even be irreparable.

Sorry to be blunt about it but everything I am going to be saying from this point onward is just going to anger you. Go and get some coffee, chill out and relax. You will always be welcome but right now you are probably part of the problem not part of the solution.

Still here? Awesome, let's get those critical thinking skills engaged and crack on.

(Side note, I am not going to plagiarise for the sake of explaining critical thinking, Brookfield 2017, does it so much better and if Becoming a critically effective teacher is not on your bookshelf it should be.)

Who is school for?

In the previous exercise I encouraged a phenomena that is referred to as "the illusion of choice", by carefully arranging the wording of the initial question and the order of the Venn diagrams an unfair bias prioritising school over the child has been promoted. 

It is merely the application of a basic writing technique taught in GCSE English to engage the reader, repetition invoking emotional engagement, yet it is amazing how few recognise they are being actively manipulated. Follow this with a dismissive and exclusionary statement and voila cognitive dissonance is encouraged, this is exactly what parents and children experience when we fail to communicate.

Now your fundamental beliefs have been tickled, here is another quick question. 

When talking to a child or parent about a concern, do you use I or we as your pronoun? 

What I am really asking is do you have the courage of your professional convictions or do you invoke groupthink as a talisman of protection?

Here are two example conversations, place yourself first as the parent listening to each, then as the teacher delivering the script.  Where is the power? Which Venn diagram best fits each scenario?

"Hi, this is Mr Thompson calling from A School I was just wondering if it was a convenient time to talk about Johnny's progress in Maths?  Thank you.  I am afraid to say I am a little concerned that he is not coping with the content of the lessons as he acting out more often and as far as I can tell, it is only in Maths that this is happening. Are there any concerns he has raised with you that I need to be aware of?"

 

"Hello, this is Mr Thompson calling from A School. I am phoning to talk about Johnny's behaviour in Maths class and frankly it is not good enough, he is regularly disrupting the lesson and we are concerned that he is not going to achieve his target grade, moreover he is disrupting the learning of the other students in the class and this is unfair to those children and their parents.  If he does not improve his behaviour quickly we will have to move him into another class."

Whilst the first is my own script, the second conversation is unfortunately paraphrased from ones I have witnessed on numerous occasions, but the important question here is has Johnny acted any differently?

Moreover, how easily could you identify the group dynamic from those shown earlier?

I like to believe my script falls into the "Yellow = Child, Green = School and Red = Parent" dynamic as the ultimate decision maker is the child, but parents are encouraged to want concerns addressing quickly based on reasonable ideas and concerns raised by the school.

The second script I struggle to place. Who is the decision maker? 

The school is simultaneously making decisions and wanting concerns addressed, but putting the parent in the same situation.  No-one is able to offer reasonable ideas and concerns.

This is why I believe it should be inconceivable that a school, as an entity comprising of multiple specialists,  takes any stance other than providing reasonable ideas and concerns. 

This does not make the School powerless, quite the contrary. 

The overlap between School and Child are those conversations where we help the child make beneficial decisions, the overlap between School and Parent are where we offer support and finally the nexus is where we bring everyone together and use the temporary powers afforded to us to make decisions with potentially far-reaching consequences.

The key wording there being temporary.