Our five-year-old daughter came home a couple of weeks ago complaining of a sore tummy. The reason? She said she was feeling under pressure over the amount of writing she was having to do in class. “I’m worried I can’t write enough sentences,” she said.
Happily, this has so far proved an isolated incident in what has generally been a fantastic start to school life. Her teacher is superb and trying to mitigate any sense that the playfulness of recent years - at nursery and in reception - might be being left behind too early.
But we are not alone in having a concern that the demands on children are stepping up too quickly. In fact, among local parents I speak to, this seems to be the leading fear. At the weekend, the mother of a five-year-old at another school talked of demanding that it reverse its decision to make her lose playtime to do extra academic work.
I hear these stories and a big part of me thinks: what are we doing to our children?
Perhaps as much to the point, why did the government embark on major changes to curriculum and assessment with, as far as I am aware, no research at all about its potential effects on pupils?
Primary schools are, of course, responding to changes in the national curriculum and assessment regimes, introduced from 2014, which ministers admit are making greater demands on children. Topics such as fractions and long division have been brought forward and pupils are having to get to grips with obscure grammatical terminology. Sats tests at age 11 are a conscious “raising of the bar”.
Much of this might sound good to the average voter. Justine Greening has talked about the government “having the highest aspirations for all children”.
Indeed, let’s hope that millions of children being put through these changes will respond in the “right” way, rising to the challenge of mastering “harder” material at a younger age.
But here’s the thing: it is just that - a hope. How many children are likely to respond in that more positive manner? And how many might disengage from a “too much, too soon” curriculum diet and, in the worst cases, be made to feel anxious about school and themselves?
Staggeringly, we don’t know because these major changes have been implemented with no detailed research on their likely impact on those affected by them.
The true picture of policy development, as seen particularly since 2010, seems not to be an objective-as-possible search for the best evidence on what would help children in the long run, including experimental studies where necessary. Instead, what happens is that a minister starts with a particular idea, then hand-picks advisers to help him implement it and then sees if he can get away with it. It’s outrageous.
Sadly, again, primary curriculum and assessment is far from the only policy for which genuine concern for all pupils seems absent in decision-making. The government’s desire for all primary schools to become academies, thus inflicting expense, upheaval and instability on many institutions, is being pushed forward without any decent research suggesting it would help the children they educate.
Last autumn’s green paper proposing an expansion of grammar schools came, again, without any serious consideration of the impact of selection on those children not selected.
Again, staggeringly, I think, Theresa May’s talk on mental health last month, while acknowledging that school-age children were often affected, offered no willingness to consider whether government policy might be a contributing factor. In a - yes - saner world, the politicians might have the humility to ask if that were so, and if it were, what could be done to help.
Instead, it is left to the charity YoungMinds to warn this week that “we urgently need to rebalance our education system, so schools are encouraged to prioritise wellbeing and not just exam results”.
Serious change focused on the user’s experience of public services tends not to happen because policy is ultimately driven by the political, rather than the user, perspective. In the end, the claimed needs of everyone else, including, in this field, those of children, are really a vehicle towards achieving what the policy machine wants.
Policymakers need to be called out for this selfishness. It is unsurprising that these issues are rising up the agenda. Campaigns involving parents, illustrated by the recent petition stating that “childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count”, seem to be gathering strength. As is only right. For ministers need to be reminded that they owe a duty of care to all young people. Our children deserve so much better from those in Westminster and Whitehall, who are meant to be looking after them.
Warwick Mansell is a freelance education journalist and author of Education by Numbers
