By now you are at it, busy with the cut and paste, telling us what religious festivals and parts of the inner ear they have studied. It is a standard letter topped and tailed with a few personal details, then labelled school report. And it is all very well, but it is not what I want to know.
I want to know who taught my six-year-old all those rude clapping rhymes, such as “Ooh, ah! Left my bra in my boyfriend’s car” and the skipping rhyme that ends “show your knickers to the football team”.
Why do my children shudder at the thought of using the school loo, preferring the option of the one in the park on our way home? Does Moaning Myrtle of Hogwarts have a cistern-haunting cousin called Groaning Gladys?
Who are the mothers who don’t nit-comb their children every hairwash night? I want them named and shamed because they’re costing me a fortune in teatree.
Why don’t you realise that Cora Copycat is incapable of an original thought and plagiarises from my daughter all the time?
Why do all your gold star awards go to the bone idle or bullies just for picking up a pencil or putting down a first-year?
As there is more joy in the staffroom over one sinner that repents than over 223 that need no repentance, is it worth a few weeks’ truancy or swot-bashing to get some recognition?
Who’s the Year 4 klepto-hypochondriac, known to have snaffled three tubes of Lockets, one inhaler, one allergy nose-dropper, half a phial of arnica tablets and countless lipsalves?
Why do the lunchboxes nearly always come home with one sandwich crust left? Is it the school hamster or did you imprison the OFSTED inspector in the games cupboard?
Yes, that’s what I want to know.
Which reminds me, in return for all those secrets, I could tell you the next line of that rhyme my eight-year-old sings: In the car park, in the car park, see our teacher with Miss Vickers...
