School à la carte

My daughter has another two years before she applies for a place at an LEA-run school or is assessed for a fee-paying school.  There are other possibilities too, including foreign government schools in London and alternative (but relatively cheap) fee-paying schools. And, of course, there’s home schooling. The more I look at the stress of the independent schools admission process and the fees (count on £11,000 per year for prep and probably more at the secondary level) and the more I despair at the small catchment areas (read: my house is beyond it) for the few decent state schools nearby and the wouldn’t-touch-them-with-a-bargepole primaries that are within my catchment area, the more I begin to think about home schooling and about what I call school à la carte.  

On 5 November, I talked about the trend towards afterschooling in The afterschooling imperative. Home schooling, or home education, goes a bit further: it leaves out the formal school altogether.  The motivations of home schoolers are many. You get all types — from nutbars to middle class people who just want a good solid education.  I would consider home schooling if it could adequately address a few needs: (1) exposure to the thoughts and views and areas of interest of people other than me (2) social interaction and the opportunity to form friendships (3) exposure to some elements of formal education (ie not everything gets done at the kitchen table) and (4) a little bit of time off of mother-cum-teacher (which would otherwise be a 24/7 job).  A school à la carte would address all of these concerns.  Parents could volunteer to teach modules to the children of others, or parents could club together to hire specialists (such as language teachers) to offer modules.  There would be a physical place where children would congregate and, critically, see familiar faces several times per week (rather than the once per week they might otherwise see another child at Brownies or football practice.)  Parents could still home school, but their children would be exposed to a whole plethora of interesting modules, many of which one might expect to go well beyond the confines of the National Curriculum.  (The unbridled ability to provide modules of any type are what would distinguish an à la carte school from “flexi-schooling”, a legal loophole which permits parents to combine home schooling with part-time attendance at a local school with the school head’s permission.  After all, if, like me, one of your big concerns is getting away from teaching to the all-too-many-standardised tests , why would you want your kid attending a school which will inevitably spend much of its time preparing for those very same tests?)

Topics which are in high demand can be scheduled after the normal school day in an à la carte school in order to pull in the afterschooling parents looking for that extra enrichment or remedial help.  I see no reason why the financial aspects can’t be viable, especially when one considers the availability of school space which heads are only too willing to rent out to buttress school budgets.

I am a traditionalist at heart, yet even I would be open to considering an à la carte education for my daughter.  Your thoughts are appreciated, but please post them quickly; I imagine that as soon as Mr Snowdon reads this post, it will be pulled…

The afterschooling imperative

I learned a new word this week.  “Afterschooling” (noun), “afterschool” (verb; as in “I afterschool my kids”)  Afterschooling is consciously augmenting your child’s school-provided curriculum.  Afterschooling parents are hybrids: think homeschooler meets laissez faire parent.  Many of us were afterschooled and didn’t even know it; our parents probably didn’t know it either.   They took us to story hour at the local library and spent time helping us winnow down our pile to the ten books our membership card allowed us to check out.  They made bets with us at the dinner table that saw us scramble to pull out the oversized folio National Geographic Atlas of the World to prove to them that Timbuktu did exist (and where.)  They helped us stack up copper pennies, layering them with lemon juice-dipped cloth and then measuring the current that ran through our primitive pile.  It was all very ad hoc.  More formal afterschool activities were rather limited and tended to consist of the likes of Brownies and Beavers, ballet, karate/judo, piano or violin lessons.  Instead, we played in the street, founded detective agencies, and established publications such as The Neighbourhood News (circulation 30; paid circulation zero) which lasted several years before folding.

Afterschooling today is another matter and attacked with a rigour far removed from the ad hoc nature of our own childhood stimulation. It’s about private tutoring for SATs, the 11-plus (whether for grammar schools or schools in non-grammar districts with selective streams), Common Entrance, GCSEs and A Levels, and elocution and coaching for public school interviews. It’s about regular attendance at Kumon centres and French clubs and half term “camps” and Christmas and Easter revision courses at crammers.   What boggles my mind is that so much of this is not so much to provide remedial help to those who need it, but rather to ensure a child is able to remain comfortably in the right spot on the curve to ensure whatever academic success his parents aspire to for him.  And there’s a certain amount of keeping up with the Joneses in this too; parents of perfectly able children are signing up en masse to Kumon and/or seeking out established local tutors out of fear of being left behind.

All of this, of course, raises the question: If our state schools are good, why do so many of us feel compelled to shuttle our kids from tutor to Kumon to le Club Tricolore and back (stopping off at WHSmith to buy a few more standardised tests to practice at home)?  We know the answer: many of our state schools do not, in fact, meet the standards many of us would hope for them, but we still want our kids to succeed (or, at the very least, get into that public school we’ve been saving up for for all these years in the state primary). Ergo, many of us succumb to the drill we all know.  What amazes me, however, is the number of children at fee-paying schools who boomerang from the home of the private tutor, to Kumon, and back to yet another tutor.  Either this is an indictment of the education these fee-paying schools provide (and calls into question what, exactly, you are paying for) or it’s an indictment of our society where even the privileged feel obligated to take away the precious time our kids have to become local sleuths, establish newspapers with no paid circulation, and pursue other, equally pointless but somehow important pursuits.