A personal Agenda
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24 / 02 / 2009 | Author: dnorris
The Personal Agenda
The personal development and well being of children is part of The National Curriculum, and although it constitutes only a fraction of that whole curriculum it manages to command a disproportionate amount of the press coverage of education.
The desire to quantify safety, health, pleasure, community involvement and financial wellbeing are part of that reason. It is a minefield which most newspapers delight in exploiting. The mystery is why it was felt to be necessary to incorporate it in a strategy in the first place.
Feeling safe in school is just such an issue. How do you quantify such a statement? Bullying is the most obvious symptom which does raise its head above the parapet from time to time. But the more it has been highlighted the more has been the demand for a prescribed course of action and that course of action has to be in place even when bullying is undetected. The inference is that bullying takes place....and by implication all the other negative aspects of school life take place too. It implies a world strewn with fearful consequences. No wonder newspapers fan the flames.
In the same way the internet is construed as a risk. Internet contacts and internet liaisons are a potential risk. Vulnerable children will not be aware of the dangers. It is all part of the classroom collective responsibility to explain how it could take children into unchartered situations with dangerous consequences. As such it puts a negative gloss on school life.
The same fear factor relates to the management of children’s’ health. Responding to the challenge of a healthy lifestyle is like asking members of a swimming club to take the blame for someone drowning in the river. Schools do put in place the building blocks for a healthy lifestyle. They encourage activities and search out the skills that may be hidden. They provide the information on what is good to eat and how much exercise we all require, but if the preferred home meal is fish and chips and children do not pay for the weekly shop then it is difficult to put the blame for obesity directly at the door of a school.
When a school in Rotherham introduced a range of healthy school meals some parents responded by providing chips at the school gate. No wonder the newspapers came a running.
The school can act as enabler but not as enforcer and that would seem to relate to happiness more than anything else. Enjoyment and achievement are not a one way street. Temperament would seem to be involved to a degree but the strategy again asks schools to prove a negative.
Staying away from school when capable of attending is a case of truancy. It is easily measured and implies that pupils do not like school. But merely attending school is not deemed to imply that everyone enjoys school. That is only manifested in symptoms like good behaviour and enthusiasm, factors which are much harder to quantify. Try asking a teenager what they enjoy and the answers are seldom words of enthusiasm.
Older pupils are encouraged to take on some form of responsibility. It is laudable that they are expected to take steps to get involved in their community, but just what that overarching community and school policy is continues to baffle many a parent-teachers association. Community cohesion to most of us is just a word. It is a brave head-teacher who will claim responsibility for it outside of the assembly room. Unfortunately that is one of the aims that a school should aspire to.
One objective however does make sound sense. It is the one which requires children to take an interest in their personal finance. Money, either in the form of pocket money paper rounds, Saturday jobs or work experience all help children to make sound career choices in the future. Work experience can act as a prompt to take seriously the need to master literacy, numeracy and I.C.T. but as with most placements it depends on who in the community feels a commitment to the school.
Learning to be healthy, learning to stay safe, learning to enjoy life and achieve your potential, learning to make a positive contribution and learning to achieve economic wellbeing are not topics that should be part of the school curriculum. What they should be are outcomes of a sound education. No more and no less. And when that is the case the press has less scope for printing sensational educational stories.
