Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone – and let parents do the parenting

Over 50 years, schools have taken responsibility for children’s emotional health, moral values and political views — putting them at odds with their families

I’m delighted to have an extended essay published in today’s Times:

Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash

Temper tantrums should be the preserve of toddlers, not mothers. But one Friday night, when my eldest son was seven, I came close to bawling. I had hoped to end a tiring week with fish and chips for supper but my ever-diligent son had a problem with this plan. “We can’t do that!” he cried, aghast. His homework for the week, he explained, was to keep a food diary.

Every morsel that had passed his lips over the previous five days had been recorded and colour-coded, red or green, to show whether the food was “good” or “bad”. He was not prepared to taint his all-green chart with a smidgen of red, while I wanted a glass of wine, not an imagined teacher silently tut-tutting my decisions.

Having worked as a teacher, I knew things had changed since I was a child. My primary school had a thick yellow line painted across the playground which parents were meant to stand behind when dropping off or picking up their children. Its significance was clear: teachers and parents, school and home — the two were not supposed to mix. Not that this line was particularly needed. Back in the early 1970s, almost nine out of ten children walked to school unaccompanied by an adult. Most parents would have rarely come into contact with their child’s teacher.

Three decades later, when my own children started school, things could not have been more different. Parents were welcomed into the classroom, not merely the playground. Exchanging words with my sons’ teachers became a pleasant daily ritual. Being presented with a “home school agreement” was more disturbing. The formal list of rights and responsibilities made me feel like a signatory to a legal contract regarding my own child. The friendly chats had misled me: the school set the rules and I needed to obey.

As I have explored in a report for the think tank Civitas, the boundaries between school and home have become increasingly blurred as teachers have gradually taken on more of the responsibilities that were once the remit of parents. Take getting to and from school. Far fewer children walk to school today than a generation ago and even fewer walk unaccompanied by an adult.

There are undoubtedly many reasons for this but one significant shift is in who gets to decide when a child is ready to walk home alone. In the past it would have been parents who weighed up the risks of the journey versus the maturity of their child. Now, although independent travel is not illegal, many primary schools have policies that prevent children leaving school alone.

Such documents often state categorically that children under ten must be collected from school by an adult. For children in the final year of primary school, teachers advise parents how to assess the risks involved in travelling independently. The very existence of this advice sends a message to parents that they are not solely responsible for their children, even outside school hours. They must instead defer to the greater authority of teachers.