My wife and I are at the start of a very important quest. It’s a quest that could have more positive or negative influence on our son than almost anything that has occurred since he was born and could affect the rest of his life. Yes, we are currently looking for a primary school for ‘Laughing Boy’ and it is turning out to be a frustrating search that has given us an inkling into how all-pervasive Left wing ideology has become in Britain’s schools.

We visited one particular school that had a good reputation and has had great praise heaped upon it by the schools’ inspector Ofsted. Although we were impressed that the school was doing well with literacy, other aspects of the school culture left a nasty taste in the mouth. Particularly worrying was the headteacher’s enthusiasm for all things ‘diversity’ related and the school’s ‘child led’ rather than ‘teacher led’ educational ethos, along with a heavy emphasis on cross curricula project work rather than discrete subject area lessons. I’m really not sure that cross curricula lessons impart enough detail in each subject area when compared to discrete subject lessons. It all looks like it could end up a little ‘woolly’ to me.

I wanted us to be 100% prepared for this school visit and had done some research prior to visiting it, not just on the school itself, but on various aspects of the curriculum in our part of England and how that curriculum is implemented. I had discovered that the particular school we were looking at followed some or all aspects of something called ‘The Learning Challenge Curriculum’. I read up about how this worked and found that this curriculum involved a lot of ‘project work’ and didn’t look, to me at least, as intellectually vigorous as it might have been. Surely, I thought, a solid hour of Geography for example must be better than some cross curricular lesson that had Geography as merely a part of a wider more ‘woolly’ lesson on ‘my local town’ that included within it a bit of literacy, a bit of maths, a bit of history etc etc?

This alarmed me greatly as it reminded me all too much of the floppy, intellectually weak, child-centred progressive Plowdenism that blighted my own primary school years. Leftist educational fads, such as not teaching the building blocks and mechanics of the English language and Maths, left me entering secondary school with an almost complete absence of this knowledge, something that put me in a bit of a ‘need to catch up’ position. I do not want this sort of ‘education’ for my son. My own educational experience, as you may understand, has not given me a great deal of trust in the teaching profession. This has led me to take a keen interest in what a school will or will not be teaching my child and how they are doing it. I want the best education possible for my son, one that will allow him to exploit all his abilities (although maybe not the ‘flinging coal into the neighbour’s garden’ one) for his benefit. I don’t want him to have the sort of primary or secondary education I had at the hands of faddish lefty teachers, I’d rather he had the sort of education his mum had, which was via a Grammar school (if that is his forte) after her local primary school, which taught English grammar as a matter of course and French as an added extra, depending on the teacher.

There are of course many decent and committed teachers, but education is also an area where the whims and prejudices of educational charlatans in academia get to be put into practise, using the minds and bodies of our children as a Petri dish for their ideas. This has, for generations of British children, not ended well and we languish behind nations such as South Korea, Singapore and Australia among others in the PISA ratings for Science, Maths and Reading. This can’t continue, we can’t continue to let an ideologically driven leftist educational establishment scupper our children’s futures like this. The PISA data shows those countries that are serious about the issue of educating their children and it is these countries that don’t seem to be following faddish cross curricular policies, such as the Learning Challenge Curriculum.

Something that really bothered me about this ‘Learning Challenge Curriculum’ was the difficulty in seeing actual examples of the detailed work that the children using this scheme would be doing. When I went to the website of those who publish ‘Learning Challenge Curriculum’ materials I found that nearly all the stuff that could tell me about the ‘meat’ of the scheme was hidden behind a paywall. It doesn’t fill me with particular enthusiasm to find that I, as a parent and as a customer of the education system, cannot find sufficient data on the curriculum that influences the teaching styles in this particular school. If I cannot read the content that is going to be fed to my child, then it makes me less likely to want to expose my child to that form of teaching.

When we visited the school and talked about the curriculum that the pupils were following, I got the distinct impression that this school was a little too child centred and the Headteacher far far too liberal in my opinion. One thing I noticed immediately is that there were a lot of children who were being taught in corridors by teaching assistants and I wonder whether this is because this is a child who genuinely needs extra help or whether these were disruptive children removed outside. We were not told why this was but the Head seemed to regard this as normal. This is in spite of having extra more private smaller teaching spaces that could be used. The headteacher was also worryingly cagey when I asked about discipline policies or policies for dealing with disruptive children. I’m afraid that her statement that ‘we work hard to ensure that there is no disruption or disruptive children’ is all too vague for my liking.

The Head also had an excessively enthusiastic attitude to diversity matters and boasted about the large number of Eastern European languages spoken at the school as if it was some sort of good thing rather than, as I see it, being an indication of a lack of linguistic cohesion. The head even waxed lyrical about the fact that there were Arabic language books in the school library and that the school encouraged mother tongue reading sessions. It may well have been that the Head was trying to reassure ‘the only Jews in the village’ that our child would be respected at the school, but this was not the impression that I got. It was obvious to me that this Head had a naive view of ‘multiculturalism’ and had never, unlike ourselves, ever had to live with some of the problems that unfettered ‘diversity’ has brought to our home towns. Her ‘reassurances’ and commitment to ‘diversity’ didn’t exactly warm us to the idea of sending our child there.

The Head’s sunny and welcoming demeanour, which she had through most of the visit, changed rapidly when we requested removal of our child from Religious Education lessons. Her attitude was not one of ‘well it’s your legal right to do so’, which is what she should have said, but a questioning one which struck me as not the right attitude to have towards a customer. I told her that I had looked at the curriculum for RE and didn’t agree with some of the content. She tried to sell the idea of RE to us as ‘moral education’ but we would not budge.

This Headteacher appeared even more shocked when we asked about removal from some of the more ‘controversial’ aspects of sex education. In particular we are concerned that our child be kept out of the way of those damned lunatics from Mermaids the pro-paediatric gender transition group or anyone like them. We were told that we could not withdraw from the National Curriculum biology part of the sex and relationship education but there were other aspects of relationship education that we can currently (until a recent Tory betrayal of parents that is) withdraw Laughing Boy from, however she was a bit vague over what could be classed as ‘controversial’. I felt that we had not got a definite or satisfactory answer to this question, as we would like to keep our son away from the pseudoscience of transgenderism, despite not having or voicing any objections to sex education in Biology. We will be asking for clarification on this matter and on the issue of withdrawing LB from RE and it remains to be seen if they will be cooperative in this area.

It worries me that so early in the school admission process we are having such difficulty in getting our very reasonable and currently legal requests on these issues willingly granted by the school. The situation regarding keeping kids away from inappropriate sexual propaganda is only going to get worse now that the Tories have caved into the LGB and T lobbies and made gay and trans propaganda compulsory in schools from 2020. If this Headteacher is so adamant on wanting to dissuade us from exercising our current rights, how much worse will it be when she has the backing of the law to impose very one sided gay and trans propaganda on our child?

Other reasons for concern that we picked up included the extensive, and very escapable for Laughing Boy (I should never have shown him Stalag17 as a baby LOL), grounds. I can easily seeing Laughing Boy giving a teacher or teaching assistant the slip and going off to explore the fence by the River. I know this because I did the same when I was younger. I didn’t like the less than precise way that the Head talked about discipline or the fact that the Reception pupils seemed to be given free reign to wander from classroom to classroom in the Reception class area. This seemed to me to be unnecessarily chaotic and to my mind would not prepare a child for later work that required more concentration and application, although this apparent chaos may not be representative of the entirety of the school at all times.

I came away from this school visit with the distinct view that this would be a headteacher and a school culture that we would be constantly fighting against. Although I was impressed with some aspects of the school’s ethos, such as extra effort being put into promoting reading and literacy among boys, the behaviour of the children especially the older ones and the way the other children accepted Laughing Boy, this school has a lot of negatives, at least in terms of school culture. In particular, the unwillingness to accept immediately that we have a legal right to withdraw our child from RE without having to give any grounds for our decision, bodes very ill for the future. As I said earlier, I reckon that due to the particular school culture and the influence of the head, we would be constantly butting heads with this school over issues of teaching styles, course content (or lack of it) along with matters pertaining to faith, culture and philosophy. It is not good to be in a position where one has to fight with a headteacher over these matters, it’s not good for the child, the school or the parents. It is better to have our child placed in a school where there is mutual respect between school and parents than have the sort of conflict that will almost inevitably arise, should we send Laughing Boy to this school.

We’ve got two other schools to look at in our immediate vicinity, one an academy and another an Anglican church school. It will be interesting to see if the attitudes of the heads of these schools will be the same as the one we saw recently. The academy readily and openly publicises the fact that parents can opt their child out of RE lessons, something to be welcomed, which suggests that this school would be more open to us exercising our rights than the first school we visited. The church school doesn’t have an ‘outstanding’ rating from Ofsted, but from what I can find out, perversely looks like it could be more intellectually vigorous than the first school, as there is less cross curricular teaching and much more teaching of discrete subjects.

It’s an interesting experience picking a school for our child, although also a disturbing one. It’s interesting to see how schools have changed, sometimes for the better since the 1970’s. On the other hand it is also disturbing to see similar types of left wing foolishness of a sort that blighted my own education still holding the educational reins. This search for a suitable school, a school that takes the view of ‘what works’ when it comes to teaching and doesn’t pander to education fads, along with a school that doesn’t engage in propagandising children with left wingery, is making me angry. It’s making me angry at the lack of choices that we as British parents have over the education system that we pay for via our taxes.

Why can’t we have the best possible education that our taxes can provide, rather than this ‘take it or leave it’ system that we have? Why can’t we have school vouchers which we can use to make informed and free choices for our children or democratically elected School Boards like in the United States or even flexi-schools where homeschooling, distance learning and on site schooling can be combined? I’m finding out during the school search for Laughing Boy that my country is cursed with a British Leyland education system when we should be getting the BMW system for which we are paying. Like the 1970’s state owned car company British Leyland, which often served up poorly designed and manufactured vehicles, in British schools parents are not treated like customers who deserve a quality product, we get what we are given. Parents get whatever the left dominated teaching unions, civil servants and academic educational advisors decide will be served, with very little respect given to the idea of parental choice in education. This is a situation that urgently needs to change if our children are to have the education system that they deserve and not the one that the left wing educational establishment has decreed that they should have.

Parts Two and Three of our Education Quest story can be found via the links below

Primary Education Quest – Part Two – Another school but one with less leftie lunatics and more real education

Primary Education Quest – Part Three – Another half decent, although not perfect, school