Is It Parents, Children, or Schools that Fail Exams

The trepidation of waiting for the annual exam results does not just apply to school children. At the moment parents are discovering if they have been successful in their application for their child's place in a preferred school. Naturally we regard the performance of a school is entirely due to the skill of the teaching team, but one of the greatest influences in the teaching environment is the effect parents have in the performance.

Changes in the social environment and the assumed responsibilities of families have evolved over the years. Many schools cite increasing pressure and workload from dealing with issues that have been abandoned by the family. Discipline seems to be the greatest concern, creating problem with the control of the classroom and a challenge to authority. Hardly conducive to a focus on learning and inevitably the prerequisite to a dysfunctional adult life for the child involved.

The schools best able to cope have retained a level of control and a teaching team that achieved good results for the children. No surprise that these schools are much sought after and strive to maintain their position in the league tables. But they suffer from their own success as a proportion of parents have been discovered to lie and cheat to meet the entrance criteria. Unbounded by social position this regrettable activity hardly sets the ideal role model for their children and wastes valuable resource in its detection.

As 240,000 children fail to get into the school of their choice each year we can see the temptation to manipulate the application details and maybe accept that some parents would feel they had failed if they did not. It's a double edged sword. But now more grist to the mill; figures announced in May 08 reveal 24,000 are classed as failing teachers that should not be in the job, up from the 17,000 assessed as failing last year. At 5 and really there are 28,800 failing teachers. The outcome is staggering as these failing teachers are involved in teaching children who are subsequently penalized. The average class size is 30 thus 720,000 children suffer as a consequent but this assumes the poor teachers only handle a single class. In reality they handle several classes at secondary level. Let's assume five classes and the number of children disadvantaged reaches a staggering 3,600,000. Doesn't bear thinking about, but what are schools doing about it ? The procedure to remove a poor teacher is so arduous that many schools have taken the alternative route to persuade these teachers to move on to another school merely recycling the problem. So can we really criticize parents wanting to get their children into the better schools.

The ideal outcome would be the appearance of a greater number of good schools and the allocation of greater involvement of parents in the schooling process through their child's attendance at school. This would swell the teaching numbers with an auxiliary team drawn from the 7.4 million households with school aged children. Suddenly the teaching capacity of the UK is swelled by a huge reserve that can only benefit our children. Modern teaching resources used in class to support lessons are predominately educational games. These are ideal to replicate the lesson content at home as practice. All we need now is the coordination of this massive resource, at least it will compensate for a child failing to gain entry to a preferred school or being taught by a failing teacher