Simon Jenkins addresses the current moral panic around school absences and notes the lack of attention paid to schooling that for many children and young people offers too narrow a curriculum (England’s secondary schools are Dickensian. No wonder children are staying away, 8 January).
This newspaper hosted a competition in 2001 inviting children of school age to describe the school they would like. This resulted in more than 15,000 entries and, since it was the year of a general election, a Children’s Manifesto. This clearly illustrated and communicated children’s frustrations with schooling. They wanted beautiful and comfortable school buildings; a diverse, practical and relevant curriculum; time and space to think; and they wanted to be respected and listened to.
Ten years later, the paper repeated the exercise and the results were very much the same. The pandemic has, we are told, changed attitudes towards schooling. The negative narrative around “learning loss” and blighted futures fails to recognise the opportunity offered by this so-called national crisis to learn from children how to make schooling irresistible by recognising and respecting what really matters to them.
Our schools may be Dickensian, but as Leonard Cohen reminds us, “there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Emerita professor Catherine Burke
Faculty of education, University of Cambridge
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