When I was very little, I excelled at school. I loved it. I was the one given a notebook to “write my poems in”, while my classmates learned to copy their names. I marched through the warm biscuity corridors like a kind of king. Time passed. I became average and then less than and then bad.
By the time I got to secondary school I had six or seven chips on my shoulder and had forgotten how to learn a thing. I was the only Year 7, they told me, stiffly, who’d got a detention in their first term. I hated school. It was a grim place for me, disappointments and panic, and hysterical boredom, and the smell of Dewberry body spray covering all manner of adolescent horrors. But it never occurred to me to stay at home. Perhaps this was a lack of imagination on my part, or a fear of authority, or maybe I just kept on going because keeping on going was just what you did. Something since has changed. The Chief Inspector of Schools in England claims that parents and pupils now disregard rules they once took for granted, like attending daily, and headteachers say they agree. The Department for Education’s adviser on behaviour policy said it was Covid that “broke the spell”.
