This week, the Secret Teacher explains why, for some children, the holidays aren’t something to look forward to.
I remember being at school and counting down to the holidays and counting down to the weekends, but for kids in the deprived area where I work, it’s the other way around.
A high percentage are desperate to be at school. They enjoy learning and meeting people.
I don’t remember enjoying school. I remember leaving primary school and thinking ‘thank goodness, I’m never going to be back in a primary school again’. A few years later I'm applying to be a primary school teacher…
I couldn’t believe how positive some of the children are about school. We sometimes see how it fails the other way when they go to secondary school, come back to the primary school and say ‘I really miss primary school. I now recognise all the stuff that you did for us’. It blows my mind.
All that extra special time and care that they got, they don’t always get that now. A lot of secondary schools are absolutely fantastic, but some of them miss that close connection that you have with a teacher who you’ve got all day. They change to six or seven teachers in a day, and some struggle with having to deal with different personalities.
Secondary schools have got their subject specialisms and they know their subjects better, but a big advantage we have in primary schools is that over the course of five, six or seven years we tend to get to know the children and their families really well.
It’s quite a change once they go to secondary school and they don’t have that strong connection with an adult that they rely on.
I can only speak for this school, but I find this remarkable and also quite sad. When we come to the holidays, we count down with the kids and say ‘we’ve only got a few days left of school!’ and most of them are delighted, but there are a few who are a bit disappointed. They say they wish they were still coming in.
Secret Teacher | Were primary schools really better when we were younger?
Holidays are a real pinch point. Everything Is magnified. If we were tracking the referrals that made social work, it would show more at the start and end of a term. As well as the children dreading holidays, parents dread them too at times, and I can understand that.
There are pressures relating to food security, keeping their child entertained, and childcare for work. Obviously we are blessed with holidays far exceeding those of the average person and families have to be quite flexible and work around that. That can cause quite a lot of stress for parents.
This happens on a weekly basis as well. We always find that Mondays and Fridays are the hardest in terms of behaviour.
We get a lot more disclosures from children that we end up passing to social work on a Monday and Friday than on any other days. The one we tend to get most is neglect. That’s a massive area. It can be a lack of food or care, or being left alone while parents are at work, which ties into parents having difficulty with childcare.
With disclosure we sometimes think about children being hit, or even domestic abuse at home, talking about ‘mummy and daddy fighting’. It typically happens on a Monday or Friday, because they’ve spent a weekend with it or they’re about to spend a weekend with it.
Wednesday is the golden day. It’s the day when they’ve had a couple of days in school and they’ve transitioned from home to school.
We recognise that as the key day, because the children have spent a few days refamiliarising themselves with expectations in school. The school is a much more settled place in the middle of the week.
If you think of a bell curve, it’ll start declining towards the weekend. Sometimes they’re just tired, but sometimes there’s also a slight dread of what they’re going home to at the weekend.
We sometimes notice certain children are really not themselves, and we speak to them and find out that something different is happening at the weekend, like they’re staying with their gran.
They might be looking forward to it, but they’re also dreading it because it’s a change that they’re not used to.
Children do seem to enjoy school more. It’s about experiences more than an education, from my perspective anyway.
My school makes a real effort to give children experiences, and both the children and their parents really appreciate that the effort has been made to give them different experiences that they may not be used to.
There is a stark reason why some children would rather be at school
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27.02.2024
This week, the Secret Teacher explains why, for some children, the holidays aren’t something to look forward to.
I remember being at school and counting down to the holidays and counting down to the weekends, but for kids in the deprived area where I work, it’s the other way around.
A high percentage are desperate to be at school. They enjoy learning and meeting people.
I don’t remember enjoying school. I remember leaving primary school and thinking ‘thank goodness, I’m never going to be back in a primary school again’. A few years later I'm applying to be a primary school teacher…
I couldn’t believe how positive some of the children are about school. We sometimes see how it fails the other way when they go to secondary school, come back to the primary school and say ‘I really miss primary school. I now recognise all the stuff that you did for us’. It blows my mind.
All that extra special time and care that they got, they don’t always get that now. A lot of secondary schools are absolutely fantastic, but some of them miss that close connection that you have with a teacher........
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