Getting the School

My
son got into the school he wanted. The results came out last night at
midnight, so Sue and I found ourselves huddled around a computer screen,
constantly clicking refresh and checking multiple clocks just in case
the international date line had caused midnight to occur slightly
earlier on one side of the room than the other.
Today, many
children across the country will be waking up to delight or
disappointment. We tried to address this with Joachin when he woke up.
‘When
you go into school,’ we told him, ‘some of the other children might not
be very happy about their result. If anyone does ask you where you’ll
be going, be pleased but not smug.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
As soon as he got to school, one of his friends came running up.
‘Did you get in?’
‘Of course I did,’ said Joachin smugly while I cringed and tried to hide my face.

Choosing
a secondary school is fraught with complications. Firstly, despite what
the government would have us believe, not all schools are created
equal. Some are good and some are bad, and you can tell the good ones
because they have 90% of the applications. Not necessarily because they
actually are the best, but because the parent mafia will have swapped
notes on internet forums, picked some criteria and declared the winner
by consensus. The remainder are left feeling like consolation prizes
even though the vast majority of children, due to a lack of infinite
capacity at the front runner, will end up going to them.

The
parent mafia were also out in force on the forums in the minutes
leading up to midnight. All adding to each others stress levels by
second guess what the selection criteria will be, how many places will
be allocated, whether there are any early indications of success, when
no amount of discussion can change the result or make it come out any
earlier.

By which logic, I myself should have
simply gone to bed and checked the result in the morning, rather than
hanging on well past my bedtime to discover a result that has no bearing
on anything I do today, nothing I can do differently if I wish to
change it, or excitedly if I’m happy with it, except that it will affect
the next seven years of my sons academic career and consequently the
rest of his life.

Perhaps it was simpler when you just
went to the school nearest to you and that was it. I mean, it turned the
selection process into a pricing war over which house you could afford,
was divisive and territorial, and meant that fortunes could be made and
lost investing in property just before a new headmaster took over, but
at least it got it all over and done with early. Either you lived in the
right place or you didn’t. It took the pressure off the child as well.
No choosing, you’re going to the school that Daddy took a second
mortgage out to live near and that’s it.

Still, at
the end of the day, what matters is a child’s happiness, confidence and
drive. The right school might give a child the connections to succeed in
life, but the real reason some schools are better than others is that
they manage to instil a sense of self worth in the child, help them
discover their passion, and help them easily fit into any social
situation. So no matter which school your child has got in to, it’s
worth pointing out to them that it’s certainly the best school because
it has the one asset that none of the other schools has, the one thing
that will improve it’s academic record, make every day there shine and
make other pupils wish to be there.

It has them.