Achievement Bragging

I had a mini rant about this last week in Mislaying The Positives but since then, other things have happened, not even to me, and I’ve got hot under the collar all over again. So, here we are: a whole blog on the subject.

First of all, parents should be proud of their children. I am proud of every new book level, every goal scored, every positive comment, every spelling test, every homework completed. Everything. I think both of my boys are amazing and I cherish every single achievement, no matter how big or small. So does my husband and so do the grandbears.

However, I do not feel it necessary to tweet or publish every single accolade on Facebook. As explained last week, I do think we should shout about amazing achievements, especially when a child has overcome some sort of hurdle or adversity to get there. Those not-so-braggy-brags are hard earned and I think anyone reading about them would genuinely be happy for the achievee (not a word but clearly should be) and their parents. For those of us whose children have additional needs of one type or another, these amazing moments can be harder to come by. We often have to hunt around for them in a miasma of ‘can I have a word’s and phone calls home and red lights in the ‘below expectations’ box. These amazing moments shine brighter for it and I’m very much in favour of people being able to share them and other people being happy for them. This was the motivation behind the #glowmo hashtag invented by @mumdrah (I think) which many of us in the online adoption community use to highlight these hard-won moments of glowing pride.

What I have much more of a problem with, is parents of children with outstanding reports, outstanding scores, amazing comments, publishing the lot on social media. Why are they doing it? I know they’re proud and rightly so, but why can’t they just congratulate one another, praise their child, tell the grandparents, share it on a family whatsapp group and leave it there? They’ve already got the warm glow of their child’s amazing achievements – why do they need public acknowledgement too?

I wonder whether they publish these things genuinely without thinking about how it might make others feel or whether, actually, they want to show off. Either way, it’s not great. And I do have to wonder whether if their child got all low marks or all negative comments, they would still feel moved to post it on Facebook. I rather suspect not… I can’t help feeling it smacks of a certain I’m alright Jack-ness, without a care for the not so lucky.

When you see your child’s report on its own, you can see it for what it is: the achievements of an individual child with their own individual set of strengths and difficulties. You can consider it within the context of them – the only context it should ever be considered in. As soon as someone else publishes their child’s report, you have a comparator. You would never mean to compare them but if their child has all these high scores and yours doesn’t, it would be pretty much impossible not to notice. No matter how proud you are of your child, and how well you know the context of their achievements, these sorts of accidental comparisons can wound.

As I write this, I don’t know whether I’m practising some form of inverse educational snobbery. My experience of school was one of being branded a swot for working hard and gaining good marks – not attributes that improved one’s social standing. So perhaps the experience encouraged me to keep successes to myself. Or maybe it just highlighted to me, from a young age, that dangling achievements in people’s faces naturally upsets them.

It’s very unpleasant to inadvertently make others squirm, just by getting a higher mark or a better grade. Sometimes people make their feelings on the subject known, even if you haven’t flaunted anything, and I think, at times, I have probably been guilty of down-playing achievements out of embarrassment. This isn’t right either – surely we need some sort of non-braggy, non-hidey middle ground.

What it does tell me is that the child who has been bragged about on social media is at risk of alienation from their peers – anything that marks a child out as different can be (and often is) used against them. Their wellbeing is equally as important as the child who has not achieved highly and feels lesser because of it.

More to the point, knowing how divisive achievement can be, I have absolutely no idea what would motivate someone to provoke these difficult reactions in others on purpose.

Perhaps it’s just me, but the reward for doing well, is doing well. That’s it. No pats on the head or public bragging needed. I suspect I have my mum to thank for this – who, whilst all my friends were bribed with x amount of money for A’s, less for B’s etc., refused to give me any amount of money for any grades, because, in her words, “You should want to do it for yourself, not for money”. And as annoying as it is to admit it, I think she was right. The reward was the satisfaction of the achievement itself. I’m sure she’d add that it isn’t about the public glory either.

I’m wondering to myself now, whether when a young person works hard and does well, they should be able to shout it from the rooftops, whatever their circumstances, if they so wish. But then I know, that if it were me up on a roof, I’d collect the words ready to shout out, and at the last moment, I would stop myself, because I would be worried about how that shout-out might make others, who couldn’t make the same shout-out, feel. I don’t know if this is right or wrong. Do we want a generation of children hiding their light under a bushel? Do we want a generation of children shouting every attainment loud and proud? Or, more importantly, do we want a generation of young people who work hard, do their best and, crucially, care about those around them? It’s possible to work hard, achieve high, be appropriately proud of oneself yet not demean others with your successes. It is.

It just requires a bit of thought and consideration and not posting children’s reports on social media.

As a parent of two very different children, with reports at very different ends of the spectrum, I can honestly say that being on the receiving end of someone else’s less than humble report brag has always been unpleasant. However, when you are already worried about your child and already on it with the school and already accustomed to keeping your head down at pick-up and already concerned about the future, someone’s less than humble report brag is akin to them pouring a whole bag of salt into your already open wound. No thank you. A little more consideration for others would be marvellous.

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High School Visits

It’s very hard to believe the time has come for me to be thinking about this but now that Big Bear is in Year 5, apparently it has. The deadline for completing the high school preferences form is early in the autumn term of year 6 so most high schools recommend you look around in year 5. So despite the fact that Big Bear is only 9 years and 1 month old, we have visited two local high schools this week. It has been enlightening to say the least.

I have had many chats with other parents in similar positions and have asked them their thoughts. A common theme has featured in the conversations: parents are keen on discipline in high schools and look for those where lessons will not be disrupted by the behaviour of others. They want a strong focus on academics and opportunities for extra-curricular activity. Apparently performance in GCSEs is also important.

When I think about my own education, there was a strong focus on academics. We sat exams twice a year, every year from year 7 onwards. Exam results were impressive, ranking well in comparison to the rest of the country. I was a diligent student and placed a high level of pressure on myself to achieve. My academic performance was important to me and I set exacting standards for myself.

Why then, when other parents were describing the education they wanted for their child, an education not dissimilar to my own, did I feel a sense of discomfort and dissonance? What was it exactly that I wanted from a school for my boys, if it wasn’t that?

We visited the first school. I’ll call it School A. I tried to assess it objectively – what did I like about it? What didn’t I like? I liked the building. It was clean and fresh. It had good facilities. The staff were friendly. We wandered around and there wasn’t anything especially wrong or right about it. It seemed fine but I had no idea at all how we were supposed to make a decision. Big Bear didn’t look too comfortable though. He looked like a rabbit in headlights. Observing his reaction was important because it would be him going there every day, not me.

The Head was doing a presentation in the Hall so we went to listen to that. She began by saying, “We are not an exam factory. That is not what we are about.” She went on to describe a very well-structured and comprehensive pastoral care system. “If children don’t feel safe in this school and they don’t feel valued and they don’t feel loved, we know they won’t be able to learn,” she said. She went on to talk about the importance of building self-esteem and giving children a belief that they can achieve. She talked about personalised learning journeys and matching support to need. She spoke passionately, saying that when these fundamental things are in place, the academics will naturally take care of themselves.

Feeling a little tearful, I had a mini-revelation. I looked between Big Bear sitting beside me, pale with anxiety, and the Head extolling the virtues of pastoral support and I thought: I have two very different children and one school may not meet both of their needs. School A didn’t seem a good fit for Big Bear, but it was hard to imagine anywhere better for Little Bear.

We should keep an open mind but now it would be really interesting to see what School B was like. We went there this evening and the first thing we did was listen to the Head speaking. We had been given an information pack on arrival. We flicked through it while we waited for the speech and noted there was a leaflet about how they extend learning for those who are gifted and talented. I asked Grizzly to pass me the one about SEN. He couldn’t because there wasn’t one.

The Head began to speak and her first point was around their outstanding exam results. She talked about how they always strive for more and push students to the next hurdle where they can. She talked of twice yearly exams and practice interviews and preparing for future careers. She talked about setting aspirational targets and achieving them. I knew I was supposed to be impressed. I sat amongst a sea of other parents who were no doubt impressed and keen for their child to be a part of this educational wonderland.

I know I was once a part of this academically focussed world and I suppose it has done me well. But I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with what I now often find to be academic snobbery. Yes, it is great if you are gifted with intelligence and you work hard and you go on to achieve fabulous grades. But what if you are not? What if, through no fault of your own, you have been dealt a different hand? What if you have various life-induced hurdles putting blocks in your academic path? What about you? How do you fit into this daunting and challenging world?

I found out how you fit. You don’t.

The Head at School B said this: “I will not tolerate anybody disrupting lessons. Stealing other student’s learning time is selfish. It is selfish and it will not be tolerated here.” At this point, Grizzly and I exchanged a look. The look said, “There is not a chance on God’s green earth that we will be sending Little Bear here.” People like discipline, they do. I like discipline when it is about clear boundaries and predictability. Other people like discipline when it prevents their child’s learning getting disrupted by another child. The problem is everything feels very different when the child doing the disrupting is yours.

Little Bear would never purposefully disrupt a lesson. He would never disrupt a lesson for the pure reason of being selfish. But he might disrupt a lesson and yes, he might disrupt your child’s learning. By saying he, or anyone else who might find school difficult, disrupts lessons selfishly and then sending them to the ‘internal exclusion zone’ places the blame squarely on the child. It assuages the adults of having had anything to do with it and it suggests there is no reason to consider why the child behaved like that. They were selfish. That’s why they did it.

In reality, Little Bear would disrupt a lesson because he was dysregulated, anxious or overwhelmed. That being the case, I don’t want him to be punished by being sent to sit alone somewhere. I don’t see how that would help him or how it would make something different happen next time. If anything it would increase his anxiety or frustration and increase the likelihood of future disruption. I am not suggesting that all children are angels or that they shouldn’t be taught to take responsibility for their actions. Of course they need to learn to self-regulate and to behave appropriately but with the best will in the world, not all children can, all of the time and I don’t see how its fair or appropriate to punish them when they lose control. When it is your child who struggles with behavioural and emotional regulation, you feel very differently about behaviour policies. You also feel pretty uncomfortable when other parents tell you how important it is to them that their child’s lessons are not disrupted by ‘bad behaviour’.

As things stand, with Little Bear’s needs as they currently are, we couldn’t consider sending him to School B. I don’t think he would be able to reach his potential there because he might not feel safe and there’s a good chance he wouldn’t feel loved. Big Bear, however, was visibly happier there. He felt safe, comfortable and interested. He will cope with the academic focus. There is very little chance of him disrupting lessons or ending up in the exclusion zone. Ironically, he would cope much better if he didn’t witness disruptive behaviour, a point which ties me in complex emotional knots. We can imagine him at the school and I’m sure he would thrive. This time it is about Big Bear and we all think the right school for him is School B.

It is another 4 years until we have to make a proper decision about Little Bear. His needs could change immeasurably in that time (as they already have done over the past three) and maybe School B could be right for him by then. But maybe it won’t be. Perhaps School A’s ethos and sporting opportunities and tailored curriculum would suit him much better. It doesn’t matter because I have two very different boys, each with their own set of strengths and challenges and now I know what I want from their high school education. I want them to be happy there. I want them to have access to teaching and pastoral support that meets their individual needs. I want them to be supported to reach their full potential because I know they can both achieve great things. I’m not really interested in those achievements being measured in terms of letters or numbers but in terms of working their hardest, doing their best and being satisfied with their own efforts. I want them to enjoy learning. I want them both to gain a sense of self-belief that will allow them to go on to further education or employment. I want them to be proud of themselves.

If that involves sending my children to two different high schools, so be it. But I certainly won’t allow Little Bear to be blamed for having the needs he has. He didn’t ask for his start in life and it isn’t his fault it has impacted him. If a school can’t understand this, he won’t be gracing their corridors.

 

 

 

 

Reports

It is school report time here at Bear HQ and once again it has got me all reflective. This time last year in Achievement I wrote about how standardised assessments and age-related expectations are not going to be the right way to measure Little Bear’s achievements.

Back at the start of his time in Reception class I had a bit of a wobble about how much was expected of him and how unrealistic it would be to ask him to meet those expectations by the end of the academic year (you can read about that in Little Bear Starts School). The expectations that are in place do not take into account a neglectful first several years of a child’s life or the significantly lower starting point that they are beginning from. After all, it would be impossible to expect a child to go from not being able to count to knowing all their number bonds to 20 in one year; or expecting a child who cannot write their name when they start school to be writing little narratives by the end of term. You wouldn’t expect a child with significant speech processing difficulties to be able to read fluently in one year or a child who is extremely resistant to adult direction to be fully compliant every day.

We did not expect Little Bear to meet the expectations as it was an impossible ask. I am not surprised therefore that he hasn’t met them. However, it would seem that I do have a little bit of an issue with the way the information has been shared.

The Bear’s school have switched to new-fan-dangled online reports. I understand why: OFSTED must love it and it must be much more time-efficient for teachers. However, call me old-fashioned, but I would much prefer an actual piece of paper (you can’t even easily print our ones out to keep for future posterity). There are lots of tabs along the top and you have to click on each to get different information.

The very first tab is a summary of where your child is at compared to expectations. On the left there is a scale with the following descriptors: well above expected, above expected, at expected level, below expected and well below expected. The core subjects are along the bottom and your child’s level is shown through coloured traffic lights. For Little Bear that means a row of red lights across the ‘below expected level’ line. They may as well flash and sound an alarm alerting you to your child’s lack of achievement.

Grizzly and I had a chat about this and he thinks I’m being oversensitive. He thinks it makes perfect statistical sense to do it this way otherwise what are you comparing your child to? My issue is that I don’t understand the point of comparing him to targets which we have already established to be unobtainable. Surely that is setting him up to fail? What I would like to see is a comparison between where he was at when he started the year and where he is at now. I don’t care where he is at compared to average Joe Blogs, that information won’t make any of us feel good. I understand that what I’m asking for is probably a complete data nightmare but in theory it would be a much more positive report because it would show the massive progress that he HAS made not what he hasn’t.

I asked Grizzly how he would feel if Little Bear were scoring right across the “well below expected range” or how he would feel if every report we ever get for Little Bear shows him to be in this “below expected” range. He’s much more pragmatic about these things than me and said well if that is where he’s at it’s where he’s at. Which is of course completely true but I can’t help feeling that this way of displaying data makes getting a report for a child with any level of additional needs a fairly negative experience. It certainly felt different to opening Big Bears and seeing his neat row of green lights.

The rest of the tabs offend me less. There is one with the teacher’s comment, one about behaviour and ones where you can see a list of targets your child is working on and which descriptors they have already met. I do find it a bit odd that the focus is on Maths and English and little else. What if your child excels at PE? Or Art? Or Music? There isn’t anywhere in either boy’s report where that can be reflected which could potentially add to the negativity for a child like Little Bear who struggles most with the core subjects.

Anyway, having come back to look at the reports again, I can see that maybe my opinion of Little Bear’s as a whole has been tainted by the red lights. The comments from his teacher are lovely and do mention “superb progress” and that he “has worked extremely hard”. It says he is polite and respectful to grown-ups but his attitude to his peers “needs to improve”. It says that he is happy and settled but that he does test boundaries and is still learning to remain focussed.

All of the above is true but what it doesn’t really reflect is just how spectacularly wrong this year could have gone and in comparison how fabulously he has done. That version might go something like this:

Although Little Bear does not always listen and sometimes hits his friends, he has had less than 20 red cards, he has not been sent to the Headmaster and has avoided getting himself excluded, all of which were real possibilities in September. The fact that he is described as being polite and well-mannered is nothing short of an actual miracle. He could easily have bitten/ scratched/ kicked or thrown something or told his teacher how stupid she is each and every day of term time. The control and self-restraint he has developed is fantastic.

On beginning school Little Bear could not count to 4 for the love of God and we were driving ourselves mad chanting the numbers over and over. He can now count easily to 10, forwards and backwards and is just a tiny bit more practise away from making it to 20. He can recognise all the number shapes to about 13 and is managing some very basic adding and taking away.

In September Little Bear was pretty much unintelligible to people outside of the family. He could just about recognise his name written down but couldn’t recognise any other words. He knew maybe 5 letter shapes. He couldn’t tell you if words rhymed or what sound they began with. He most definitely couldn’t blend sounds together. Now, he recognises all the letter shapes, which he learned surprisingly quickly. After a lot of hard work and perseverance he has mastered blending which is no mean feat and can read at a basic level. He has even gone up one reading level on to Red books which he is extremely proud of. Considering the fact that Little Bear was attending a Special Needs nursery before he moved here and the likelihood of literacy in his future was slim to none, his progress has been phenomenal.

At the start of term Little Bear could hold his pen well and could scribble but his pictures didn’t look like people and he couldn’t write at all. He can now write his name and draw a picture of himself with most of the right body parts. He can form letters really well and can copy from a grown-ups model. He can make some attempts at independent writing.

Little Bear is happy and settled at school. He has learned all the routines. He loves show and tell and is now confident enough in his communication to stand up and talk in detail in front of the class. He has taken part in assemblies and school trips and has behaved appropriately.

The year could have been a complete disaster. Little Bear could have been like a fish out of water. His behaviour could have been out of control. He could have struggled with all the learning and not made any progress.

Instead, I feel he has achieved above and beyond any expectations we could have had for him. If there were a chart for progress, he would have a row of bright green lights in the “well above expectations” row. Instead the row of red lights he does have seems to figuratively piss all over his bonfire. I am not finding some of the other parents’ bragging about how advanced their children are particularly helpful either.

Anyway, I shall brush myself off, endeavour to develop a slightly thicker skin and focus on what I know really matters: Little Bear has had an extremely successful first year at school. We have secured the funding we need to build on his progress next year and I have no doubt he will continue to exceed the limited expectations his early life tried to saddle him with.

Achievement

This week Big Bear brought home his school report and SATS results and it has got me thinking about achievements: how do we measure them and what really matters anyway?

Big Bear has been well-stimulated since birth and has been fortunate in having a good start in life, unlike his brother, Little Bear, who has not. Big Bear has also been blessed with natural academic ability and despite being the youngest child in his class, has exceeded expectations in his year 2 SATS. I am extremely proud of him but it’s not because of the marks that he got.

It has taken a while for school to notice that Big Bear has these abilities. Naturally boisterous and with a fairly short attention span, his skills have been masked by his excitable behaviour. He has worked really hard this year to focus and to put all his efforts into tasks. Consequently he has found himself in the harder groups in class. His chronologically older peers seem to have been able to cope better with the expectations and pressures of being in these groups than he has. Although able to keep up with the work, I think Big Bear’s age shows in his immature resilience and sensitivity (though some of that is part of his personality). He takes criticism (even if intended in a constructive way) very personally and is easily wounded by it. In addition he is a reluctant, left-handed writer who constantly needs to improve his handwriting. Due to the issues with feeling criticism so keenly, constant comments about not being able to read his writing have not been received well.

Yet, despite all this, Big Bear has recently found within himself the desire to do his best and has tried really hard. He has finally achieved his potential and that is what I am proud of.

When I read his report however, the SATS results were nice (because they represented all of the above) but they were not the bit that made me well-up with pride. That was the bit which said he is a very kind and caring member of the class and is always the first to comfort others when they are upset. Now that IS an achievement: being a truly lovely human being. That is something which cannot be measured by standardised tests but which is so important in leading a happy and fulfilled life.

I would take loveliness over SATS results every time.

However, it would be wrong of me to suggest that academic achievements don’t matter because realistically they do. After all, exams/ grades/ certificates are the currency we trade in to get gainful employment as adults. Without them, options are limited. It is probably this thought that surfaces in my subconscious whenever I get an update on Big Bear’s educational progress and a few minutes later am hit by a semi-panic: how on earth will Little Bear cope at this juncture in 3 years’ time?

It is true, 3 years is a long time away and no doubt Little Bear will have made tons more progress by then, but as he still cannot count reliably to 3, will he really be able to do multiplication and division by then? Will it be realistic to expect him to identify a noun phrase or an adverb when he finds language processing and formulation so difficult at the moment?

Who knows? But I’m pretty sure that SATS are not going to be the right way to measure Little Bear’s achievements.

As far as I’m concerned, Little Bear is achieving every day. It is an achievement for him whenever he complies with an adult request, thereby ignoring his own agenda. It is an achievement if he can do it without growling or commenting or hitting. It is an achievement every time he learns a new word, makes a longer sentence or expresses a new concept. And, like his bigger brother, Little Bear tries really hard.

Living with Speech and Language Difficulties is really tiring because every interaction is fraught with challenge. What does that person mean? Can I make sense of it? How do I express my complex thoughts on the matter when I don’t have half of the words I need?

Faced with these challenges day in day out it would be easy to give up. But Little Bear doesn’t. In fact, he is now very chatty and will persevere over and over sometimes if I can’t quite work out what he means. Or he will think of another way to make me understand – a gesture or by getting an object.

Overcoming a communication difficulty is quite an achievement, but not the kind SATS can measure.

Also, like his bigger brother, Little Bear has a very kind side to him and can be very considerate and thoughtful.

A big part of the reason I was happy with Big Bear’s report was because he had tried hard to reach his potential. I don’t really know what Little Bear’s potential is, his development having become delayed through neglect, not by any innate cognitive difficulties. I do know that whatever he achieves academically will be despite this. He is showing some real early promise for practical tasks such as mending and figuring out how things work. He seems to instinctively know what to do with tools in a way that other children would not. He is also a good budding sportsman.

These achievements will not be measured by SATS.

I’m grateful that there are other options these days for young people – apprenticeships etc. where you CAN achieve using practical skills. However, from Big Bear’s experiences so far in the primary system, the curriculum at that stage seems focussed on Literacy and Numeracy and I’m not sure how many opportunities there are to achieve in different ways.

Whatever Little Bear’s potential, I hope he is happy at school and able to thrive there. I will be extremely proud of every achievement, no matter how big or small, as I am with Big Bear.

If I measure achievement by the parameters that I value – hard work, trying your best, being kind and considerate towards others – then both bears are already high-achievers in my book.