Motherload

This week my daughter sat an 11+ exam for a grammar school in our area. We stood outside at 7am, in the biting September cold. No one spoke to anyone else. Everyone clutched their daughters. We had got up at 5.30am. The staff called out, "All right, we're going to take your girls in now". Their voices took me, in a heartbeat, to the moment late in the night after I had given birth to my daughter, when a nurse told me, "All right, we're going to take her away and give her formula". I wanted to push her aside, run into the hall and take the damn test myself. You know it has to happen, you've got this far, and you know/pray/hope she's going to be OK, but you are being left behind, and others are going to have possession of your vulnerable child. Who knows what they are going to do to her? My husband was away while it happened, and, in his panic, ended up shouting at me that I hadn't prepared her enough. Three hours later, she came out smili...

Radio 4 Woman's Hour was getting all steamed up this morning about the social rights and wrongs of tutoring children during the school holidays. "Socially divisive", "giving the posh kids an extra leg up they don't need", "impossible demands placed on young shoulders", etc etc. According to some amongst us, children turn into vegetables during those precious few weeks of summer, and need to be kept nose to grindstone lest they forget how to spell, punctuate, do times tables and stand still in the lunch queue. I've been tutoring children and young people from 11 to 18 years old for the past few years, and it's completely changed my views on what tutoring actually is . In the summer holidays, most of my tutees stop, unless they are preparing for a selective entrance exam that's going to come up early in the next academic year. These poor souls have to keep going, yes. I find it next to impossible to force my own poor children to d...