Parents' Forum

Parents’ Forum discussion on bullying 15/10/2009

Last night the Institute of Ideas Parents’ forum discussed bullying. As usual the discussion covered many things, and as always was able to really understand some of the nuances that the issue throws up.

I am just going to look at a one of the interesting threads that came up-what is happening in the school playground. One of the points that was raised was that there seems to be an expectation for children to behave in a better way than we expect from adults. At one of the member’s child’s school the policy was to make the playground “pain-free”. How this translated itself into practice was that the children are now divided into friendship groups imposed by the teacher, and they have to play in these friendship groups at playtime.

A primary school teacher described how now children have no room to be on their own, or do their own thing. The dinner ladies now are trained to be playtime mentors; the Year 5 and Year 6 children are asked to be learning mentors of younger children in the playground and they are sorted into friendship groups. Children are being constantly watched, monitored and closely supervised in what used to be their free playground time.

There does appear to be a real fear of letting children have space to be themselves, of children being out of control if not constantly marshalled, and a belief that children can’t sort things out for themselves and adults shouldn’t let them.

However, as one of the group said, no matter how much adults intervene, children will find ways of circumventing this. If forced to play fairies in a “friendship group” the children will designate the child they don’t like as the wicked witch!

(Republished from Spiked, Wednesday 30 September 2009)

Under Brown, New Labour’s obsession with acting in loco parentis for teens has expanded to older parents, too.

Hearing Gordon Brown’s pronouncements on teenage parents from the podium at the Labour Party conference yesterday reminded me of the much ridiculed Peter Lilley, Tory minister for social security in 1992. Readers may remember that Lilley delivered, via an excruciating Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche, a party conference speech promising to ‘root out… young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list’. The subtle differences between Brown’s and Lilley’s approaches tell us much about where the New Labour project has ended up.

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There’s a great feature by Marianne Kavanagh in today’s Daily Telegraph. She really gets the point that there’s something very new about the obsession with parenting today. Though I think the idea that people have had enough and policy-makers will get bored and moved on is a bit of wishful thinking – particularly given Brown’s speech this week!