The Huffington Post
Are school reports too nice? A headteacher once wrote in Dame Judi Dench’s school report: “Judi would be a very good pupil if she lived in this world.” Meanwhile, Sir Stephen Fry fared worse: “He has glaring faults and they have certainly glared at us this term.” And it seems this level of brutal honesty is sorely missed among some of those teachers penning today’s school reports. In an eye-opening r/TeachingUK post, one educator shared that “every year it quite annoys me how we aren’t allowed to just flat out tell the truth about a child in the report, everything has to be reworded as a positive as not to offend anyone”. “For example, the child in my Y4 class who throws chairs and calls me a stupid c*** every day is now being described as ‘working towards making more positive choices in the school day’,” they noted. “I remember getting my school report back (I was mostly a good kid) which explained how I spent most of the time chatting and not listening, and my mum went mad, best believe I sat and listened as to not get another report like that.” While they caveated that some school reports in the 1990s did go “a bit far”, the teacher suggested “everything has to be worded positively” in modern-day school reports. And many seemed to be in agreement. “Yeah it’s gone too far the other way,” said one commenter. “There’s a difference between saying a kid is rude and cruel vs saying they have been acting rude and cruel, and we should be able to say the latter.” Another chimed in: “It’s daft. I think there’s a lot of reasons honesty should be allowed in reports. One of them being that we are seeing many cases of undiagnosed SEN [special educational needs] such as ADHD, ASD etc where school reports can be a vital piece of info.” Some suggested that because reports used to be handwritten, teachers “got to be brief, and absolutely brutal”. “I’ve seen ones that boiled down to ‘John has no aptitude for science and should not continue’. That was it; no euphemisms, no niceties, just absolute honesty,” shared a teacher. “We were discussing today that we should be allowed to rank the child in parental discussions about behaviour. If that child is the number 1 problem in class you should absolutely be able to call them out on it and make it crystal clear to parents that their child is the worst; not this ‘well other kids in the class...’, ‘boys will be boys...’ excuse-making you get, the cold hard reality that your child is the worst kid in the class.” But there were a handful of respondents who disagreed that school reports decades ago were not so different to those of today. “Nah, I’ve read my old school reports from the 90s and they were full of the same old banalities that we use today,” said one educator. “There’s this false nostalgia for the days of honest school reports, whatever that means. The biggest difference between the reports I received as a child and the reports I write now as a teacher is that the former were handwritten! Can you imagine going back to that?” Another teacher said that there’s more contact between schools and parents nowadays, meaning serious issues are usually raised before report season, “whereas for some in the 90s, the report and parents evening were nearly the only contact they had with school”. They ended: “In my view, the long, detailed school report itself is a bit of an anachronism now because of this change in the home-school dynamic.” There’s been growing discontent with school reports for some time, both from teachers and parents. Back in 2015 , The Guardian reported how both parties were increasingly unhappy with “robotic” school reports. At the time, a deputy headteacher revealed in an op-ed how “many teachers no longer feel that they can tell parents what they really think about their children”. Related... Teens Are Falling Out Of Love With Reading. Teachers Share What They Think's Behind It 'Schools Alone Can't Achieve This': Teachers React To Phone Ban Warning 8 Truly Wild Pieces Of Lore Kids Dropped On Unsuspecting Teachers
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