The worst education a parent can provide

One way I'm looking at our new landscape of education provision is with this question: Can any normal parent of a five-year old offer a worse education than the one coming up on offer?

The Tory government is continuing their project not only to dismantle the state education system, they're also on a project to support privatised supply of educational materials - particularly materials standardised for nationally regulated and globally marketable tests and exams.

Individual creativity? What? Include here independent thought, critical thinking, the questions that begin with WHY? and the bonkers la-la-la of a child's wonderful reasoning - the sort of la-la-la your five-year old lives with, that starts you in rational pursuit of a penguin and ends the day by pouring custard powder in the bath to find out what happens. (Um, lumpy custard doesn't come with a PISA score.)

Basically, the only place you can pursue creativity of thinking is outside the classroom. You can't follow whimsical, thoughtful, creative, bizarre, wonderful curiosity stuff in school, and certainly not in the new generation of schools.

The schools coming up have economy as their alpha-to-omega driver. To know that, we only have to look at the source of the government's recent announcement - that all schools must become academies - which came not from the Department of Education, but from our Minister of Economics, Chancellor Osborne. It's not an educational underpinning we have here. It's an economic one.

The new schools will be geared into an international education marketplace, with suppliers who need to turn state cash into a profitable return. For their benefit, education needs to be engineered to make money. So we get a new wave of machine-readable tests. It's easier (and cheaper) to print out worksheets for your five-year old on naming parts of grammar. Tell the parents it's all about standards, and Tinkertop will never get a good job unless she knows parts of grammar because that's what five-year old kids learn in China. Co-incidentally, use the ensuring (poor) exam results to put staff on a performance-related pay scale, screw down wages for classroom squaddies, and increase the salary for the effective business leaders of tomorrow! Er, who gives a damn about the education of your five-year old?!

When a parent educates, they take their kids to the garden, the park, the woods; they make cakes, play with custard and cornflour, and get out the paints and playdoh. They meet other like-minded parents in community halls, at museum workshops, down the library, in kiddy art, dance, sports, music and drama groups, and for a tour round town. No-one thinks of providing a test on the naming of parts because it doesn't make up a day of jumping about in the joy of being alive for your average five-year old. For them, an efficient and effective education is the freedom to explore, laugh, learn, love.

Now which education would you call the worse one? *

* Mind you, to get the unworst education, we gave up the second salary, the second car, the automatic dishwasher and the packaged holidays. We never replaced the TV set, we ran a diesel-powered van into the ground, equipped the house via freecycle and we made the charity shop our preferred clothing supplier. And I accept, a lifestyle change might be a step too far.

Cambridge Classics

To Cambridge. While me and Dig are busy, Squirrel spends the hours looking for The Museum of Classical Archaeology (aka the plastercast museum, which she can find here).

I recommend it. We toured before. But even though Squirrel couldn't find the entrance, and trudged back to meet us at the car, it has set me thinking. Cambridge has many lovely features, does it not? It would be a useful point to stop over. En route to beautiful Suffolk and an annual Red Rose Chain theatre, we could take in the Early Music and the Shakespeare Festival, and I could fantasise that we could afford tickets for Cambridge Folk!

I think I might entice one of my children - possibly the Latin-noddled one - to consider a career in Classics, for which Clare College Cambridge has a ring to it.

Dig says it is one of the worst ideas he has ever heard, and if any of our offspring get wind of it, the earth will implode. Nevertheless, let's go forward with all good heart! I have a few years to try it out! Look, already I did the research! Next, that time-honoured home-ed technique I have used: a spot of strewing.*

* The earth is probably safe. My strewing has never worked yet.

'Even failure can be a form of success'

Yes, I find myself saying this, and other positive statements of world worth, after Yesterday.

Because we can now tick another Experience Box. Exams. Tiger and Squirrel sat the first part of an IGCSE Chemistry exam, and Shark blew up her IGCSE Geography, scattering corpses in her wake.

Strictly speaking, Squirrel did not actually, knowingly, sit her exam. I drove her to a sports hall in a school that looked like a Corporate Headquarters, maybe Corporate Admin Supplies Ltd, and I deposited her into the indifferent care of an invigilator while Squirrel's face bore a puzzled look of Exam? What is that? Am I sitting an exam? But how? I am standing up! And what is this thing, exam?

But Squirrel has a winning way of looking simultaneously charming / deluded / off-her-face / bewildered / dream-filled / hapless - all achieved while smiling, so you forgive her all, and I hope the invigilator put a pen on her desk, and I also hope Squirrel picked it up sometime while the clock did that turny-hand-thing.

Tiger, well, she surprised us all. I thought at the mention of the word exam - in fact any word that begins with the letter e and possibly has an e in it - that this would provoke the most enormous, wallpaper-chewing meltdown, where the family barricaded ourselves quivering in the cellar, calling the helicopter police to tasar her on the rampage.

Astonishingly, Tiger determined the letter A should follow the word exam and she's gone for it, having spent the last 28,000 hours with her face stuck in 450 Chemistry books. I wish her well.

Shark? What can I say, except it could be a race to last place.

We had an almighty fight about the IGCSE Geography last month - a fallen angels and rising devils sort of argument - which helped not. Shark since then spurned my generous advice about diagrams and how to hold a ruler over a river. Then, while a misplaced sense of confidence settled into Shark's exam preparation (whatever form that took), the bastards changed the exam specification, probably while I was sulkily staring into a notebook for cuddles and consolation. The upshot was, Shark had to approach the experience with the heroic daring of an Eddie-the-Eagle style assault. I expect she can resit, sometime after she has actually read the chapter on rivers.

Then yes, failure is a form of success, because it is not a failure to experience. Experience is only ever, success.

'The degree is doomed'

I've been saying to Shark, Tiger and Squirrel for a while that - all things considered - I'm not expecting la famille Grit to come busting out from home education at age 16 with your conventional 10 A* GCSE exam set (x3).

Frankly, the rate I'm going, we'll be lucky if we manage one IGCSE grade between the lot of us. Not because my kid brains aint brite, but I am having awful difficulty finding a local exam centre.

Then half of me thinks, feck it, why don't we give up on the IGCSE exam route; I could direct the kids straight to A levels at college and see if we can by-pass the conventional curriculums. Let's continue picking through the subjects our way - fish; more fish; looking at rocks; reading; drawing horses; stitching orange peel together; talking about the world; walking in woods; music in the year 1445. Some good will come out of this eclectic set, no mistake.

Of course this strategy of going straight to A levels to some extent depends on how open-minded and forward thinking is our local college.

But I can reassure them. We can all watch the educational world changing right now as we live it.

For a start there are the online MOOCs, and if you are not taking one of these, you should. Know the educational landscape. Accreditation is a step away, requiring a remote admin structure to monitor a student; an additional step of submitted work; a procedure to confirm an identity; and your credit card.

Then study a range of MOOCs lasting three years or more, and potentially you have a degree, taken online, sourced from a dozen universities, all accredited: a portfolio higher education, chosen to match your existing expertise, professional experiences, amateur interests, practical skills.

So why follow that conventional slave route of 10 GCSEs, 4 A levels, and one very expensive degree culminating in 30,000 pounds of debt? It's a well-travelled road that makes less and less sense.

Which is why, as Shark, Squirrel and Tiger start to sign up for their 2014 MOOC programme, half of my brain is saying, this is so much more of an interesting, updated, individual-friendly way to study. These wonderfully open-ended courses require individual thinking and all of your study skills - the how-to-study approaches we use as ordinary out-of-schoolies - and why am I opening up an IGCSE text book with its implication that there is one way to do things and one right answer only?

Obviously I am not the only person scanning this future scenario. If you're interested in education, then go and have a gander at a blog in the Harvard Business Review.

Geography lesson? Looks like poker

But Poker-Geography wins cake.

Find your local STEM

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. We attend the Christmas set at the OU today. Honestly, these lectures can be audience aware, age-appropriate, and as a home educator you get to think, thank goodness someone is standing up talking about techie stuff they know.

And the paper-based evidence

Yes, education of your recognisable variety goes on.

Thus be assured, ye maiden chained to the Local Council Drone Desk. We home educating clans do stuff other than lolling about, reading books, complaining about schools today, swotting up on Latin because we're all terrified of the fortnightly Latin teacher, and going squishy-eyed at cute baby seals. We have Geography sessions!

Admittedly, they involve cake, somehow, but they also necessitate maps and tribal warfare team games.

See, sorted. Now don't look to count them as neets, thanks.

Quiet day list

I feel some sort of checklist is in order. Admittedly because another day passes when I haven't got a clue what is happening (gone notebooking) and I feel a list may help me deal with my control issues.

Shark. Has seriously fallen behind her sisters in Chemistry assignments posted weekly to Sam. If I ask her if she has any pages to post for Chemistry or Physics, she gives me a fixed stare and says in a firm voice that she is doing it. I am not sure what doing it means when it looks like reading a book on the sofa, but I console myself with the knowledge that Shark is one force of nature who will do what is necessary to get where she wants to go, in her own time and her own way. No threats, nor hufty-pufty parenty pressure will have any impact on her. Her handwriting is, however, appalling, and I am giving her merry hell for it.

Squirrel. Behaving oddly, so everything is normal. She has become inscrutably teenagery of late, shrugging indifferently at me and hanging out mostly in the cellar, having taken up residence with her computer in a pair of old cane chairs that I strapped together in the woeful hope that from this act would emerge some sort of chaise longue. At the time, I rather fancied bringing a touch of eighteenth century aristocratic glamour to my interior design. In the cold light of day, it looks like someone strapped a couple of old cane chairs together in the cellar and a Squirrel sat in them. Anyway, she is quiet and producing the filled in Latin worksheets, so I'm not disturbing her.

Tiger. Gloating, with a vengeance. She is up to date on Chemistry, Latin, Geography, Horse Knowledge, and Goading her sisters, and has enthusiastically begun making a model of a 4-foot horse from willow withies, wire, clingfilm, tissue paper and an electronic circuit so that it glows. It must have articulating legs and a tail apparently, or the whole thing is rubbish. She has worked hard on the knees (do horses have knees?) and shows me the tail proudly. I say nothing except It is very good etc etc etc. I know better than to confront her about anything. She shares this characteristic with her sisters: a quiet determination to pursue some inner driving need, for which they have taught me, better not thwart it.

The promise of art leads me to penury

Take Tiger to join a London-based home ed art group.

These particular creatives (organised, dedicated, 100% focused - if you see them working their way round the V&A, do not approach or attempt to distract them from great arty purpose), are to be found this month in the bowels of the British Museum, holding to ransom a Japanese woodblock expert for four hours, extracting from her all knowledge of Japanese woodblock printing techniques until she squeals*.

They are proper wrong 'uns, this home ed art lot.

They are leading me into bad, bad ways, I can tell you that. Within a couple of hours of Tiger finishing printing her Japanese bird I am come over all Amaazzing ooh ooh oh! Look at that birch plywood! then I'm off over here ogling Japanese Vinyl and Hosho Pads, feeling an urgent need for a 'Fancy Leather Dabber Shiny', and totting up an order for a stack of wood and some carvers.

Expect another art route to ruin.

*Workshop availability probably tied into the British Museum's present exhibition, Shunga: Japanese Art, which, no, I am not taking the gritlets to see. I couldn't face the lengthy explanations of what he is doing with that stork.

The problem with seasides

Is the car filled with stolen beach that we then must proudly display on every surface in every room until the Hippie Mama has a big squeal on finding the egg cases floating in my sandwich box balanced on the toilet lid.

I am not to touch them, apparently. And neither should I think for one second about moving the dried out salty ones waiting to be examined and now resting on my antique carriage box in the hallway.

Coastal engineering

Let's call it that, yes, let's call this day A Study of Coastal Engineering (hard or soft) for a Geography IGCSE curriculum.

Otherwise, the day might look suspiciously like enjoying a walk along part of England's south coast path, exploring mud, playing in Lyme Regis, adding to Shark's seaweed collection, and picking apart the beach at Charmouth to find pyritised ammonites. And that doesn't sound like a Geography syllabus at all, at all.

No photos, and very little blog

It is true, I am being overtaken by life. Events need to go unrecorded otherwise I might remember them.

Instead, here's education, which is, ultimately, the point of diary-blogging. So I can imperiously refer the LA if/when they ask, What I am doing with this home-school malarky?

Apart from stubbornly calling it all home education, this is what my offspring are doing:

Shark: flipping a string of blue beads about the kitchen for two hours, possibly in the vague hope this might be interpreted as Physics. Meanwhile, I go on and on and on and on about doing some proper physics which surely must mean, at some point, writing words down? Voice in head says I should be overcome by remorse at this unreasonable request on my daughter. Life should be about ... oh I don't know, not conforming to an ideological construct in which we seek external validation by examination, or summat. Other voice says, Just get the sodding assignment done Shark, before I explode. Otherwise she is sub-aqua once a week. And that is what I can do, once a week; I don't tell her about the weekend dives because frankly, to get her to a quarry in Northamptonshire at 8am on a Saturday morning would hospitalise me.

Squirrel: inscrutable, as always. I hope there is a career in flattening out tree bark, salting apple peel, or stitching dried orange rind. Maybe there is a living to be had in rolling berries in melted candle wax. But as she is meeting the Chemistry deadlines, I am leaving her to it. Otherwise, horse-riding once a month.

Tiger: becoming a surprising scholar. This is the dd I had down for a career in psychotherapy or staffing a helpline for social phobics, but she is doing a remarkable turn as a Latin scholar. She always, without fail, produces the Latin homework on time, with extra. Perhaps she is terrified of our Latin teacher, Lingua Latina with the Menacing Stare. I know I am. Similarly, horse. Once a month.

There. Oh yes, and they went swimming today with an out-of-town chum.

Fly-by Ashridge

Double-quick march round Ashridge, woodland estate that holds deer and my complete phobia about getting lost (again). But I have to do this walk, even at the speed of a 747. I have begun to panic that with the many duties and responsibilities I am now misguidedly shouldering, I may miss footling about in autumn altogether.

(In case anyone suspects home ed vandalism on the mushroom, it had already been uprooted.)

Pride and Prejudice

We are very much socially improving! We are to begin a marathon session of the BBC's 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice!

I confess. I do not know whether I am looking forward to it or not.

I become emotionally affected by romance plots which is awkward for all concerned. I must discreetly put my fingers over my eyes at the kiss.

But it is a necessary Austen to know, by any means, is it not? And I have young ladies to consider. One day I will set them free in the world of English-shires culture, bound for middle-class dinner parties, and I would hate for them to miss out on what constitutes canon England.

Anyway, now I have writ it on our scholarly kitchen timetable. It is there as P&P so I cannot get out of it. Although by referring to it as Postage and Packing I am making a good start. I could tell the children that it means we all stand in the Post Office queue today and tomorrow waiting to be served.

But worse than my feeble deception would be that we have agreed to go round to someone else's house to watch it, and I cannot betray them now. They might hurt me if I go all Little Weed at the last moment and claim we have to stand in the PO queue.

The reason, by the way, that we have to see it at their house is simple. Their TV is miles better than ours.

Theirs.

Like a cinema screen with lights and sound and popcorn.

Ours.

Sorry. I forgot to push back the rood screen which hides the tellybox bought in 1895 and is in the corner where it is handy to shove all the junk including, on occasions, one of a selection of non-working vacuum cleaners.

There! It is like watching a video at the local museum.

But P&P! You know the one, yes? With Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. He of the duck-pond shirt and she of the sidelong simper. I bet you saw it the first time round.

We are breaking the six-hour P&P down into two screenings, today and tomorrow, which means I shift our Film Family Fun Night because otherwise Coriolanus will be slap bang in the middle of Episodes 3 and 4. Then Shark, Squirrel and Tiger will misremember the plot of P&P and, at some future dinner party engagement - because let's face it, that's all I'm doing this for - they will ask awkward questions about what happened to the Roman general who comes in half-way through, slaughters everyone then Darcy throws himself in a lake and isn't that an odd book to write?

Now I have written all of the above, I think I am quite looking forward to the opportunity to improve our sense and sensibilities of English culture in the country shires. It is 30 years since I read the book and, like most other middle-aged women of middle-England, I could grab a discreet eyeful of a bloke in a wet shirt holding a riding crop in a provocative way and I shall not complain, not at 3 in the afternoon, that much is certain.

Another trip to the orchard

Am thinking that I could easily find a career now as a gang master, rounding up those triplet labourers, paying them next to nothing, promising only to feed them, then locking them in the cellar.

Actually, sounds like just what happens now. Except that Squirrel puts herself in the cellar voluntarily.

It must be autumn

Squirrel is out for the weekend, with chum Monster and Monster's dad, at a dark site in Shropshire. Here a load of astronomers are gathering in a field, hoping for clear night skies to gaze up Pleiades' skirts and ogle at Jupiter's bouncy moons.

She has literally bounded out the house to join them. I need to record her enthusiasm on this; it proves to me how home ed happens for me more in hope than in expectation of reward. Perhaps, with events like dark site gazing, and amateur astro courses at Bedford, then one day she will get herself together enough to pick up the GCSE Astronomy she began (and I paid for).

Here - also in hope that a changing of the season into autumn brings happier health, brighter times, a better apple harvest than last year, along with berry bonanzas and fungi fancying - have pictures of the community orchard we visited this week.

While I'm on the subject of hope, let's also hope the dentist doesn't find out how much sugar I've put into Tiger's recipe for apple and ginger jam.

When's the release of Titus Andronicus II?

Took Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to the light-hearted romantic comedy that is Titus Andronicus.

Only joking!

Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's revenge-fuelled blood-and-gore fest. Entrails, severed limbs, bloodied heads, and piles of corpses. With rape. And the eating of one's offspring in a delicious pie.

I did pause before taking my 13-year old gritties jnrs to see this one, true, because I am a parent who feels a responsibility towards the delicacies of my children.

I don't want to give them any more ideas about murder, mayhem or pyrotechnics than they already have. But I also set myself this ridiculous challenge. To see every Shakespeare play before they finish statutory education to age 16*.

But Shakespeare helped, with the winning direction of Michael Fentiman, who finds the jokes, the absurdities, and the moments of now-I-am-laughing (even though I shouldn't).

I loved the intimacy of the Andronicus family seated round the breakfast table, half clad in jimmie jams and bringing to the dissection of the fly all the horrible foreboding of what is to come. I loved the pitch-perfect Andronicus in all his movements, tapping the silver bowl to bleed the boys, later dressed like a waitress so we can be disgusted but against ourselves laughing at the vengeful dish he's serving. I loved all of Aaron, who was so delightfully, wickedly, stage villain, yet touchingly a father.

In the final moment, we watched Andronicus Junior, silently upon the stage, menacingly hold both babe and pie slicer. He looked from one to the other, and so did we. Lifted from our genre of horror films where endings of unfinished business are always left hanging to begin the crowd-pulling sequel, I inevitably thought ahead to the start point of Titus Andronicus II when the junior is a full-grown general determined to complete the blood-grudge begun by some new casual cause.

Afterwards, out in the bright sunlight, I cautiously asked questions of Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, to check whether I had sent them mad, unhinged their heads, or dented their tender souls. I do not think so. Helping was the fact that all the actors stood up for afterwards while we applauded, and we toured the costume exhibition to discover how many laundry loads the running wardrobe team must do after the final dinner scene. (For cleaning of blood and pie: all dinner jackets plus 12 loads of industrial size washing; 6 baskets for hand-washing; 4 baskets of shoes.)

For now, I am glad we went, and I can only recommend it to other hardy teens and their parents. But if my delicate children at some point turn bonkers, we will all know the reason why.


*I have sadly missed the moments to grab tickets for either Tennant as Richard II or Hiddleston as Coriolanus, so if anyone has four tickets they would charitably like to donate to the gritty cause, please feel free.

Film Family Fun with madness on the blasted heath

Before I press play, mama says be grateful, because look, some families are worse than ours.

(But don't risk it, pushing me on that chemistry assignment date. I'll end up screaming naked in the rain, rolling about the local rec talking to your fluffy camel.)

Anyway. This week's Film Family Fun is the RSC production of King Lear with Ian McKellen. 

You can watch it here, if you have pressing deadlines or are trying to get out of making dinner. Call it an education round at Grit's.

On film, doing better than alright

I might be crap with maths but I am okay handling film (let's kindly call that Media Studies).

This week's Film Family Fun Night chez Grit is Laurence Olivier in Hamlet (1948).

Maybe that would do, but lo and behold, here's comes an unmissable upstage from the Independent Cinema outfit in the form of Aelita, Queen of Mars. This Russian sci-fi film (1924) is where Metropolis nods a thank you.

Obviously, there's a three-line whip to march the gritlings to Milton Keynes Gallery where, thanks to funding from MK Council and Arts and Heritage Alliance, Aelita is screened with live piano accompaniment.

I wasn't expecting to be so entertained (and educated) about Russian society in the early twentieth century. The narrative is fluent, the characters rounded and interesting, and there are jokes! From post revolutionary Russia! Better still, it set me off with discussions on Constructivism and Can you trust a Tsar? I'm counting that as an education even if I can't multiply 23 by 56 in my head.

Now if you are interested in film history/ twentieth century politics/ the Russian revolution, then turn down the lights, and enjoy a home screening.

Term start

See? Even I talk about terms, and I barely grasp what day it is. 

Our terms are mostly imposed by the Latin teacher who comes round once a fortnight to scare me witless with Cambridge Latin.

It's our first lesson post-holiday, and I was up until 11pm last night, revising.

I thought, if she suspects that I haven't maintained our declensions and conjugations, she will breathe in that terrifyingly withering way. It is a special technique all elderly Latin teachers have.

In other news, Squirrel attempts to teach two children aged under five how to play croquet.

For the very first time, I receive a bit of sympathy for 'what it must have been like', coaxing triplets round a National Trust property without being hung, drawn, and quartered by the custodians (who probably teach Latin in their spare time).