The School Report

When I was five years old, my junior infant’s teacher Ms Poole attached an extensive letter to my end of year report. It was a whole essay actually, all about how, in her opinion, at five, I was lacking in emotional maturity, and needed more attention, love and care at home. It was 1980. My mother was a single parent to three girls, in itself a rare and freakish state in Ireland at the time. According to the Catholic Church, of whom about 96 per cent of the population was a practising member of, we were already pretty much a lost cause, outliers in the puritanical norm. To add to this my mother was parent-shamed by one of the few people who should have had her back.

You might not get away with such a personal attack now, but even without a minor thesis on the functionality or lack thereof of your child, I am always reminded of it at this time of year as school reports land in our laps again.

Of how ultimately they are never just an appraisal of your child, but really one big judgement on your success or failings as a parent delivered cold with practically no nuance or shade at a time when there is little you can do about any issues raised anyway.

And with it comes a hefty ability to tap into all those feelings of not measuring up or fitting in that you may have had in school too.

Admittedly, this is not necessarily a helpful reaction. Over-identifying isn’t going to do you, or your child, any favours. If you were something of a dreamer, and your teacher tells you that your child struggles to concentrate, you immediately feel you’ve given them some kind of impediment for life. But reading it from an older, forty-something perspective, I’m wondering, why it’s always on them.

Maybe your child’s mind is wandering because their teacher is boring? Either way, the truth is that while schooling has mostly moved on from the 1980s – no more corporal punishment, and singular religious teaching – it still hasn’t caught up with the real world in terms of how assessment is not just a one-way street, delivered down without discussion or gameplan.

The process of reporting is still deeply reductive. Nine months in any child’s life is immense, and it gets shrunk into a one-pager with some boxes they can fall into, or out of. A line or two may be offered in terms of comments, but given that there are whole websites dedicated to just how to give generic pat answers on end of year reports, there is no guarantee that is going to be constructive.

Bad timing

The timing is a disaster too. Just as kids are exiting the building for months you are given a list of all the things they can do better at, which quickly disappears down the crack in the sofa of summer, actually and/or metaphorically. If you transferred it to a more grown-up scenario, no appraisal in modern working dynamics would be given without tools to help you improve on the areas you are struggling. It is just no use telling parents what is going wrong, without helping them with how to also make it better. Or perhaps, even more helpfully, what plans the teacher, and school, have in terms of making it better.

But if, like me, you are trying not to feel like you’re coming up short all the time, I also recommend bearing in mind that great failures as laid out on headed school stationary have gone on to do the most magnificent things. John Lennon’s school report, for instance, said that he was ‘Certainly on the road to failure… hopeless’, or Einstein’s which declared, ‘He will never amount to anything’, or my personal favourite, Roald Dahl, whose teacher labelled him ‘A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel’. Some camel.

For my part, for some inexplicable reason, my mum kept that original letter attached to my first report in school, though I would have forgiven her for destroying it on sight. And years later, I found it. I read it again. For the life of me, I couldn’t recognise the child in those pages. Not at all. Maybe because I didn’t recall feeling that way, but also quite possibly because it wasn’t true. We all know as parents that we aren’t perfect. But neither are teachers. And though we may have been indoctrinated otherwise as children, they are not always right. This part of your child’s life is not definitive, not the whole story, and it can never be reduced to a page of boxes with four options and a one-liner.

Jessie Collins, June 2020.