Clarissa Farr - The Making of Her - Why School Matters

For many children, the start of senior school is exciting. There might be apprehension at first, but the expectation of a new beginning soon takes over. There is so much to learn: new friends to make, new teachers to meet, new habits and traditions to learn about. All part of becoming a member of this new community. To promote the building of confidence, at St Paul’s we deliberately kept our forms or tutor groups small, around twelve (two joined together made a teaching group) so that it would be easier for the children to make friends quickly and get to know their pastoral or home-room tutor. As a London school with a scattered catchment area, we also grouped the children as much as possible by geography, so that you would be likely to find two or three girls in your group who lived reasonably close. Over the first few weeks, there would be careful attention paid to helping everyone settle in and make friends, including a much anticipated one-day visit to an outdoor activity centre, with team-building exercises and plenty of opportunity to get extremely wet and muddy, which the staff looked forward to nearly as much (or so they claimed afterwards …) By half term, most would feel completely at home in their new school.

It isn’t just the pupils who have to adapt, however. Their parents face challenges too. If you are a parent on the brink of seeing your child move to secondary school, you may well have conflicting emotions: excitement at the new opportunities opening up mixed with fear that you will suddenly feel redundant and pushed away. All those years of having fragile artwork and sticky cookery pressed into your hands at the school gates, of checking satchels for squashed letters about the next school trip or dress-up day, of hearing in detail what Miss Eyelash said about hedgehogs – all this is about to give way to a new, more grown-up experience for your child, and also for you. If for pupils it’s about fitting in, for mum and dad it’s about building trust in the school and letting go, especially when the children leave the normally smaller and cosier environment of their prep or primary school and, at age eleven, transfer to senior school. Parents wonder what their role will be, now that the children no longer seem eager to share every detail of their day, but look past the too-familiar face at the school gate to something or someone more interesting, answering the eager question ‘So what did you do today?’ with a shrug of the shoulders and that familiar adolescent brush-off: ‘Oh, stuff’.

For the leadership team at the school, carefully building a relationship not just with the new pupil but also with their parents is vital, for it’s the school which is the newcomer in this triangular relationship. Schools are used to doing the talking – to setting out the expectations – and this is important; but first, establishing the relationship with a family means being ready to listen and learn, demonstrating trust in and respect for parents’ knowledge and experience by encouraging them to share as much as possible about their child. Almost all parents secretly believe (some not so secretly) that their own children are the most wonderful young people in the world. I know mine are. Parents love any opportunity to talk about these remarkable individuals they have created and nurtured. What topic could possibly be of greater interest? A parent’s view of their child is at once the most informed and also the most subjective, so as new families joined St Paul’s, I would invite the parents to write me a letter about their daughter. Note this was to be a letter: the importance of the subject matter meant this was going to be something you would take time to think about, not a form to be filled in hurriedly or a dashed-off email (even though some would inevitably arrive electronically). I asked parents simply to tell me as much as they could about their daughter’s personality and interests, about the family and about any unusual experiences she might have had that it would be useful for us to know about. These might be special triumphs or achievements (many parents delighted in providing a long list of those) and equally, they might be difficult life events; it would all help us understand her better. Most parents appeared thoroughly to enjoy the process and put great thought into it: each new pupil came alive on the page in the voice of her mother or father: ‘We came to parenthood late and Hattie has continued to amaze and astonish us since the day she was born. She cannot wait to start senior school’, or ‘Lola has a very strong sense of right and wrong and finds it hard to stand by and watch any unkindness amongst other children’, or ‘Maisie has a very close relationship with her grandmother and they love making up stories together; she is a quiet child and is therefore somewhat apprehensive about being at a larger school’, or occasionally: ‘We sometimes feel quite exhausted after a weekend with Zainab. She is looking forward to interviewing her new teachers for the magazine she has recently started writing in her bedroom.’ And so on. Sometimes I learned about difficulties, perhaps of loss or separation, that these not-quite-eleven-year-olds had already weathered. How important for us to have this context, to understand them better as we took charge of their education and care. The letters gave parents at the outset an unhurried and respected voice as well as underlining the importance we attached to their special, uniquely experienced perspective. Of course, they also gave insight into the dynamics of families and their values and what circumstances we might be engaging with as time went on: families separated across the world because of work commitments perhaps, families where there was only one parent or sometimes families caring for a sibling with disability or an elderly grandparent. Reading these letters, filled with unashamedly partisan love and with hopes and aspirations for a daughter’s future, I hoped the parents would keep copies, to read again to their daughter as she left school in seven years’ time. ‘Tell me about your daughter’ was perhaps the most powerful conversation opener I ever employed, and it was where each individual girl’s story at senior school would begin.

Having invited them to write those important letters, during our welcome tea party I would explain to the crowd of slightly apprehensive new parents that we would be encouraging the girls’ independence right from the start. So soon? their faces said. My own mother’s maxim was that as a good parent you should make your child independent of you ‘as early as possible’ and this very practical and sound advice, especially for working mothers, I have always kept in mind. As parents, they would not be told every little thing, because this was a stage where the pupils would be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and sort out some of their own challenges. There are many things for the girls to adjust to on starting life in a new, bigger school, with more pupils and teachers, more subjects to get used to and a totally new way of doing things, I would tell them. But we would all be there to help. For example, if as a pupil you are too busy attending lots of exciting after-school clubs to get your homework done (a very familiar problem to many an eager new eleven-year-old) this is a thing to talk to your tutor about. You don’t need to rush to involve your mother or father. At this I would see the parents looking hesitant: surely it was up to them to know everything, to smooth away all the snowdrifts blocking their path? No, I would say firmly. Education is about learning to solve problems for yourself, even though that adjustment and releasing of parental control is very hard.

For us parents, this learning to let go is a lifelong counter-intuitive lesson (I’m still working on it and my children are in their early twenties) and we are greatly helped in the adjustment if, at the secondary stage, the school makes the effort to forge an effective and trusting relationship with us. As a head I was always aware that mutual trust could only be built up over time, but the school needed to make clear that this was a priority. Reminding parents that as a parent myself I was not unaware of the adjustment they were having to make, at that same welcome tea party I would talk about the exciting journey we were embarking on together, entering into partnership in the care and education of their children, and how important it was that we established good channels of communication – and then kept them open. During your daughter’s time with us there will be ups and downs, I warned lightly. The teenage years are coming! If you are having difficulty adjusting to that bored sigh when you ask what your daughter did at school, wait until you are getting the adolescent eye roll accompanied by ‘ Hello …?’ when you make some well-intentioned but hopelessly inept remark about modern social mores or popular culture.