How foolish could I be?
I must begin with a little personal history and a confession. At the end of August, I retired following fifteen very enjoyable years as the Headmaster of King’s College Junior School (KCJS), the prep school for King’s College School in Wimbledon. KCJS has about four hundred and fifty boys in the 7-13 age range so, as is true of many prep schools, it straddles the 11+ divide which separates most primary schools from secondary schools.
Prior to becoming a prep school headmaster, however, I had spent my career in secondary schools, teaching first ‘O’ Level and then GCSE and A Level history to boys and girls whose ambitions were focused on university places. Early on in my time as a teacher, while I was still in my twenties, I remember a conversation with my mother, who was a primary school teacher. I cannot recall the details of our debate, but we had very different opinions. At one point, exasperated with my mother’s inability to see that I was right, and manifesting unacceptable arrogance, I said to her, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you are just a Mickey Mouse primary school teacher!” It was a remark she never allowed me to forget. She passed away twenty-five years ago this month, but how she must have smiled when I became a headmaster with responsibility for a school teaching youngsters of primary school age!
Although my unthinking, misplaced sense of superiority as a secondary school teacher is rarely manifest so openly today, the importance attached to the secondary years still underpins much coverage of education in the national press. Every August, significant numbers of column inches will be devoted to the GCSE and A Level results and what they reveal about ‘standards’ in education. It is these results which determine the various league tables that are then given so much prominence. In addition, debate around independent and maintained schools is almost invariably focused on famous senior schools, such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester, and it is the opinions of these heads and those in state secondary schools which are sought by journalists.
Increasingly, however, people are beginning to understand that the life chances of young people are overwhelmingly determined long before they reach year 7 and join their secondary schools. Indeed, more and more people now realise that the first three years or so following a child’s conception are amongst the most important, if not the most important, in their development. Dame Andrea Leadsom, the Conservative MP and a candidate for leader of her party and Prime Minister in 2016, has long argued for investment in children under two years of age and emphasised the importance of the attachment between babies and their principal carers, usually the mother. Such views, which were unfashionable just a few years ago, are now being taken much more seriously. Last year, Dame Andrea was appointed as Early Years Health Adviser by the Prime Minister and given the task of leading a review to improve health outcomes for babies. Earlier this year, amongst her proposals was the idea of establishing Family Hubs to provide wide-ranging advice on childcare and early education.
Dame Andrea’s recommendations prompted significant political debate, which was itself welcome evidence that increasing numbers of people recognise the importance of supporting the physical, emotional, psychological and intellectual development of the youngest in our society. As I look back on my younger self, I am all too aware how wrong I was to think that teaching teenagers was what really mattered. Indeed, we are far more likely to have healthy, happy and well-adjusted adults if we take real care to invest in the all-important first years of our children’s lives.
Gerard Silverlock