Parents who question criticism of their children have made school reports changed as teachers are no longer honest in their content. Dr Julian Murphy, headteacher at the £12,000-a-year school Loughborough Amherst School has claimed in order not to conflict with parents, teachers are dishonest in their remarks on paper.
Rather than be brutally honest, teachers will use different descriptive words for children such as “chatty” and “high spirited”—instead of saying they are disruptive. The headteacher of the school in Leicestershire said those words used to fill the pages means reports are no longer worth doing. “When I went to school, you would get reports that say ‘so and so is extremely lazy or arrogant’. But now no one says that—it would upset parents.”
“Then when parents say ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a problem?’ teachers say ‘Well, we did’. But they did it too politely. It is a cultural change—now parents are more likely to say to teachers, ‘You have upset my child. You have damaged their confidence. The problem isn’t my child. It’s you’.”
Dr Julian Murphy added, “Speaking as a parent, if my son or daughter is being badly behaved, I want to know. I don’t want to be told they are chatty. I don’t think traditional school reports are worth doing—they waste a lot of teacher time and they are not necessarily particularly useful for parents. Parents are busy people. They don’t want to read through the reports about how ‘Jane is a lovely girl’. They already know she is a lovely girl. They live with her. They want to know where she is, what she can achieve, where the gap is and how we close it.’"
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