Bloody Prize giving

[AllienOlliemum]

I have 3 DC in the same school, it's a grammar school and tends to achieve very good results. Every year they do prize giving. There are two award categories, Excellence and Effort.
Last year I queried what exactly excellence is in this case and was told "The excellence awards are decided by each department as a whole and considering attainment, attitude, progress and effort" the second award category is simply for effort.
In the upper school (Y10-13) 3 students are selected for each subject and ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd for excellence, and 3 students (if enough uptake of the subject) are given effort, not ranked). In Lower school (Y7-9) 5 students are selected for excellence, not ranked and 5 for effort not ranked.

Today the upper school prize giving awards list was sent out. The actual ceremony is at the end of June but I guess it's because some leavers will have to plan around it. My eldest DD is in Y11, sitting her GCSEs and for the 5th year running not a single award. She has fantastic predicted grades and we are frequently told how hardworking and diligent she is. As per usual though it's the same kids as always. In fact one girl has an award in every single subject she must have taken, 7 Excellence awards and 3 Effort! With 1st in 5 of those! She also seems to have won the award for an essay writing competition and the award given by the historical society!
My other two children (Y8 and Y9) have also never received an award to date but the lower school awards aren't announced until middle of June.
Last year I queried how it is possible one child wins all the awards and was told the departments select their own winners and can't know who the other departments have chosen.
There are also non academic awards such as Integrity, but typically it's always the same students who get these too.

AIBU to be massively pissed off with this bloody system which is centred around favouritism!
It's every good damn year!

But people do care. Look at the op and her daughter. And plenty of the kids receiving will be delighted. I’m sure they don’t work harder to get them and of course no one would ever put it on a cv, but at the time, yes I think plenty care.

Because a popularity contest for an academic prize is a twisting of the criteria.

And I think that’s probably along the lines of where people have issues. Especially in fee paying schools you do see a lot of “ interpretation ” in who was best. For example often children tracking marks in tests might be of the impression ( aka mathematically certain) that x whose dad provided a weekend stalking on his Scottish estate as a prize for the school fundraiser was actually in fourth place but the curious calculator kept in the staff room had just enough leeway to bump him to the prize ( and it isn’t always the maths teacher themself who is responsible for creative calculations). And when the child who got the drama prize actually forgot their lines and delivered them in a monotone etc it really only serves to detract, rather than reinforce, the idea of reward for merit. And I think it’s often the implementation by teachers with various pressures to juggle that can mean they are not successful in achieving the goals of competition and work ethic etc that the theory might hold out.

Ultimately children should all be encouraged to strive for- and rewarded for achieving - personal bests. That doesn’t mean a string of prizes at the end of the year “ because you’re all winners” but rather building positive reinforcement for this into the general system.

OP, please set a good example for your DD and don't feed into her jealousy about this other girl. Healthy competition can be a great motivator, but if all you do is compare yourself to others then you won't be able to find your core strengths and achieve your potential - you'll just be dragged down into a quagmire of bitterness where you feel the whole world is against you, and you feel your lack of achievements is down to others rather than yourself.

I went to a selective school, was in the top set, regularly won awards in RE and music. There were other kids who were scholars and would regularly attain 3+ prizes each and it was well deserved. We didn't have awards for effort though, just whoever was top of the class. We had other prizes for sports, arts, ethos, and charity etc which some of the academic kids would also get, because being sporty isn't mutually exclusive to being clever. It's just life.

Prizes become meaningless if you don't hand them out on genuine merit. But you can teach your child that prizes aren't everything - some of the highest achieving children in my year struggled after school emotionally and/or academically, whilst others who were less academic flourished.

Core skills of independent study, self motivation, curiosity, being able to engage with others are factors that lead to success in someone's career. Those aren't necessarily correlated to getting a clean sweep of prizes on speech day.

Both my DBs were academically more gifted than me, but they've struggled more in their careers because they didn't work on their social skills and don't understand the idea of doing drudge work to keep the boss happy whilst also working on more meaningful projects on the side - they get wrapped up in being the cleverest, and that arrogance seeps through. Your DD's resentment of high achievers will also hold her back, unless you help change her perspective - admire people who are achieving their goals and use that as motivation, don't resent them!

^This, exactly.

OP, you have chosen to place your child into the grammar school system, a system which is designed from the outset to be elitist. You cannot now complain that aspects of it are unfair. You can't pick and choose your privilege.

If you are unhappy, then send her to the local FE college. No? Why not?

This is all very wise.

Also I would note that despite my recognising that determination and a degree of competitive appetite is useful for life, I increasingly see parenting becoming obsessively structured around “ the merits” of competition. This is evident even in the womb where mums take certain supplements and play Mozart to their belly etc. This continues out of the womb with stimulating black and white wall charts, baby swimming lessons etc etc. Then at school they have to be up for every challenge, club or skill on offer.

There is nothing wrong with wanting the best for your dc and often this behaviour is actually more marked in parents who didn’t necessarily have opportunities as a child so I am very sympathetic that they are really doing their best.

However the problem is somewhere in all this both parent and child lose true autonomy. We are all on this earth to have a meaningful existence. Part of that is knowing how to sort out what is meaningful for you as a family from what really isn’t and actually having time and headspace to live a life. I see so many children being fed a “meal” in the back seat of the car after school so they can get to their extra tuition session, extracurricular activity etc and there is just so much pressure to achieve they really are achieving almost everything but … actually living.

You make some interesting points here, as my eldest DB fell out with my mum for precisely this - she felt so unskilled from her own childhood (her parents were very laissez faire) that she put everything she had into ensuring we were 'high achieving'. My DB resented her for being "more of a teacher than a mother" and for not catering enough to our emotional needs.

It's sad, but as a parent it's hard not to swing the pendulum to hard in the opposite direction to your own childhood to rectify what you saw as lacking.

It's good to be a cheerleader for your kids, but it's most effective when you're helping or enabling them rather than pushing them.

To this day, I can't help but basically 'report' my achievements to my parents. It's a bit pathetic, but I tell them about my annual reviews etc...because my mum put such an emphasis on those kind of things when I was growing up. I still seek that external validation that I'm 'doing well' 😂

The pendulum pattern you mention is so true of so many things, but particularly I think with parenting.

When nasty rears it’s head…

And what’s with the string of laughing emoji? Don’t you know it’s poor form to laugh at your own jokes? Unless it is in response to something genuinely funny, they always convey the impression of a totally keyed-up poster.

My DD had a similar experience, she was also very shy (and no teacher's pet). They had a very important visitor giving the prizes out on stage in front of the whole school, and he said something like what a haul, literally an armful of awards, she was so embarrassed she could have died. It was all secret until the day, then those who were getting awards were herded off, but she had no idea how many she was getting. I would say well deserved, but I'm her mum!

My daughter wasn't embarrassed at all to get all subject excellence prizes at A-Level. It was ahead of getting her final A-Level grades but she had consistently had the highest marks in her year group for all of her subjects. They were all STEM so marking was pretty objective. It was obvious she should have got those prizes and anything else would have looked like a fix. DC in her year group were very gracious and maybe joked 'no surprises there' but within a clear context that it was all fair and transparent. If you start spreading excellence prizes out to other high (but less high) achieving students then you can't really call them prizes for excellence. It devalues them.

Well I suppose it depends how you define excellence. I think it's perfectly possible for more than one pupil in a class to excel. If an award is simply for highest exam marks then that's what it should be called.
I think it's rather reductive to judge excellence solely on exam marks in fact. I got the highest A level/S level results that had ever been seen at my school at the time but apart from Biology which I did genuinely excel at I wasn't even particularly interested in the subjects. I'm really good at sitting exams though.
I was always top in every test in every subject but I wasn't the only excellent pupil in my classes and there were certainly others who would have been equally if not more deserving of prizes than me had our school given them.

Then you have found your tribe.

Also I wasn’t saying your head is nasty. I’ve never seen your head. It was the comment that was nasty.

In our schools the distinction between prizes for excellence and those for effort were pretty clear. One tended to be measured in objective and measurable performance and the other was more a subjective view on interest, effort and attitude. If an excellence prize becomes purely a reflection of the latter, then it is something different. If there are several students who are very close, maybe have several excellence prizes but I think it would be devaluing to give someone with lower absolute achievement the single prize for excellence.

The excellence prizes at our schools were quite transparently for the highest results, possibly taking supra-curricular achievement (strong Olympiad performance, national essay prizes etc.) into account too. The latter actually do take quite a bit of extra effort. However, in reality the motivation for them could be a genuine interest in the subject or a key component of an application to a top university, no-one really knows but it is the outcome that is being assessed.

The "effort" prize probably relates more to what you are describing - interest and application to perform as highly as you can. Supra-curricular participation rather than achievement might be taken into account for that.

One tended to be measured in objective and measurable performance
I'd call that attainment personally. Excellence I see as something wider, but obviously that is subjective.
I got an A at A level when that was the highest grade, a grade 1 at S level and the school got a letter telling them I'd got one of the highest marks of the year or something so obviously I had the highest attainment but I don't think I was the best chemist in my class.

I see where you are coming from but I think if you are not hitting the very top marks (ie. the 'better' chemist in your class) that's not truly excellence in objective terms, is it? Maybe 'true' excellence was your attainment combined with the better chemist's wider interest/effort but if I had to award one of you an excellence prize, you would have got it. Why, because even if you didn't have the right interest and effort level, you still got the best results whilst he/she maybe had huge interest and application but it didn't feed through to the final output, so they didn't excel relatively. Would you call an athlete who lost their races excellent just because they trained the hardest? I wouldn't. They are not the ones who win the medals.

and the Op’s school probably does manage to do both

but not everyone can win something

and clearly there were others over the years more deserving that this DD

I’m in a couple of minds about this. The OP doesn’t come across as a particularly sympathetic character BUT I expect she is venting her spleen on AIBU rather than in real life. AIBU is useful for that.

It’s a bit of a weird awards system. I can imagine thinking “Oh God, you’ve had my child for five years and have never shown her recognition” - particularly in a grammar school where all the girls are bright and hard working. An awards system which leaves those who don’t get an award feeling sour is not motivating. The timing of the announcement (DURING GCSEs? Christ) is extremely weird.

Having no overall oversight of who is getting which awards is strange. I don’t think that everyone should get a turn at getting a prize but a school will usually have someone say “Hang on - Marianne is getting seven prizes. Before we go ahead, can we be sure that that is reasonable?”. We had a couple of terrible prizes at my school - Boy of the Year and Girl of the Year. The same boy won three years in a row. I can see why - he was clever and motivated, played instruments, sang solos, was in the young council. But it ended up with pretty much all the kids asking whether there really was no other kid who could be recognised.

If this girl really deserves her prizes (I called her Marianne as she reminds me of the person from Normal People) then good luck to her. But it sounds as though the prize giving process could use a review.

Considering OP's wording around what her DD is saying about this girl, I don't think it's just a case of venting her spleen on AIBU - her attitude is clearly bleeding into how her DD feels or DD's attitude (if not actually egging her on).

I remember experiencing mums like this in school - one particular mum used to turn up to my performances even when her daughter wasn't performing, presumably to just report back on how it went (my mum heard her commenting on my performances a couple of times, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't just her appreciation of amateur music that brought her to my concerts!). It's weirdly embroiled behaviour, as if the parent is living through the child. Best to let the child come to terms with where they're at, and not fan any flames of resentment or jealousy.

I'm a department head in a grammar school with a very similar system
Our Excellence awards are based on all graded work through the year tallied up, so this could be homework, in class tests and most importantly mocks. This means that frequently these awards go to the same people, it is objective and can't be changed just because one person does well across the board. It is designed to award those who have consistently done very well. They are announced before GCSEs but once all teaching is complete.
Our effort awards go to those who have either made massive amounts of improvement (so perhaps their early results will prevent them from getting the Excellence award but by the end they were up there) or to students in lower sets who have worked extremely hard but wouldn't stand a chance otherwise. These are more subjective.
In my department (MFL) we have a separate award too which only students who have studied 2 languages are eligible for and its measured in the same way as excellence. So this year our 1st place in French, was also first in German and won the excellence award, but 2nd and 3rd in French didn't take two languages and 3rd in German didn't so we got some fresh winners there. I believe Science/STEM has a similar award and maybe humanities and there is an allrounder trophy each year for the highest performing student in each year, one for effort and one for excellence.

There are other awards in sports too etc.
I think it is fair, some middle of the road kids miss out but that is the nature of it, if they aren't putting in any great effort and aren't excelling then what can be done.

Well I don't see it as binary ie the top attainer is excellent and the others aren't. And I think academic excellence is a bit more nuanced than a 100m sprint. There may be very little difference between the highest few marks in a strong class. Is the pupil who gets 95% on a test really meaningfully more able than the one who got 92%? I doubt it in most cases.
I'm obviously not dim - you don't get a near perfect score on an S level without having a modicum of intelligence - but a lot of my success has been down to very good exam technique and a near photographic memory. My class mate who was consistently second to me in exams was the one who would ask the really probing questions in class though and would bring up interesting points raised in the editorial of last months Journal of Chemical Engineering or whatever. My edge in the exams was almost certainly down to my memory, a better exam technique and maybe a bit of luck not because I was "excellent" and he wasn't. I think exams are something of a blunt tool and whilst they have their place of course I'd like to think that a teacher who had taught a class for 2 years could do a bit better than "Well she got 3% more in the exam so she's obviously the best".

In any case, in all of this the school is unlikely to change the way they handle it - and this year is in the past for OP and DD now.

Without knowing the girl ourselves, ( and indeed the others), we really can’t comment on how deserved it was. I think sometimes you have to be prepared to meet things with a shoulder shrug.

This is funny. Mummy is unhappy because her child isn’t winning awards. Sounds American. Speaking of America did you read the girl that got scholarships and acceptance at hundreds of schools.

I guess there are higher achieving kids than OP.