For anyone who still thinks that access to selective state education is a level playing field.....

[curlew]

I have just read the latest OfSTED for my dd's grammar school.

There are no children in Year 7 who are eligible for FSM. None. Not one.

Mine don't automatically turn the TV on as a rule, but there are times when they do.

With one expecting they all read a lot, one is getting there. We would not like to live without a TV to be honest , however we still chat over the dinner table - heck sometimes we chat about TV.

We have a huge TV, in fact we have a few huge TVs and a lot of books

I think children watch a lot less TV these days as there are so much more interesting media around. Mine watch less than I did as a child. We also at one stage had a no TV in the week rule although that was over 10 years ago and is a bit pointless now that children have phones and computer access. We still have a no televisions in bedrooms rules (and I don't have one there either) but again they do have a PC and phones in the bedroom although they are off at bed time.

I drive them to school although it's Radio 4 Today programme usually in the morning not a lot of conversation that early. My father drove us to school too as teenagers and I remember the conversations now. So whatever means you find particularly with teenagers think of some way to talk to them.

Television is not the work of the devil.
We watch a fair amount of tv in our house. We don't have a television in the dining room so meal times are about conversation. We watch some programmes as a family and some individually. However, my youngest son is a total book worm and reads lots and lots (as well as enjoying tv). He will happily spend all of his pocket money on books that he wants. Our house has thousands of books and the local library has been exhausted.
I don't think it has to be tv or reading; both can be prevalent in family life. I think balance is the key.

I remember being told that one of the best things you can do for your child is get them to read a paper which I have actively encouraged with my 11 year old ....we will go and have brunch together on a Saturday and both read the papers whilst out ...sometimes she'll read First News but I also try and encourage her to read the Guardian or Independent .... she was the only child in her Yr 7 class who was informed that her vocabulary was good the rest were told to improve.... her dad still reads to her in bed every night ...something they both enjoy ....

I have been reading this thread with great interest. I am the product of a comprehensive where I sat in the top set and was picked on for being a "snob" and "up myself" break times were torturous although I came out with a clutch of As (days before A*). DH is the product of a private education (rich and thick sums it up perfectly IMO). We are preparing Ds for the 11+ . I sincerely hope that life for clever kids in comprehensives has changed in the last 20 years, because that's where Ds will be going should he not make the cut (superselective, he is easily top 25%). I no more want the rich and thick experience for him than I want him to go through what I experienced as a clever girl in a comprehensive.

Of course this opportunity should be open to all, I have no problem with priority being given to dcs on fsm as looked after children get priority now.

And I keep telling him he needs to read more widely......you can lead a horse to water (or Dickens or Kipling) but you cannot make them drink (or read) !

I agree that there's no harm in a bit o' telly. Dd did get into a rut of sitting zombie-like in front of Victorious and ICarly (you'll know them if you have a tween!) but that craze wore off.

We watch quite a bit as a family, ranging from OnlyConnect to I'm a Celebrity. And lots of films. Just ploughed our way through Das Boot. Variety is the spice of life!

As Juliet says, there's no point in castigating tv nowadays anyway, because most teens don't watch much. Ds spends a great deal of time surfing (when he's supposed to be revising for mock GCSEs...), his current obsession being some Finnish rock band which he keeps sending me YouTube clips of

Attitudes towards telly used to be one marker between WC, MC and UC people. The idea of a telly free house/flat would have been incomprehensible to the people I grew up with on my estate. The idea of a telly that wasn't permanently ON would have been pretty incomprehensible to most.

If people are claiming (and using the 'evidence' of their own kids to 'support' this claim) that if you want your kids to get into a SS you have to either junk or at the least severely curtail the amount of telly they watch, then that is another way of subtly trying to discourage certain types of people from even bothering to apply. And it's wrong both morally and factually. If a kid is good enough to get in somewhere, whether that is Cambridge, RG, or a SS, then they will get in whether they have square eyes (like me) or not. There is an argument for considering the sort of telly that is watched, oh very yes (junk the X factor, junk that stupid jungle thing, big up the history documentaries, the arts coverage, and clearly any programme featuring SPACE or ALIENS or possibly DRAGONS) but that's it as far as I'm concerned. When work has to be done, sure, you can't do it watching telly (although I actually did all my homework at school and university with either the telly or the radio on in the background, and unless I'm in the office I work with the radio on in the background now, and I've done OK - but maybe that is the point at which my super snowflakeness asserted itself). But to imply that watching telly as a general thing is somehow a disqualifier for high level educational ambition and attainment? That's laughable but also worrying.

Thing is, when I was growing up on my council estate, we could watch telly as soon as we got in from school, but it only ran until around 5.45pm when bloody Callendar got started.

So realistically, an hour, an hour and half tops?

Nowadays kids can have access to children's telly 24/7. Now that can be a great thing. But it can also mean kids are parked in front of it. And if not the telly, then the PS3, XBox etc.

I think it's the sheer amount of time many kids spend in front of screens. The default setting. Parents have to really watch out for the hours spent in a way my parents didn't have to.

Saturdays the same - Multi coloured Swap Shop or Tizwaz til noon, then fecking hours of sport!

These days some DC will spend their entire weekend parked in front of screens.

And I'm not claiming higher moral status here. My DC would do it. You have to watch it and bloody nag them and sometimes you just can't be arsed.

Well, I can still sing you the phone number for Going Live, if anyone needs it...

Actually I relish the times we all sit and watch stuff together, or times I happen across one of them watching a film - much prefer that to endless Sims and Campus Life that I keep finding them on. I think precisely because the same stuff is on all the darn time, children are less arsed about watching anything much now.

word did you not watch Nationwide????? And in the summer, occasionally, they would repeat Dr Who (the happiest memory of my life, and my sister's (I checked recently) was an unexpected (we didn't get a paper or the Radio Times) repeat of Day of the Daleks instead of Nationwide one summer's evening. )

On Saturdays there was indeed lovely lovely grandstand but of course there were old black and white films on BBC 2. Happy days.

I wasn't allowed to watch Magpie......

Nit We have a schedule of planned 'box set' (actually it;s all on the Apple TV but some of them were ripped from box sets rather than bought direct from the iTunes store) viewing. Each DC in turn gets to choose. At the moment we are doing Lost for the 3rd time (for them. For me it's the 9th time - well, the 9th time I'd gone through S1, obviously each subsequent season I've watched one time less than the one before). But they don't play games at all - no wii no xbox no whatever else there is. So maybe it balances out.

(I'm not at home (quelle surprise) but I think next up on the schedule is Studio 60 again. DD2 keeps vetoing The West Wing which is quite annoying. And they ALL veto Hill St Blues. :( )

I wasn't allowed to watch much on ITV at all (adverts. Mum wanted to limit the possibility of us realising how much stuff there was potentially for us to have that we didn't. She didn't apply those rules to herself of course, Upstair Downstairs was one of those immoveable points in family life - we had to be well out of the way when that was on).

Now I come to think ofit, perhapd it was Nationwide after the kids telly. Then Callendar after that? The regional news, or was it Look North?

Either way, kids telly ended pretty early. And once you'd outgrown Jacknory and Magic Roundabout, you were pretty much living for Grangehill, because John Cravens newsround and Blue Peter were death sentences in boredom.

And let's nt get startedon Sundays!

No telly til bout 6pm when you got Heidi, or Poldark, or Anne of Green Gables...

Yes, I used to watch Grange Hill and think 'I hope there are still schools just like that one in the future, so I can send my children there', and lo and behold, life imitates art and I have my own pair of Fayes.

I used to like that Holiday programme on Sunday evenings with Judith Chalmers, actually.

I was one of them estate kids who watched rubbish kids tv including grange hill and byker grove. I also used to stay up late and watch prisoner cell block H during the holidays from about 7 years old. I was obviously very damaged because I went on to have a well paid job at 18 and then returned to study later in life, getting into an RG university on a very oversubscribed course (40 applicants for every available place). Bloody parent letting me watch the television.
BTW, I used to read an awful lot despite having access to a television, although the newspapers we had in the house were very much of the red top variety .

I was at school with someone who was in grange hill. :)

I know from another post Streaming , that you used to watch that girl who was expelled from 4 schools...... " MARMALADE" ATKINS..

My brother and I used to play 'guess the ads', it was great fun, more fun than actually watching anything that was on .

I enjoyed telly in the school holidays - bells and Sebastian and Why Don't You pulse all of the old Elvis Presley films,,,

Oops Belle and Sebastian and plus not pulse... Sorry