Does your state school cope well with your DC?

[AnswersToAnything]

We have a meeting with school coming up because a few issues have started to crop up, mainly around our reception-age child being bored and not stretched at school. I know that on this board I don't need to explain that this is coming from our child's 'need' for information rather than us being pushy, but I feel I have to anyway!

The school is great - they know our child has different needs but don't really seem to have the resources to meet them. Not their fault, but nonetheless a reality.

I was hoping some of you could tell me the things your child's school have done to make sure your child is stretched
so we can go to the meeting with ideas rather than problems.

Apologies for a certain vagueness. I have my suspicions that other parents from school are MNers though.

Thanks.

@PiqueaBoo As for boredom, I'm inclined to agree with Answers, as I think there are two different kinds of boredom at stake here.

I completely agree with you, and the great and the good, in that boredom is a good thing. Adam Philips says something about a child not knowing what they really want without going through boredom first, so we almost need to be bored in order to know who we are. But that's a very open-ended kind of boredom, in which you have (in theory) a lot of choices.

On the other hand, being stuck in a classroom being taught something that you already know is an entirely different thing, perhaps we should call it tedium. There are no choices, no chance to make something else from the time. I vividly remember being in the sixth form, with a teacher who was teaching Tom JOnes, reading the book about a chapter or two ahead of us and clearly hating it. I was so bored in those lessons that I stopped wearing a watch, because then at least I couldn't see how slowly the time was going. I still don't wear a watch.

ps. Is my child less of a good sport because she gets bored? I'm quite intrigued by that concept.

We moved ds to private after having real problems with the school.

theendgame ....word of warning! If you HE, your child is likely to accelerate even further (benefiting from 1-1 and self-directed learning) and then can find it very hard to re-integrate back into same class or social groups. I learned this the hard way. Also, do not assume that an academically selective school will have all the answers. Depending on the intake criteria you may find that the cohort is not particularly aligned with your child's academic ability. I have a child who is a summer birthday, was accelerated to the year above and is working at the very top of that cohort. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to meeting the needs of academically 'gifted' pupils. Sometimes it requires taking a leap of faith and trusting your instincts, with an eye to all the warnings and advice available.

It's also important to think " is my child bored because he is doing stuff he already knows- or is he bored because this is a crap teacher?" Not everything is connected to the g&t.

It is definitely not the latter in our case, curlew - I have no complaints about the class teacher at all, or, indeed, the school as a whole.

DD was very ahead in reception. She was allowed to spend huge amounts of time at the creative table while the others were being taught their letters (which she knew). this really worked for her, she loved drawing and art and she was happy to quietly paint while the others learned.
She also was generally the one picked to help out with school things like setting up the hall for events so she could work in a group. she was also allowed to pick her own reading books. This all worked fine.

We found that year 1 was ok but year 2 a nightmare, she would come home crying with boredom and we changed her to a more academic school then. Looking back we should have put her in the other school at the end of year one..ah hindsight. DD now says "I didn't have any friends at my old school, they only were nice to me so they could copy my work" and I felt a total failure as a parent when she said it.

Looking back , apart from the coming home crying with boredom the biggest signpost that she needed a different school was when she started correcting the teachers.

This was an Ofsted outstanding school I think DD was the only one who was really unhappy there - it has since become obvious she is an outlier in terms of her thinking patterns and her new school suits her well - they encourage free thinking and unconventional approaches to learning.

I would say not to leap into a particular developmental path in reception. I think the child being allowed to do other things when the class is taught something they already know is a good one. The one thing I personally would not stand for was having my child used to coach other children - ok for a couple of times but DD ended up an unpaid classroom assistant and ok, other kids benefited but DD was attending school and really getting very little from it. That was the crunch point when we moved her out mid year.
I would also add other mothers, who helped at the school told me they thought DD was getting a raw deal, so I didn't feel like I was over reacting.

LongDeadMother - thanks for that experience. I think if we did HE we would probably go travelling a bit and explore some non-curriculum subjects rather than doing trad HE - in a way treat it as more of a gap year. Although whether we could persuade her back into school after that might be another problem.

@theendgame: " Is my child less of a good sport because she gets bored?"

How would I know? It's difficult enough figuring out my own...

Hi Answers, I've had this conversation with my DD's teachers this year (also Reception). She was asking for more reading and beginning to get a bit disruptive in class sessions when they were learning things she knew already. Things that have worked for us are very similar to simpson's list above, eg extra reading books (before she was getting two books a week, now she gets to change them and choose more whenever she finishes them rather than wait till the end of the week), a set of exercise books to write stories / lists / draw in during "class learning" time if she is getting impatient - she can go and grab these whenever she wants, slightly different handwriting homework (others are doing single letters whereas DD writes a few sentences) and also some extra 1on1 time with the deputy head which is either extra reading or Maths or IT (she has typed me a couple of emails for example). The extra 1 on1 time is a real luxury in a big and busy state primary, but the others are things that don't cost anything but make a big difference to my DD's enjoyment and independence.

Good luck with the conversation - hope you come up with a plan.

Thanks everyone. We spoke to the school and together we've devised a new timetable for DD where she will spend half her time with year 1. It came out in the meeting that DD is pretending not to be able to do things at the moment - we presume as part of an effort to fit in, so working with the year above will be good for her I think.

The school have been amazing. I can't praise them highly enough.

Of course we still have the problem with what happens when there is no higher year group, but we'll cross that bridge later!