Dear everyone,
thank you very very much to everyone who has taken the time to reply.
From reading through all your contributions, with many of you taking the time to provide considered and thoughtful responses, I felt obliged to reply. Firstly, to thank you all. And secondly, to chip in with a few observations.
I have never posted to any social media forum before, inviting people to comment on my particular position, and I have to say the experience is challenging - some replies are very direct, some are critical, and that can be quite chastening. But the directness of people's speech can also be refreshing. I am sure I wouldn't get such frankly expressed views face to face. To experience a dialogue stripped of the usual niceties that you find in conversation is challenging but also really interesting. A warning to anyone who hasn't tried it before: prepare to be a little shocked, a little intimidated, a little amused, and a little heartened! It's quite an experience.
Secondly, I found your responses fascinating. I can see that quite a number of assumptions were made from the fairly scant information I provided. I know that we all make assumptions, all the time, based on little information, to help us fill in the bigger picture and understand how to interpret what we're seeing and hearing. As with all our assumptions, some will be accurate and some not.
For example, I think the title of my post encouraged some to assume that I purposely tried to find a place to live that was not in a deprived area: to try and 'socially insulate' my children, as someone put it in a very colourful way. Actually, I bought this house ten years ago when I was returning from a period of working abroad, and was not even remotely thinking of children. I had only two criteria: I had to be able to commute to my job in central London and it had to have a fairly decent sized garden to accommodate my eight rescue dogs (that I had rescued while living abroad). And I had to find something quickly, because my huge kennelling costs were eating into my deposit. Those were my criteria. In fact I wouldn't have cared what sort of area the house was in because when you have eight dogs security is not a big concern! However, the area where I found the house that I needed happened to be in what looked like a completely average, run of the mill area, and for the first four years of living here I had very very little interaction with the local community. I didn't meet the neighbours as the house is set away. I didn't really know anyone apart from the dog sitter that I had to hire to look after the dogs while I was at work. If you're working long hours and have a long commute at each end of your workday it is surprising how little time you actually spend at home.
I would also like to comment on the classist assumptions that some drew from my post. Actually I commented on the area factually - it is an average area, close to a very deprived one (that's probably why I could actually afford to buy a house here at all). Some drew from this observation that I believe that deprived areas have parents who don't care about education. In fact, I come from an immigrant background myself and went to a school (when I could go - due to family issues I had an attendance record of about 30%) where there were a high number of children from families with very deprived backgrounds. Of course as a child I can't now know what the parents' attitudes to education were: but when I return to my home town I sometimes bump into my classmates, who now work in banks, as solicitors, and in other professions, and from what I recall most children did their work without complaining. I think the classist assumptions that some took from my post are more a reflection of our society: I sometimes think our class system is entrenched enough, decisive enough, to rival India's caste system. People judge you from the second you open your mouth (myself included, I can't escape the curse!) We're socialised into seeing everything though the lens of class and sadly that traps us into making assumptions that can be quite misleading.
In fact my personal experience, of living and working in countries where people are really, really poor, is that some of the most poor are some of the most motivated to enable their children to pursue formal education. That includes going hungry to be able to pay school fees and young kids walking for more than an hour each way to school to get to a classroom with 49 other children, having nothing to sit on but the floor once they get there.
One thing that has really stood out for me from this debate is how sharp the divide is around formal education in the UK, but perhaps elsewhere as well (those who come from other countries or who have relatives abroad might be able to share whether this is a common feature of other countries too). I can identify two camps. The first, kind of understands where I'm coming from - this camp worries about what this big gap in formal learning will mean for the future, and values things like providing children with a structure for their days, and trying to offer them formal opportunities to continue with their educational development (for want of a better way of expressing it). The other camp is quite hostile to formal education. There are some very negative perceptions of formal education here: I sense fear, loathing, rejection. It sort of culminates in the sentiments of the response of one person to my posting: 'I feel sorry for your children'. (I'm not trying to pick on that person or single them out: I am sure that that response came from the heart, a gut reaction to my post and was perfectly sincere). But it sort of encapsulates the view of formal education as punishment: an abuse, the stealing away of childhood happiness and fulfillment. This kind of attitude imagines that if a parent is interested in formal education then they can't be interested in their child having fun or learning through play: it's either one or the other and you can't be a parent that does both.
Obviously I don't share the views of the second camp. Firstly for me far from being a form of prison, education was my liberation. For me, education is freedom. Freedom to read, learn about new things, explore the world if not directly then through ideas. It's also meant freedom in the more prosaic sense of having a bit more control over what job I would end up in - since under our present system we are paid according to how many or few others can do our jobs and not by how valuable to society that job actually is. I struggle to identify with the views of this second camp because I don't associate such negativity with formal learning. And I am not even sure that this negativity is related to class. It seems to permeate every single part of society without direct regard to income level. I've met poor people who speak with sadness about their school experiences, people who are somewhere in the middle who accuse teachers of wanting to humiliate and berate them; people who are wealthy talking about how little they enjoyed school. Is this all related to bad personal experiences at school - a lasting sense of failure, unpleasant teachers? My teachers were mostly respectful and encouraging but maybe I was just lucky. For this sentiment to be so widespread in society it must be a symptom of something deeper. It's even become part of popular culture (Teacher! leave them kids alone!)
Finally, thank you, a heartfelt thank you to those who have made suggestions about finding resources, looking at other schools, or finding outside-of-school activities. I think all those elements are going to be part of my family's journey through the questions that the situation has raised for us. Just to be clear, I don't want more worksheets! I hate those Twinkl things and the website even more as I usually can't find what I am looking for and end up feeling overwhelmed when trying to make a selection. I really want some guidance on the topic choices and the techniques to use. But through lots of research, talking to parents whose kids are at nearby schools who are receiving these types of resources (and who are kind enough even to share with me log in details!!!) I think we will probably muddle through.
The unevenness in our schools provision should worry us all, I think. This can't stand us in good stead for the future. I think these developments have shown us the benefits of not dividing schools up into their own little atomised units but instead keeping a community of schools in an area that can pool resources, share ideas, and offer more even provision. Apparently last year there were around 106,000 medical vacancies in our NHS. I just cannot see how allowing some schools to slip so far behind others can in any way alleviate this situation in the future.
best wishes to all.