Pupil of the week upset

[Cactus5]

My year 5 child still hasn't been picked to be pupil of the week and is feeling upset about it. He was also not given any parts in school plays or church readings this year, which he used to enjoy. He loves praise and responsibility.
He is working at greater depth, is quite confident and has lots of friends. Last year, he was part of the school council and he's always had parts in Christmas plays.
His teacher pulled me up a few weeks ago for the first time to say he had been moved twice due to chatting in lessons. My son explained that he had done this because he was excited about his friends' sleepover (he was sitting next to his best friend) and was finished with all his work. I feel like he's given up working hard and seems less confident. What is the best way to address it?

I’m sure I’m going to get torn for by this but… isn’t this normal? We can’t all get the award for being the best or the winner. This is what life is about, carrying on regardless. Surely the praise should be at home, that he’s doing really well and doesn’t need a best helper of the week certificate. It does sound as if you’re making this worse than it needs to be. Why aren’t we teaching self confidence and esteem rather than seeking validation all the time.

You're not wrong, but schools make a big deal out of these things and they're very visible, photos of the winners with their certificates on school websites/newsletters. It's easy to pick out the usual suspects.

I'm not sure how it teaches resilience either.
Not stealth boast, but my son won the Spelling Bee in yr 6. The girl who had won it the three previous years burst into tears and had a complete strop. Nobody else had cried in previous years despite NOT winning for three years.

You don't need to care about things like this - you really don't. If your child understands that they're designed to encourage children who are struggling a bit, then why do they care? It doesn't indicate anything particularly positive, so there's no sense in coveting it.
In China they take a different approach. They put the test results up on the wall, so everyone can see that you've come last.

Doesn't China's whole system work on honour and shame? Children in the UK definitely couldn't cope with that.

They did the same thing at my nephew's grammar school. If you change expectations, children adapt. The issue is really the parents. In China, parents support teachers and education is generally taken very seriously.

@Toffeefudgecaramel We had form orders at my grammar school. It was meant, I think, to promote competition and striving to be better. The bottom 1/3 or even 1/2 are just invisible and nothing would ever make someone ranked 29th become 2nd. It was published on the notice board of your classroom base twice a term. The Headmaster called the bottom dc Drones. Praise was heaped on the worker bees. it wasn’t remotely encouraging or pleasant. I never did adapt to being humiliated.

Prizes manipulate behaviour without enhancing learning. There’s loads of research on this. Which is all ignored because everyone knows better, apparently, and who cares about research and pedagogy these days? Prizes are also destructive because people- both adults and children- who are incentivised by prizes, focus on the prize and lose interest in the subject itself. In the long run they are less motivated than those who have not been distracted by the offer of rewards and, crucially, their focus on getting the prize makes them less curious, less willing to take risks and less willing to experiment.

But they’re obedient. So that’s good.

I have four- all grown up now.
Three of them were very well behaved, good, high achieving students. None of them ever won anything at primary or secondary school.
The fourth was a blooming nuisance, always up to something. This was the one who won all the awards and achievements.
It’s a standing joke amongst my kids now.

DD is in uni now. She got all top grades at GCSE and all A* at A level. She never won a certificate, award or prize throughout any of her schools. Apparently it was because she didn’t have to try to do well.

Oh I feel for him and you. At our school it’s normally each child gets its once a term (they double or triple up). One term my hard working, well behaved daughter didn’t get one at all and it sent a terrible message to her seeing the naughtier kids get one and her not. Schools have got to be quite careful about negative impacts as well as positive. She was 7 saying ‘well maybe this week I need to be naughty and then they might give it to me next week for showing better behaviour’. I mentioned it to the head at the start of the next term and she got one during week 1 but she then had the awareness to realise it was because she was missed the previous term and was then even more pissed off she got one by default for something not very meaningful.

She is quite a perceptive child but even then, if the system can be seen through and viewed as unjust and pointless by a 7 year old, it’s not a very good one.

We had to email DD’s year 3 teacher last year about this same issue. Getting towards the end of the year, she’d not had star of the week and was very very aware that some kids had had it twice when she’d not been awarded it once. She always was so well behaved, helped the teacher, worked at greater depth and she felt so invisible because of it.
She’d come home on a Friday and cry because Freddie the naughty kid had been given it for the second time as he’d not hit anyone that week. She became so disheartened.
We had numerous chats with her and (rightly or wrongly) said they award it to the naughty kids first to prompt them to behave better whereas she was always well behaved she didn’t need that encouragement.
An email along the lines of this is upsetting DD, what can she do to work towards getting Star of the week helped the teacher understand how missed out she was feeling. The teacher spoke to us and reiterated to the class that everyone would get the chance to get the award. Dd did get it before the end of the year but even this year has not forgotten how it made her feel.

@TheGriffle DC do have to get used to disappointments though. I dislike these awards but intelligent dc see through them in the end. It’s not the worst thing dc face. My DD never got the pretend birthday cake and happy birthday sung to her in EY or KS1 - August birthday. It’s not fair of course but teachers don’t think as much as they should about feelings. Big happy birthday sung to all summer borns before the holiday sorted it, but DD didn’t dwell on it and I was more annoyed than she was!