Parents are asking too much of teachers

For a truly educational experience, visit your neighbourhood primary school. Watch the goings-on in the playground: tiny tots rushing around in nappies, pushing and shoving one another, tantrums puncturing the air. You can’t understand what most of them are saying because they mumble – inarticulate and mostly incomprehensible. Say hello to the ‘Covid babies’ – in our classrooms and out of order.

Teachers up and down the country are welcoming to their Reception classes the babies of the early months of the pandemic – only to find that this cohort is like no other.

A survey out today of more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of Reception-aged children in England and Wales paints a scary picture. Scary, because their parents seem to ignore both symptoms and consequences of a devastating development – the transfer of responsibility from family to school.

The survey, by Kindred Squared, reveals that 90 per cent of parents say their child is ready to enter Reception class, yet teachers say one in three (33 per cent) children are not.