The cruellest month

In six months’ time, my son is due to attend an assessment day for a nursery. The details on the nursery’s website are deliberately sketchy — presumably to avoid parents coaching their children — but it seems to involve my son being observed while he plays and graded on the results of his burbling: it sounds very much like an interview. He is going to be two and a half.

It is easy to be satirical about a child going for an interview at the age of two and a half — his PowerPoint skills are not up to it; we haven’t arranged a single internship for him; he doesn’t have any particularly insightful questions to ask. But my wife and I thought we had better put him forward for it. We don’t particularly care about this nursery — I can’t imagine the quality of the crayons varies much between different providers — but it is the feeder to a prep school which is the feeder to a high school which has some of the best A-level results in north London. We got the impression that this interview would decide his entire future.

Parents become students in this. In north London — the world centre of competitive parenting — there are seminars for new parents and parents-to-be about navigating the English school system. An American friend of mine went to one, and was commended for being ahead of the curve because she was the only one there who was not visibly pregnant. When she admitted that the reason she wasn’t visibly pregnant was because she’d already had her baby, and she was 15 months old, the other parents gasped and ignored her for the rest of the seminar.