The sad demise of the scathing school report

As the first term of the school year draws to a close, pupils’ reports will soon be landing, encrypted and password-protected, on parents’ smartphones. But once they’ve finally managed to open them to find how little Amelia or Noah has been performing, there will be another code for them to crack: what on earth the teachers are actually trying to say about their child.

These days, reports tend to be written with the help of AI software or templates, which makes it impossible to work out how your child is really doing. In our super-sensitive age, many schools now play it safe by couching all comments as positives, and only using approved adjectives from word banks and drop-down menus. The result is that the real meaning gets obscured by a thick fog of bland generalisations, in case it offends a parent or pupil.

Even that time-honoured put-down, ‘Could do better’, has slipped out of use, replaced by gentle hints that it would help if Felix ‘took a more self-directed approach to learning in order to reach his full potential’.

An Eton housemaster wrote of young Boris Johnson: ‘I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else’

As a parent of two children, now out the other side of the school system, I have noticed this homogenisation getting worse over the years.