Cristina Odone is founder of The Parenting Circle.
From our UK edition
Despite still searching for a social media policy, the government launched – with great fanfare – a pilot this week involving 300 teenagers. Over the next six weeks, these children will be subject to varying restrictions on their use of social media, ranging from time limits to a complete ban. Events have overtaken this social
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Young people are unwilling to go to school. They are unwilling to go to the office. And they are unwilling to go to war for this country. Is this about Generation Z being born with a natural predisposition to laziness and solipsism – or is it about parents who want to be their child’s best
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The Jesuits had it all wrong. They famously insisted: ‘Give me a boy at seven and I will give you a man.’ Schooling could change everything. Today, neuroscientists, educationalists and psychologists know that the clay is set much, much, earlier. Whether boy or girl, the brain and its neural pathways will be formed by the
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Louis, 9, rocks back and forth. He can draw the solar system and place every planet on it, but he will not meet your gaze and a high-pitched voice will have him clap his hands to his ears in agony. Louis’s parents recognised his autism early on and sought a referral to a specialist from
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Bridget Phillipson, Secretary of State for Education, has finally turned her attention back to her brief – and there is a big group of school parents who wish she hadn’t. Parents whose children have special needs are up in arms about the latest announcement that has come from the Department of Education. It was bad
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Parents must be ‘front and centre’ in their children’s education, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has told schools. Her upcoming white paper will introduce clear expectations around parental engagement with schools. The idea, presumably, is that parents have the confidence and know-how to oversee their children, allowing teachers to focus on teaching rather than on being a
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Welcome to the Isle of Sheppey, a stretch of pebbled beaches and caravan parks that regularly stars in the ONS’s index of multiple deprivation. Health outcomes, like household incomes, are well below the national average: the life expectancy here is nine years lower for men and four years lower for women, while the rates of
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A friend remembers how, growing up in Ceausescu’s Romania, she and her classmates were encouraged by teachers to spy on their parents for dissenting opinions or unpatriotic behaviour. Such monstrous behaviour would never be countenanced here, right? Wrong. In the poisonous atmosphere of the family courts, quarrelling parents are known to plant devices on their
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In news bound to make Keir Starmer nervous, voters in 121 Labour-held constituencies with high rates of child poverty are reportedly prepared to support Nigel Farage at the next election and hand their seats to Reform. This shock projection, via the Financial Times and More in Common polling, came less than a fortnight after the
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‘Transition’ is a word much bandied about in education circles. No, this is not about gender. Rather, when school staff talk about transition they mean that pivotal moment between primary and secondary school. This is the moment when a child moves from a small (average roll number of 280 pupils) and familiar place, probably within
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The brothers Grimm knew that it sometimes takes a child to call out what grown-ups think but dare not say. Whether it is that the emperor wears no clothes or that our parliamentarians show little compassion, you can count on children to speak the truth. Does it take a 17-year-old to point out that we
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Today, every parent of five-year-olds will find out what school their child will be going to in September. The likelihood is that they will get one of their top choices – last year, 93.2 per cent of families received an offer from their first choice of primary school. Reception class is the introduction to ‘proper’ school, and
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Parents are up in arms. The Prime Minister’s decision to allow all state secondary schools to screen Adolescence, the scary Netflix series about a 13-year-old murdering a classmate for taunting him online as being undesirable, has parenting groups fuming. Keir Starmer believes that showing the drama will teach adolescents about the dangers lurking online which are
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Shakespeare, Dickens, JK Rowling: Britain’s literary heritage is undisputable. Creativity, emotional depth and universal values have ensured that Hamlet, Oliver Twist and Harry Potter are familiar to school children (and grown-ups) around the world. While other pillars of the proud national legacy – the BBC, the army, the NHS – have crumbled around us, we
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‘I was different,’ Bill Gates describes his childish self, ‘School… felt slow. I found it hard to stay interested in what we were learning; my thoughts wandered. When something did catch my attention, I might leap up from my seat, frantically raise my hand or shout out an answer.’ In his autobiography, Source Code: My
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The proportion of children staying away from school may be alarming – one in five – but the proportion of parents – almost one in three – who do not see school as a necessary part of their child’s daily schedule is even more so. Keir Starmer’s government understood that the connection between parents and
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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’ –
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Hard cases make bad laws. There can be no harder case than that of Sara Sharif, whose torture and eventual murder by her father and stepmother moved the presiding judge to tears – and horrified us all. But this tragedy should not launch a witch hunt. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, fast-tracked by the
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It takes a lot of effort for ‘Johnny’ to take off his coat every morning when he joins his reception class. That’s because his teacher or a teaching assistant have to help the five year old pull his arms out from the sleeves of his duffel coat. Johnny is not disabled in any way; he
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The Toto Washlet toilet: at the press of a button, a jet of clean warm water sprays your nether regions; press another button and warm air dries them. The sleek bowl, a masterpiece of Japanese technology, can be fixed at the right height for your use, ensuring easy access. At around £3,000 this stylish, ultramodern
