School days are the happiest days of your life, or so they say.
Mine weren’t idyllic, and they didn’t fully prepare me for the rough and tumble of the big bad world.
But I still look back nostalgically at All Saints CofE Primary and Normanton Grammar School in West Yorkshire.
They made my brain work, and I made many childhood friends.
So why are so many parents taking their kids out of school for home tuition? Numbers have doubled to 60,000 over the past five years – a small proportion of the eight million boys and girls in state education, but still a worrying trend.
And not surprising really. Schools these days are a battleground.
Paul Routledge: Public services don't profit from being privatised
Under-funded, staffed by overworked teachers struggling to keep order in classrooms of truculent, mollycoddled brats whose parents offer scant support.
So many pupils have autism, Asperger’s , ADHD or special educational needs that the system is crumbling. Referral units are bursting at the seams. Exclusions have doubled, fuelling gang warfare and knife crime on the streets.
And teachers may soon have a legal duty to identify violent youths. That shouldn’t be too hard – 17,500 children were suspended last year for assaults on school staff.
Sadly, parents too often take the side of troublesome little Johnny or Mary, even dishing out verbal abuse or worse. That is intolerable.
Paul Routledge: 'Labour must put national interest first and help Theresa May'
Most migrants to this country hugely value free education for their kids, which they could never have in their country of origin. They respect teachers.
British parents should take a leaf out of their book, not their children out of school.
Fearful of a generation receiving inadequate education, the Government is setting up a register of home-schooled children to monitor standards.
All well and good, but it does nothing to solve the real and growing crisis in state schools.
Happy days? Give them a break.
