Star comment: Should we punish the parents?
Schools are for teaching and homes are for playing computer games and watching television. Discuss.
In this era in which successfully attributing blame to others is given a high priority, it is very easy for parents, on perusing their child's awful school report, to say that the teachers are rubbish and the school is not doing its job.
Education is, though, a shared responsibility, something Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, has underlined in comments which will not be welcomed by those who hide behind well-worn excuses when their child is not doing well at school.
The idea that poverty is linked to poor educational performance is a line of reasoning which is attractive to those promoting a wider political ideology. But according to Sir Michael, poverty is too often used as an excuse for failure by white working class families.
"It's not about income or poverty. Where families believe in education they do well. If they love their children they should support them in schools," he says.
His remedy? He wants head teachers to be given the power to impose financial penalties on parents who allow homework to be left undone, who miss parents' evenings, or fail to read with their children. These measures would take things to a different level, elevating head teachers into the role of the education police. Whether head teachers generally would welcome this has to be open to question.
It is one thing to have a word with parents about their children's education and suggest tactfully that more could be done at home, and it is quite another to slap fines on parents.
One way is the path of co-operation, and the other is the path of confrontation which would inevitably cause bad feeling in the same way as it does when heads exercise the power to deny parents their requests to take their boy or girl on holiday during school term-time.
It all comes down to whether people can be made better and more responsible parents by the stick, or the carrot. With wayward children, it is always going to be difficult whatever approach is adopted.
Sir Michael says it is striking that white British children are doing worst of all, and that immigrant communities are doing very well educationally.
The obvious inference is that the latter are more interested and involved in their children's education, and that the former comfort themselves with excuses for failure.
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