Are we looking in the wrong direction?

The wrong deficit – are we looking in the wrong direction?

In education we are often driven by deficit narratives; we look for what isn’t going well and then address these with precision, resources and often an uncomfortable and stressful fervour for fear of widening gaps or somehow being left behind. There are multiple resources published, pushed or promoted which indicate and outline how things need to be enhanced, caught up, gaps closed, and results improved.

There is, of course, never anything inherently wrong with looking for what could be improved; of looking to other statistical neighbours or successful models for ideas around improvement; neither is there anything wrong with ensuring that high educational standards and achievement are always championed for our children. But what are we looking at in terms of deficit? What might our children truly be deficit in? Where are the gaps in their experiences, understanding, development and knowledge that we may be unintentionally sidelining in a relatively narrow educational quest? What may actually be soaking potentially unnoticed to form the future saltpetre of an educational or societal explosion of challenges, whilst we are feverishly caught up in our current debate about their educational canon?

A toe dip in the lived experiences of our children is not pleasant. The UK is currently named the unhappiest country for children in a 2024 survey by the Children’s Society. A 2023 World Health Organization (WHO) report on obesity levels in Europe, showed that roughly one in three primary school-aged children is living with obesity or are overweight, and this is only set to rise further. There is a 61% increase in boys living with obesity and 75% increase in girls living with obesity. Sport England 2023 reported that only 46.4% of children aged 5-16 met the recommended 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily; OfCom reports detail that non-school screen time for 8–15-year-olds in 3 hours 56 minutes on a school day and 4 hours 18 minutes on weekends. There has been an increase of 1 in 6 children identified with anxiety or depression up from 1 in 9 in 2017. Over 1/3 children are now living in poverty in the UK; alongside this, if current trends of homelessness continue then a report by the Chartered Institute of Housing says that by 2029 there will be over 200,000 homeless children in the UK – up 26% from current levels.

We have some of the unhealthiest and apparently the unhappiest children in the world.

Just typing that sentence and re reading it is tragic – some of the unhealthiest and the unhappiest children in the world.

Ask any parents, or indeed any adult what they’d want for a child and happiness is likely to feature. Children (especially young children) spend a huge part of their waking hours in our schools and so we cannot absolve ourselves of involvement in and contribution to the overall health and happiness outcomes of our children. The role of school is changing and has changed rapidly in recent years and has called into sharp focus a revisit of the purpose of school, but regardless of this wider purpose, we must put physical and mental health and wellbeing of our children front and centre in all our decision making. This is not however, a soft and permissive call to action to create schools that are the Disneyland or chocolate factory of children’s daydreams; this is to look robustly at what our children are deficit in and build schools and approaches that nourish their cognitive capacities and capabilities but also recognise the need to support children to be healthy, happy, joyful and playful which is the natural state of a child. There is a neat equilibrium that needs to and can be found between the championing of academic standards and also developing young people to be able to thrive physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually, creatively and in age and stage appropriate ways. It is an intensely lazy dichotomy to assume that play or playfulness, joy and delight are the enemies of effective instruction; they are not adversaries to be pitched in explosive battle; they are comrades in arms in a well deployed pedagogical arsenal. Play and playfulness does not mean instruction never happens; effective instruction does not mean play or playfulness never happens. This is as foolish a stance as insisting that breathing can only happen when inhaling or only when exhaling. They serve two distinct and separate purposes; have distinct and separate approaches and are organised and deployed in different ways at different times. This does not make one or the other “better”; they are different elements, but both are necessary for the effective learning and wider development of our children, especially our under 7s.

Recently, as a profession, we have been focusing with intense effort on two elements – how does learning happen, and what should we teach in the curriculum. Endless books, CPD hours, reports, staff meetings and documents have been drawn up around the country and yet here we are – the unhappiest children in the world, and some of the unhealthiest.
There is somewhat of an element of violins on the Titanic here. We have played many a curriculum and cogsci tune whilst our children’s happiness and health sinks.

That is not to say our endeavours have been misplaced or wrong; the learning undertaken as a profession will no doubt bear fruit in many ways, but we also have to look at the long-term bigger picture for our children. We cannot obscure and obfuscate their unhappiness and unhealthiness with a giant flashcard, or spaced practice our way out of these grim statistics.

So, what do we do? Schools can’t do everything and as with so many things, much of what is seen to be going wrong in society is often placed at the doors of schools with little to no funding but a huge weight of expectation that schools will “fix” whatever problem it is that has hit the headlines that week.

But this isn’t an additional thing. This isn’t another reactionary knee jerk to an eye-catching headline.

These are our children.

These are our children, and they are miserable.

So many of our children are unhealthy, unhappy, struggling with their mental and physical health; we have more children living in poverty than within any time in any of our staff’s living memory; we have more children with SEND and speech and language challenges than ever before; and we have children who spend more time on a device each day than looking into the eyes of another living soul.

These are our children.

This is their childhood.

They are not an additional thing to be done. Their happiness and wellbeing should not be another thing to whack on the SEF or SDP; it should be part of the barometer of our work; the temperature check of our approaches; and the reason we pull up in the car park every day.

Yes, success and achievement can support happiness and future wellbeing and whilst we have clearly tilled the cognitive and curriculum soil with admirable and assiduous earnestness, we may have potentially and inadvertently left fallow the golden fields of childhood.

So, what do we do? How do we maintain high standards, informed by what we know works within learning whilst addressing these potential wider deficits?

To be continued