Hugh Reilly: Empower pupils but don’t let them speak

I wistfully recall the occasion that my sons, both mere striplings at the time, badgered me into hiring a rowing boat for two hours at Hogganfield Loch, the Lake Constance of Glasgow’s east end.

As I toiled to pull the miniature hulk through the water, taking great care to avoid colliding with a drifting dead dog and a half-submerged perambulator, my issue busied themselves by making quack-quack noises to vainly attract web-footed feathered friends. When they tired of this, my bored progeny dropped their paws into the water, which added unnecessary drag that compelled me to increase my calorific output.

At that moment, I decided to “empower” my children. Their enthusiasm to swap seats with pater and grapple with the oars dissipated after a few strenuous strokes. The little galley slaves pleaded for me to resume rowing but by then I had taken off my T-shirt and begun to tap out an intimidating stroke-beat. If memory serves me well, it was the final voyage we undertook as a family.

These days, empowering children is all the rage. Once, it was deemed the job of Sir to evaluate a child’s progress but in today’s Golden Age of Learning it has become fashionable to allow kids to judge the efforts of their classmates. Peer evaluation is loved by inspectors and line managers. At the fag-end of my career as a burnt-out chalkie, I ached to showcase the sheer amount of peer evaluation that was part of the learning experience in my classroom.

When wee Johnny eagerly pointed out the mistakes made by a visibly upset Mary, the HMIE officer sitting at the rear of the class slipped into a state of almost frenzied ecstasy. Although by then somewhat light-headed, he just about managed to hold onto his clipboard and tick the boxes I’d offered on a platter.

Foolishly, I thought I had borne witness to the peak of pupil empowerment. I was wrong. Last week, in the Highlands, a kilted man holding aloft a burning cross – who was initially mistaken for an Olympic torch bearer with a duff sat-nav– carried the newsflash that a school in northern Alba had come up with a pioneering format for parents evenings. Rather than the staid, traditional event where mum and dad dress up and speak to a teaching professional, parents are given the choice to listen to a child-led verbal report. Sceptic that I am I was somewhat perturbed but, thankfully, like all education initiatives, it has already been deemed to be a resounding success.

Why then, do the nagging voices in my head complain about the tweeness of the scheme? Sure, kids with good grades will embrace this set-up, happy to let mother and father know that they are excelling in all aspects of their education.

This will please aforementioned supportive mum and dad, probably because they completed most of the projects and greatly assisted with the homework exercises. However, the veracity of reports delivered by slow learners/fast-forgetters must be questioned. There is an inherent danger that any success will be exaggerated and obvious failings will fall not so much under the radar, more into a dark underground bunker brimming with squabbling badgers.

To be fair, the classroom teacher is present at the happening, providing, in theory at least, a backstop facility to temper any Walter Mitty-type pronouncements of a pupil’s worth. However, in this situation, Sir will find himself on the horns of a dilemma. The evidence-absent utterances of a confident dolt have the advantage of improving the perceived teaching abilities of the dominie. On the other hand, hearing an outrageous self- evaluation forces the perplexed pedagogue to interject with a modicum of reality.

In my opinion, teachers attending such parents evenings only lend credibility to a bankrupt format. It’s insane that a professional teacher earning in excess of £34,000 per year can sit with her feet on the handlebars and watch a kid cutely relate his educational achievements (or lack of) to gushing/suicidal parents.

I accept it is an unfortunate fact that problems exist with the standard parents evening. Long queues to see teachers of subjects such as Maths and English leads to the kind of fidgeting and anxiety levels one normally associates with people lining up for a methadone appointment.

Ultimately, however, children should be seen, not heard, at parents evenings.