Opinion: It's official: success at school starts at home
18/09/2007
After years of insisting there can be no excuses for failure, politicians across the political spectrum appear to have accepted that home background is the paramount factor determining how children do at school.
It's official: success at school starts at home, says Mike Baker.
Finally, the penny has dropped. After years of insisting there can be no excuses for failure, politicians across the political spectrum appear to have accepted that home background is the paramount factor determining how children do at school. Since they spend only about 14% of their time in school, you might have thought it would be obvious that home factors are critical. But successive governments have preferred to focus solely on school factors to explain educational failure. Perhaps that was because the task of improving schools, big enough in itself, appeared less daunting than the task of banishing poverty. It is interesting to note the recent change of emphasis. The very act of creating the new Department for Children, Schools and Families underlines a holistic approach to education. Bringing together, in a single department, all aspects of childhood is a tacit acknowledgement that you cannot divorce home upbringing from school achievement. The recent launch of a public consultation on a 10-year Children's Plan further underlines the new strategy.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/comment/story/0,,2171095,00.html
