Do we really need our children to 'catch up'?

You might think we’ve a vested interest in supporting the recent rhetoric about children needing to ‘catch up’ on missed education, potentially through private tuition. However, our stance is actually pretty much the opposite.

We’re not denying that children have missed learning opportunities through the prolonged absence from school. Yes, there are barriers and some of these may impact on the rest of their lives. But we strongly believe that if we change the approach and the mindset our children will be fine.

Many thousands of families will be worse off due to the pandemic; bleak pictures are being painted about all sorts of aspects of life, including education. However, it is now more important than ever to demonstrate positivity to our children and young people. Let’s not focus on what has been missed, but on what has been achieved and experienced such as family time and a slower pace of life. 

As far as learning and ‘catch up’ is concerned, every child is at their own particular point on their learning journey. They will have developed over school closures in many ways such as academic development, becoming more independent, cooking skills and understanding and appreciating nature, to mention a few. The important thing to do is to continue moving forward. Let’s focus on building resilience and using imaginative ways of making learning enjoyable. Cramming extra learning into holidays or making school days longer is not the answer. Ensuring our children are happy, confident and enthusiastic learners is far more important and impactful.

While schools and formal education have a crucial role to play, so too does attitude and temperament. People as diverse as Einstein, Simon Cowell, Thomas Edison and Richard Branson didn’t find school to their liking and sought their own highly successful paths through life. One thing they all have in common is self-confidence (arguably a little too much in some cases!), proof that with the right attributes and attitude, success is always possible.

So our overall position on ‘lost learning’ and ‘catch up’ is that, for us, it’s not quite the emergency the media would have us believe. We all have topics or concepts we perhaps don’t understand as well as others, or it takes us longer to get our heads around it. That’s just how it is. We can have extra support (such as tuition) to focus on that topic and we know schools have been doing this on an individual basis already. 

Instead, let’s concentrate on creating positive, confident and curious children who are happy and enthusiastic learners.

Measuring yourself everyday doesn’t make you taller, but treating your body well and fuelling it in a healthy manner will allow you to grow.