There’s no future in the all-work, no-play policy of self-protective schools

If a child will simply not manage As and A*s, what then? Do schools eject them?

The head referred us to the cutting in our packs. It was the school league table for England and Wales and, sure enough, this establishment had risen up the rankings.

It was at that point I switched off. I wanted to know what the school was like for our son, wanted to know that he’d be encouraged and nurtured, that he could explore different subjects, and it did not matter if he failed. But within minutes we were being invited to make comparisons between this place and that place, and their respective percentages of A*s.

It never used to be like this. I’m pretty sure my parents weren’t discussing exam results before I’d even gone to my secondary school. It simply wasn’t done, back then.

I was willing for a display of enjoyment and passion. But it never came. The league table was followed by talks from the head boy and girl. Yes, they loved the school but never really said why, and they were destined to go to the university of their choosing. Around me, the other parents nodded. Oxbridge, Russell Group, American universities – they were all mentioned. And the nodding grew more vigorous. Two words entered my head: factory and control.

Yes, we’re at that stage of trying to find a secondary school for our son. I’ve got five children, three of whom are grown-up. So I’ve done this before. I’m battle-hardened, a veteran of cups of tea and biscuits with the head, tours of classrooms (what do you look for in a maths room?), sport halls and theatres, and talks with staff and pupils who tell you next to nothing and certainly don’t tell you what the place is really like.

In my experience there are a few things I look for: a caring, keen, authoritative head. Everything flows from the top and it’s this person who should be stamping their character on the school. Always, it’s the head that swings it. Do I want this person to be in charge of my child’s education? Do I instantly feel respect for them? Do I like them?

The best are the ones who blend the sales guff with a certain knowingness – there’s a twinkle in their eye as they rattle off the hyperbole. No, they don’t believe all of it, either. But they’re letting you know they don’t believe all of it. You want that twinkle, that honesty. I’m studying the words they use. “Pastoral” is a good one to look out for. Or not, as the head at one school was so desperate to gush about exam results that they completely forgot to mention the other aspects of school life. Or perhaps they didn’t, and there simply wasn’t any interest in anything apart from those A*s.

Listening to them, I’d like to ask them about the characters they’re developing, about discipline, and what do they do if a child simply will not manage As and A*s. What then? Do they eject them, as so many now do, before the coursework starts, in case, woe betide, they might slip a few places in the rankings?

Perhaps it’s because I’m a journalist and paid to be nosy, but I read the noticeboards. What am I looking for? Signs of life. There was one school I visited where many of the boards were either empty or the notices were faded and clearly old. Extra-curricular? Not at this school. And why does that matter? Because the clubs and societies – and I don’t mean the “homework club” – reveal a staff that is prepared to do more, willing to share their own interests and hobbies.

If all there is, is working for exams and nothing during the lunch-break or after school, it really is a greenhouse, producing children devoid of personality, unlikely to impress in an interview, unable to win over colleagues and clients once they join the world of work. That’s another sign while going round the school: confident, relaxed children, comfortable in their own skin.

When employers talk about school-leavers and graduates not having the skills they seek, it’s often not the exam qualifications they’re referring to. It’s the ability to engage, to look in the eye, and hold a conversation. If the most formative years of their lives have been spent with their heads down, and often for year after year without any break from the cycle of exams, what do we expect?

In front of me, a woman has written down the detail that the children can have a cooked breakfast and lunch, and the school chefs use only the finest, sustainable ingredients. And allergies are of course, catered for. Why? By making a note of something that most schools lay claim to provide is she sealing it – is it the organic food that for her is the clincher?

No, because she also wrote down that the school has a well-stocked library, a state-of-the-art computer room and language laboratory. And they go on school trips. Blow me down. She even wrote down where the head girl was planning to go to university.

Perhaps she was not a parent at all but someone’s PA, told to go along and write it all down. That’s one explanation I could think of – either that or she specialises in the banal, in taking notes of things, all of which were described at length in the accompanying literature.

It was, I suspect, her way of taking something seriously. It was also about school, and at school you take notes. Or at least, she did. Her whole life had been this way, ever since school, where she’d been taught to write everything down and learn it off by heart, like a machine. Probably, I realised, at a school like this one.