Another primary school dressing-up day looms. This term it’s the Victorians. Before that it was the Romans, and the Egyptians. My wife and I scrabble around painting cardboard and tying up sheets, sometimes even buying a costume that our nine-year-old won’t find embarrassing. It seems like harmless fun. But dressing-up days, extra homework, pressure on school attendance and the expectation that parents should do more to support their children’s education are taking a toll. You can chart the discontent on the Mumsnet website, where parents complain in their thousands against such demands, particularly from primary schools. One suggested dealing with the dressing-up request on world book day by giving children a day off, and saying they’d gone as the Invisible Man.
Sometimes parents reject school rules out of self-interest. Figures released in June showed 397,851 daily absences in England between September and December 2008—an increase of more than 20,500 in two years largely due to parents taking holidays in term-time, when they are cheaper. But increasingly there is an ethical dimension to parental non-compliance. Tom Hodgkinson, author of The Idle Parent (Hamish Hamilton) makes a virtue of taking his kids for weekday camping breaks. More serious is Kevin Rooney, a parent and a teacher from Hertfordshire, who recently spoke out against the increasingly formalised involvement of parents in homework and other areas of school life. He thinks their time can be better spent with their children on other things: “A parent should be free to parent, and a teacher to teach, but there’s been a real blurring of the line.”
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