Cristina Odone

'Do you know where your children are?' I remember watching TV in Washington D.C. in 1969 and listening to my parents’ shock at the public service announcement. Who wouldn’t know what their offspring was up to? Did the government really need to remind Mum and Dad of their responsibility? My parents had just arrived from Italy, carrying with them a host of unspoken but crystal-clear rules about raising children. Within months, they learned that they had been naïve to think these were the norm in urban America. 'Let them learn from their mistakes' was the prevailing pedagogy, and violent youths on the rampage made daily headlines. No one seemed interested in the connection between the two trends.

Despite still searching for a social media policy, the government launched – with great fanfare – a pilot this week involving 300 teenagers. Over the next six weeks, these children will be subject to varying restrictions on their use of social media, ranging from time limits to a complete ban. Events have overtaken this social experiment, however, and the government’s stalling on what to do about how kids use the internet may no longer be feasible. On Wednesday in LA, a jury found Meta and Google guilty of intentionally building addictive social media platforms that harm children’s mental health and awarded £4.5 million in damages to 'Kaley', the 20 year old plaintiff, who claimed the platforms had ruined her childhood.

Louis, 9, rocks back and forth. He can draw the solar system and place every planet on it, but he will not meet your gaze and a high-pitched voice will have him clap his hands to his ears in agony. Louis’s parents recognised his autism early on and sought a referral to a specialist from their GP. Early diagnosis – and a middle-class postcode – has helped them seek prompt speech and occupational therapy for their son. This came with guidance for Louis’s parents on navigating the unfamiliar bureaucracy of special needs education: how to obtain a needs assessment from the council; ensure Louis received an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan that met his needs; enrol him in the local primary school.

Bridget Phillipson, Secretary of State for Education, has finally turned her attention back to her brief – and there is a big group of school parents who wish she hadn’t. Parents whose children have special needs are up in arms about the latest announcement that has come from the Department of Education. It was bad enough to hear that, given Phillipson’s other pressing commitments (her doomed attempt to be elected deputy Labour party leader earlier in the Autumn being one), the publication of the white paper on schools’ special needs (SEND) provision would be postponed until next year.

Parents must be 'front and centre' in their children's education, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has told schools. Her upcoming white paper will introduce clear expectations around parental engagement with schools. The idea, presumably, is that parents have the confidence and know-how to oversee their children, allowing teachers to focus on teaching rather than on being a therapist, a social worker, or a nanny. If only. Parents have lost confidence, courage, and, as a result, authority. Teachers quite understandably fear 'engagement' will require teaching parenting skills that have grown rusty: too many mothers and fathers seem to have abrogated all responsibility for their child’s hygiene, toilet training, and vaccinations.

Welcome to the Isle of Sheppey, a stretch of pebbled beaches and caravan parks that regularly stars in the ONS’s index of multiple deprivation. Health outcomes, like household incomes, are well below the national average: the life expectancy here is nine years lower for men and four years lower for women, while the rates of diabetes and obesity are higher. At Thistle Hill Academy, a primary school in the northwest corner of the Isle, teachers have been contending admirably with their community’s challenges – including the news that 47 per cent of the Reception class they expect in September will have special education needs (SEND). High levels of SEND children is commonplace here and in schools across Kent.

In news bound to make Keir Starmer nervous, voters in 121 Labour-held constituencies with high rates of child poverty are reportedly prepared to support Nigel Farage at the next election and hand their seats to Reform. This shock projection, via the Financial Times and More in Common polling, came less than a fortnight after the Reform party leader declared that he would scrap the two-child benefit cap. Could it be that limiting benefits to families with two children, a policy once so popular with the public, has lost its appeal?

'Transition' is a word much bandied about in education circles. No, this is not about gender. Rather, when school staff talk about transition they mean that pivotal moment between primary and secondary school. This is the moment when a child moves from a small (average roll number of 280 pupils) and familiar place, probably within walking distance of their home, where they were the oldest and most important cohort; to a site often with five times as many pupils, where, aged 11, they are once again the pip-squeaks, braving strange new faces and routines, after most likely having travelled a long way from home (up to 8 miles in rural areas). This step change is proving more challenging than anyone had previously suspected.

The brothers Grimm knew that it sometimes takes a child to call out what grown-ups think but dare not say. Whether it is that the emperor wears no clothes or that our parliamentarians show little compassion, you can count on children to speak the truth. Does it take a 17-year-old to point out that we shouldn’t be focusing on assisted dying but on assisted living? Take the latest report from the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza. Asked about the Assisted Suicide Bill, which reaches report stage this week, the teenage respondents’ approach is thoughtful and compassionate.

Today, every parent of five-year-olds will find out what school their child will be going to in September. The likelihood is that they will get one of their top choices – last year, 93.2 per cent of families received an offer from their first choice of primary school. Reception class is the introduction to 'proper' school, and the tiny tots will do more duck-duck-goose than A-B-C. But today’s children arrive incapable of even this light schedule. As we now have heard so often, many arrive in nappies and many will not know how to speak properly or play nicely. Almost half of teachers say parents have no idea what being school-ready means.

Parents are up in arms. The Prime Minister’s decision to allow all state secondary schools to screen Adolescence, the scary Netflix series about a 13-year-old murdering a classmate for taunting him online as being undesirable, has parenting groups fuming. Keir Starmer believes that showing the drama will teach adolescents about the dangers lurking online which are driving toxic relationships. Parents argue instead that the move risks subjecting school children as young as 11 to violent and sexual content. The roll-out has the potential to harm those children who have experienced similarly abusive relationships, alienating and retraumatising them. The content, they say, is age-inappropriate and messages misconstrued.

Shakespeare, Dickens, JK Rowling: Britain’s literary heritage is undisputable. Creativity, emotional depth and universal values have ensured that Hamlet, Oliver Twist and Harry Potter are familiar to school children (and grown-ups) around the world. While other pillars of the proud national legacy – the BBC, the army, the NHS – have crumbled around us, we could still take pride in our peerless literary canon.  No longer. The National Literacy Trust, the very institution that should be protecting our literary heritage, is encouraging us to replace reading with audio. They have launched a campaign, #GrowAGenerationOfReaders, that risks pushing teachers and parents to supplant 'traditional reading' with audio. 'Just one in three children and young people say they enjoy reading.

The proportion of children staying away from school may be alarming – one in five –  but the proportion of parents - almost one in three - who do not see school as a necessary part of their child’s daily schedule is even more so. Keir Starmer's government understood that the connection between parents and schools needed fixing – and settled on Ofsted as part of the solution. For many, however, Ofsted was part of the problem. The suicide of Ruth Perry, a much-loved headteacher, had highlighted the pressure that school inspections placed on the teaching profession. The majority of teachers viewed the regulator negatively.

For a truly educational experience, visit your neighbourhood primary school. Watch the goings-on in the playground: tiny tots rushing around in nappies, pushing and shoving one another, tantrums puncturing the air. You can’t understand what most of them are saying because they mumble – inarticulate and mostly incomprehensible. Say hello to the ‘Covid babies’ – in our classrooms and out of order. Teachers up and down the country are welcoming to their Reception classes the babies of the early months of the pandemic – only to find that this cohort is like no other. A survey out today of more than 1,000 teachers and 1,000 parents of Reception-aged children in England and Wales paints a scary picture.

Hard cases make bad laws. There can be no harder case than that of Sara Sharif, whose torture and eventual murder by her father and stepmother moved the presiding judge to tears – and horrified us all. But this tragedy should not launch a witch hunt. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, fast-tracked by the Department for Education and unveiled on Tuesday, risks turning all home-schooling parents into suspects and their children into victims.  Home schooling should be seen as part of the education ecosystem Home schooling is a symptom of schools failing families. That failure can be administrative, such as a dearth of school places in your local area; or more fundamental – such as the inability of your SEND child’s schools to meet their needs.

It takes a lot of effort for 'Johnny' to take off his coat every morning when he joins his reception class. That’s because his teacher or a teaching assistant have to help the five year old pull his arms out from the sleeves of his duffel coat. Johnny is not disabled in any way; he simply was never taught how to dress himself. 'School readiness' is a catch-all term for some alarming failures. Children who are not toilet trained, who don’t know how to hold a spoon, who can’t sit still. Some can’t articulate properly because at home they are not talked to enough. Others come to school smelling so badly, teachers are spending on average £27 of their own money to buy hygiene products for their charges.