The home and school relationship - can it be fixed?

As a clinical psychologist working in CAMHS, adolescents tell me just how much school pressure they feel. Many of the young people I see adopt either a coping strategy of relentlessly working, or dropping out of school completely – both of which are terrible for mental health. Year after year, The Children's Society publishes data analysing children's wellbeing, and school and schoolwork come up consistently as one of the main areas impacting children's happiness. However, compared to the impact of social media, school is rarely discussed in the mainstream media.  

According to recent research from the States, by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues, young people who attend high-achieving schools have mental health problems 6 or 7 times higher than average. These children are often surrounded by systems of pressure (home, school, peers), which leads to a 'survival of the fittest' mentality and increasing mental illness. In my book Good Enough: A Framework for Modern Parenting, I look at the ill effects of a culture of perfectionism in parents, education and society, including social media, which contributes to many mental illnesses (see Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt's 2022 book on perfectionism in childhood and adolescence).

Perfectionism and the pursuit of excellence are generally seen as positive things, and voices about their costs are less often heard. In education, there is an assumption that more work is always best, yet there are many victims of this culture. In 2019, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill published a meta-analysis showing that socially prescribed perfectionism is on the increase amongst college-age students. Psychologists need to be speaking out about this, and more research and data are needed on the impact of school pressure on young people in the UK.

I wonder if our own profession is contributing to perfectionistic standards through qualification creepage. Some universities do not just require a 2i in a Psychology degree to study Clinical Psychology, but a high 2i at a particular percentage grade. Many applicants are forced to get a Master's or PhD to be considered for the course. Is there any research evidence that these applicants manage academics better? Or indeed make better Clinical Psychologists?

I don't just worry about the high achievers, though. I continue to worry about the forgotten third of education – a third of pupils fail to get their Maths and English GCSE, and many are stuck in successive re-takes (see my piece in the TES). What does this do to these pupils psychologically?

It seems that it might evoke anger, learned helplessness or a feeling that they don't matter. Business leader Paul Reed argues that policies that aimed for 50 per cent to go to university leave the other 50 per cent marginalised, uncatered for in the education system and without a route into work. We know that many young people are disenfranchised from school or society as a whole, with increases in absenteeism at school, and post-school increases in young people not in education, employment or training, and many of these young people feel they are unable to work because of ill health.

The relationship between schools and parents has changed: the parent-consumer at the school gate is a more demanding customer. Over the last couple of generations, globalisation, consumerism, and the visual, 24-hour media cycle have arguably increased aspirations for all. There are many signs of a parent body engaged in their children's education and ambitious for their future, such as increased use of tutors and the growth of SAT/revision books for sale. There has been a growth of an opinion-based culture in society: we are now asked to review every aspect of life, from a parcel delivery to an airport toilet! 

And deference to authority has decreased. While there are undoubted benefits of these changes, it is a fertile mix which makes it more likely that parents will feel empowered to give their opinion to a school. Added to which, many parents are struggling to make ends meet, and under a lot of pressure with the cost-of-living crisis, perhaps making the desire for their child to do well more intense, and tempers more fraught when obstacles arise.

Looking at the interface between home and school, I wonder whether this border has ever been so fraught? Nearly all school leaders (94 per cent) are reporting an increase in complaints from parents, and in addition, parents often take their complaints to multiple bodies such as Ofsted and the Department for Education. Teachers and school leaders are talking of the level of complaints being 'unmanageable' and having an impact on teaching, staff retention and staff wellbeing. We have seen how this can spiral up with a recent news story of parents being arrested after allegedly harassing a school. Most importantly of all, pupils seem unhappy in school, with absenteeism in school having doubled compared to pre-COVID.

A recent survey for the TES suggested that the top two areas of complaint by parents are special educational needs provision and attendance. Many parents believe that schools are failing to meet their pupils' special educational needs. The number of requests for EHCPs, the actual number issued each year, and the total number of EHCPs currently active have all increased to all-time highs. A Guardian investigation suggested that meeting this demand for SEND provision is threatening to bankrupt many local authorities. Non-attendance complaints include parents wanting to take children on holiday and complaints about schools' responses to pupils 'refusing' or 'unable' to attend.

There are different reasons children do not attend, including emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA), a category which includes avoiding the anxiety school elicits, or the stressful situations involved (e.g. academic or social pressures) or separation anxiety. But some kids do not attend as they seek the greater pleasure from outside of school, effectively truancy. Covid contributed to this too, breaking the habits and norms that kept kids in school. Parents risk being fined if their child continues in non-attendance.

Given the amount of media coverage the relationship between social media and schools generates – illustrated by the response to the Netflix show Adolescence – the fact that this is a smaller area of complaint is perhaps a surprise. Other areas of complaint include other parents' behaviour, travel and parking, and a smaller category of other, which includes social media and safeguarding.

The language between parents and schools is often one of conflict. I think that the conflict can best be understood through systems theory. There are many layers in the education system: Government, Local Authorities, Academies and academy chains, school leaders and teachers, parents and pupils. I believe everyone in the system is coming at this with good intentions, but given the level of conflict, something has clearly broken down.

Looking at this conflict within a societal context, which includes global and governmental changes, can help us to understand more about how we got here. 

Since Thatcher in the 1980s, the rhetoric and reform in education from successive governments have been about marketisation, with the purpose of increasing standards and giving children opportunities. Parental choice has been encouraged; there has the break with local education authorities and a move to academisation. 

Pasi Sahlberg from the University of Melbourne calls this the 'global educational reform movement', with its acronym 'GERM' perhaps capturing his true feelings on this. Applying free-market models to education positions parents as consumers, and yet their consumer choice is highly limited by the economics and bureaucracy of school provision.

Whether local authority-led or an academy, schools are rightly a highly regulated provision, bound by hundreds of standards from asbestos to safeguarding, before anyone is taught anything. Whilst demands on schools increase, real-time funding has decreased. They are under constant scrutiny – compared and contrasted through league tables of exam or SATs results, and assessed through Ofsted. Teachers complain of spending too much time on general admin, as data input and monitoring increase. It is clear that schools are under pressure downward from societal (and community) factors, but also upwards from parents and the needs of pupils. Schools are squeezed on all sides.  

Decisions to rank and judge schools taken at a governmental level start a cascade of pressure on schools and heads, which passes to teachers, their pupils and their parents. The systemic becomes personal. Working with schools, they often talk of 'pushy parents' demanding more homework or better results, whereas parents bemoan schools and the pressure they put on their children. When emotions run high, everyone looks for someone to blame, but the truth is, we are all part of this system.

Parents are forced to prove that their child is suffering with a mental health diagnosis or special educational needs to get the support or understanding they believe their child needs, or risk fines if not. In her book The Age of Diagnosis, Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan argues that 'The pathologising of distress, the sanitising of the messy truth of life through biology, is a scientific and a social trend.

If we do indeed have an overdiagnosis crisis, how is society's expectation of success and perfection playing into that? We are encouraged to believe that anything we want should be possible for us, but that cannot always be true. I fear that medical diagnosis has become something that is used to reframe our perceived failings.' The SEND system privileges those with the resources to fight it: An EHCP application is not for the faint-hearted. Extra time in exams is over-represented by those in the private schools.  

The mismatch between expectation and reality is where unhappiness and conflict can fester: Mo Gawdat, in the 2017 book Solve For Happy, argues that anyone's happiness depends on the perceptions of the events of their life minus their expectations of how life should behave. Societal changes create expectations and aspirations in parents, and if their child's individual needs can't be met or their child is unhappy or anxious, that creates a disparity between the promised hope and the actual reality. Schools compete for pupils, but then most are struggling to meet the competing demands on them, including those for high grades and attendance. In a culture of individualism, schools have a collective offer restricted by their resources of time, money and energy.

This leaves the setting conditions for conflict: scarce resources; differing perspectives; thwarted expectations; and highly emotive issues, with parents fighting for the perceived needs of their children on the one hand, and schools and teachers for their reputations on the other. Positions become entrenched, and curiosity is lost. Psychology can be helpful here in opening up more discussion.

Many of the most successful educational systems in the world stress more a collective mindset in education, both in terms of schools being embedded in their own systems of support (as opposed to sanction in the UK) and where the importance of children working together and learning from each other is valued (see the book Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan). Competition is baked into the UK system.

I think this is a particular problem as we begin to understand the role of the internet and social media in the decline in children's wellbeing, we are struggling to find a way of regulating phone use for children. Should phones be banned in schools? Should social media be banned completely before a certain age? How would that even work? Phones and social media are societal-community problems: kids want a phone because everyone else has one, and most of the 'everyone else' are other children at their school. The TV show Adolescence highlighted how there is an underground subculture on phones which adults are barely aware of.

What is lost in a conflictual, competitive system is the potential for collaborative models. Local school leaders – respected headteachers – could be leading on this at the centre of communities for parents to band together against this common enemy – the phone.

We need to examine the purpose of education at the beginning of the 21st century. Is education about exam success, igniting a passion or leading children to meaningful work? The reform and rhetoric in education over the last generations have largely privileged one of these aims: qualifications. The post-industrial world requires more qualified workers, and governments are competing for a bigger slice of the global knowledge-based pie. 

Higher standards are an appealing message to voters/ parents, but this rhetoric is disingenuous as it fails to acknowledge several different truths: that not all kids are academic; some kids won't get school qualifications, and in addition, arguably, society can't run if everyone succeeds academically. And, indeed, social mobility and equality across race and class will inevitably mean that downward mobility is a reality for some. This is one of the factors that is hypothesised to be behind the surge in right-wing politics in the Western world.

Covid highlighted that some of the key people we need for society to run – bus drivers, shelf stackers, delivery workers, care home workers, hospital cleaners – are some of the people with the least qualifications. How can school be useful and valuable to less academic pupils? And pupils leaving feeling like the important and valuable members of society they are?

Placing children's wellbeing and their engagement in society as central purposes of education may reduce some of the conflict in the system. This would allow for increased time and money to do what is important: meeting a child's individual needs as best as possible within the reality of a collective provision.  Layard and deNeve (2023) quote Thomas Jefferson 'The care of human life and happiness is the only legitimate object of good government.' 

Research linking children's happiness with school at 10-14 to their future exam success would suggest this is a good thing all round. Achievement is generally important in life chances and wellbeing, but here the concept of 'enough' is also important. Many adolescents are working relentlessly, but there are other factors. A child's wellbeing is a goal both parents and schools can agree on… a balance, a best-fit, needs to be found.