Will you ever learn?

Big School or bust

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Finally the summer is over, a ton of Blackpool rock has been surreptitiously dumped in the compost bin, and T is back at school. This is not just any back to school moment but the start of Big School, which is a whole new adventure. Big School naturally requires a serious outlay of cash: there is the uniform, of which more later, but alongside that T has rinsed me for a new backpack, a new pencil case, a wide range of novelty items to go inside said pencil case, a new water bottle, and a large hot chocolate to revive her afterwards because shopping is so exhausting. I would have objected to this but, as Lizzie pointed out, it’s only like me rewarding myself with gin for making it round Tesco.

Inevitably, Big School is part of a Multi-Academy Trust. I have spent a lot of time jostling for space in the wholly inadequate car park, where I have had ample opportunity to ponder the Trust’s strapline, ‘Together We Exceed’, which is plastered on the front of the building. I’m sorry, guys, but I’m missing something: exceed what, exactly? The possibilities of language? The skill level of marketing company interns? Did you mean to say ‘Excel’? Are years of government obsession with English grammar really no match for a gruesome corporate branding exercise? Is 9am too early for gin? Answers to Michael Gove in your best copperplate handwriting, please.

Big School are so enthusiastic about their new intake of students that they arranged for a school photography company to visit on Day Two of the new term, which is the optimum time to capture students looking their best, with their back-to-school haircuts and before their brand new uniform gets ripped, outgrown or customised beyond recognition. It’s also the optimum moment to buffer the Academy’s cash flow. I have no problem with school uniform in principle and I am sure it goes a long way towards Big School’s stated aims of instilling a sense of pride, developing a shared identity, supporting the school ethos, and reducing the likelihood that kids will get battered for being uncool. However, I am entirely baffled by the specifics. I have had to spend over £100 on badly fitting clothing constructed from petroleum derivatives and shipped over from China, where it was quite possibly made by people not much older than the ones who end up wearing it, and it is beyond me how the enforced discomfort inflicted by a polyester blazer-and-tie combo is supposed to help kids learn. Why do we make teenagers dress like management trainees from the 1980s when dress codes in most workplaces have moved on? A sizeable portion of the population discovered during lockdown that we could turn in an equally mediocre performance sitting at home in a hoodie and a heated blanket as we could commuting to an office sporting full Twat Wear, as an eloquent friend used to call it. We freelancers have known this for years.

Anyway, the upshot is that two days into Big School I have been required to spend yet more of my dwindling reserves on a poorly focused, awkwardly posed image of T in full uniformed splendour, with a wonky tie and a smile that doesn’t reach her dimples, which the photography company have made available to purchase in no fewer than 31 possible combinations. And for reasons I am completely unable to fathom, all the myriad purchase options have been named after trees. There is an entire forest of choices depending on whether you want a framed 10 x 8 technicolour of your kid dressed like Barry from accounts to proudly display on the living room wall (Premium Oak) or would rather opt for two dozen stocking-filler photo keyrings that the lucky recipients will have binned by New Year’s Eve (Dutch Elm). Unfortunately for the cash-strapped among us, several minutes of scrolling failed to produce an MDF option. But it is vitally important that I buy this photo, because how else am I going to embarrass her in five years’ time? Apart from simply continuing to exist.

Lizzie has sensibly stayed out of the way during the preparations for Big School. She didn’t accompany us to Blackpool because she spent August in Las Vegas ‘working the strip’. I assume this means she had a job in a casino and do not intend to ask any questions in case I turn out to be wrong. Lizzie may not have covered herself in academic glory during her own school career but she certainly honed her enterprise skills out of the classroom, most notably during an ill-advised school trip to Amsterdam that I had better not discuss without taking legal advice first. Lizzie has a bank of photos from her school days that would certainly not comply with uniform policy and she exceeded expectations against a wide range of indicators not routinely covered by OFSTED. The Multi-Academy management team must have been proud. She’s popping round this evening and has offered to give T all her best tips on how to thrive at Big School. What could possibly go wrong?