CLASS A PARENTING (Parenting & Childhood in Crisis Part Two)

I met a parent shopping with her 13 year old daughter. Her 11 year old boy was at home, safely left alone with some snacks and advice not to open the front door. She cheerfully announced that he was on his computer 10 hours a day playing Fortnite. She thought I was mad when I expressed schoolteacherly concern andsuggested limiting this.

“7 out of 10 children said they had missed out on sleep because of their online habits and 60% said they had neglected school work as a result.” (National Online Safety 2018)

The chemical reaction in an adolescent’s brain from addictive computer games – and our kids are addicted – is the same as that produced by cocaine.

Kids brains and bodies are developing all the time Fortnite, and others, Game producers consult psychologists about how best they can make their games addictive. The games promote the release of dopamine which is how cocaine works. Youngsters are particulary susceptible to its effects, deliberately designed to satisfy teenagers’ craving for instant gratification as they have not yet developed the capacity to resist this. (For much more on the science look up video-game-drug-addiction at Psychology Today)

As parents, are we worried about this?

Fortnite is much cheaper than cocaine, ecstasy, MDMA, spice, speed…
This is a blog about Fortnite and you know I’m going to suggest that our boys’ obsession with this game is bad for their physical and mental health, family life, schoolwork and, even, their future romance prospects.

And it’s a great game and kids should play it. Just not so much.

In my various surveys of hundreds of kids, over 90% of boys aged 11-15 admitted to loving the game. Less than 40% of girls were plugged in every possible day but most say they are shackled to their phones and social media. Although this blog is specifically about FORTNITE the benefits and dangers of children being always connected apply to all.

Do you know if your kids have online access when they’re meant to be sleeping?

NSPCC and NCA (National Crime Agency) warn that one in four children have been contacted by strangers by voice and or text when playing Fortnite. It’s a social game and offers new opportunities to paedophiles. Google the NCA warning and read national newspaper stories about the 12 year old offered £50 to perform a sex act online. This sort of danger is widespread.

Fortnite is free but kids can buy 100 tiers of weapons outfits and gear that can be purchased on line. Parents have discovered, their credit card is associated with the site and receive big bills. Kids on the Spanish beaches were wearing Fortnite hats and T shirts. My niece’s primary school has banned Fortnite dances.

Accounts have been hacked and money stolen. (Telegtaph April 5 2018) A friend of mine rewards his 14 year old son with money to buy Fortnite gear if he reads for half an hour each evening. They even sit and read together, which lets boys understand it is OK to read as dad does it.

How about, removing phones and tablets from the room when they are reading (with or without you,) from the place and time when they are eating (with or without you,) and when they are doing schoolwork. Put yours away, too, and perhaps talk to each other.

Oh goodness, take them out without phones.

Launched in 2017, Fortnite had 125 million players by June 2018.

Forbes reported that Fortnite brought in $126 million in February, $223 million in March and $296 million in April. The company has so much cash that it's forming a $100 million prize fund for upcoming Fortnite competitions. (July 2018)

Fortnite is a magnificent, rewarding, and exhilarating phenomenon. It is a co-operative survival shooting game that lets players build structures out of materials they scavenge from the game world. Most play the Battle Royale version, which pits 100 players against each other, some of whom are in small teams, to see who is the last man standing.

Players are there to kill others and the violence is presented in a cartoonish way – there’s no blood and gore. (If you want lots of blood try “Call of Duty” a game with an 18 certificate which parents have told me they have bought for their 12 year olds. Around 60% of my 13 year olds had played COD and more than one was off school on a new version launch day.)

The notion of kids “killing” is controversial in itself.

Have you noticed, this summer that there’s no kids on the street, that the various “Spotted In...” Facebook sites are hardly mentioning wayward youth, that the parks are empty? As a headteacher, I’ve not had a single call from the police. If you get the opportunity, read Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story, “The Pedestrian” where there is no crime in our cities because everyone is at home in front of giant multi-media screens. Walking at night is “not unequal to walking through a graveyard."

I guess it’s good that we know where our kids are.

Ever the English teacher, I asked a class of 20, 13 year old boys to describe their perfect weekend. I didn’t count but most said “Fortnite.” When pressed, because I was an innocent until very recently, they said something like, “Yes, the whole weekend.”

I try not to suggest that I am some sort of superior parent or human being. I can remember the joy when my four year old daughter first got up on a Sunday morning and put the video on without me waking. In terms of computer addiction, let me tell you about Crystal Crazy. 102 levels of anti-missile protection and weapons that ended up taking up about three hours a night, every night. It was the time when games came on discs and my eyes dripped gore, my sleep featured crashing spacecraft. I took a photo, on a real camera, when I completed Level 102. Fatima came from Paris to visit and I left her alone whilst fulfilling my game addiction. I have not seen her since. Knowing from my tobacco addiction that throwing the disc in the bin would only mean I went through the rubbish to retrieve it next day, I eventually smashed the disc. I was 40 years old.

An 18 year old Economics student at my school, two weeks and six lessons short of his final, perhaps career-forming, A Level exam, announced that he had been up until 5 a.m and achieved a 23 person “single kill,” which is apparently very good. The game keeps you trying to get better and players can see their score improving.

I have put on “prep” every term-time evening for GCSE boys who were going home with good intentions but plugged straight in to Fortnite and did no homework. Younger boys come into school with scraps of paper hastily scrawled moments before the lesson.

This is now me trying perhaps too hard: Boys’ opportunities to have girlfriends/boyfriends are obviously diminished. As a father of girls I have would have welcomed Fortnite because ordering them not go out with boys until aged 35, and then with me as chaperone, did not work. We have a new school year starting with our boys going cold turkey and some of them not coping. As boys spend more time alone in their bedrooms, less time studying, do less well academically, the girls may turn away from romantic liaisons, relationships, marriage, futures…

There’s no doubt that young women are now doing better than men and are getting more of the top jobs. Only the fact that old men are still in power and can discriminate against women is holding them back .

Of course, it’s not the end for all boys.

However, I have 32, 15 year old boys entering their final GCSE year whose end of year reports clearly show that their all-consuming interest is Fortnite. I am now going to ask parents to leave us their 15 year olds until 5pm.

Back to the mental health concern:

A nine-year-old girl is in rehab after becoming so addicted to a video game she wet herself to avoid moving and hit her father when he tried to stop her playing. (BBC New Voice 17th June 2018)

The World Health Organisation has classified playing video games on the internet as an official mental health disorder. This means one can get treatment on the NHS.

'Gaming disorder' is defined as 'a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.' (WHO 2018)

Some views to leave you with:

I was talking with a really pleased mother who told me,“I’ve got my 10 year old son back. He was getting obsessed and tetchy, playing Fortnite all the time. It was hard for a week or so but I stuck to my guns and he now plays for two hours every other night…”

Did I mention the anger problems kids have when “losing” at computer games?

A Deputy headteacher gave me this, about his sporty 13 year old, “I came home to find that he’s got angry at losing at Fortnite and threw the controller through the TV screen.”

Another teacher takes the console to work every day and is in endless rows with his addicted 14 year old.

If as parents we can’t negotiate harm reduction with our kids over a computer game, how are we going to cope when they come across ‘drugs’ and other challenges?

What price a bit of peace and quiet?

Dennis O'Sullivan

Grammar Schools Promote Inequality and Injustice

Post 1945, working class children left school at 14 and went into unskilled jobs and apprenticeships . In the new secondary modern schools working class children were destined for working class jobs. They sat few if any exams and school expectations were low. Grammar schools educated a quarter of our 12 year olds – depending on availability - and these children were destined for jobs in offices. The privately educated were our MPs, doctors, lawyers and senior civil servants. Everyone knew their place.

Unless we reopen the factories, shipyards and mines secondary modern schooling will not provide the skilled workforce we require, unless Sports Direct and McDonalds take over more workplaces.

Apparently (they got consultants in for this) if you select the kids doing best at tests at age 11 and put them in one school, that school will have the highest achievers in GCSE tables five years later. Stunning. Apparently, it is also hotter near the Equator.

All schools should be good schools. We have the best teachers ever and more parents are happy with their child’s school than ever before. Government claim “parent choice” as their goal – well you can’t have selection and parent choice.

Here’s an email I received on Wednesday: ”Do you only accept children who live in your area? I live in X and there is one school I like but both my children are below average and worried they will fail the entry test.”

From the parents of her friends to my Year 6 granddaughter, “You should go to school P rather than the excellent local school S because you’re academic.”

Meanwhile 12 miles away, “We wanted her to go to school H but it is too academic for her,”

Half way between the two, “The Headteacher told me that if my daughter’s reading age was one iota below her chronological age she cannot come here, it is not fair on my staff.”

We have schools, Ofsted “outstanding” schools, which claim they are, “not good with special educational needs.” School M made its TAs redundant and then claimed to be unable to admit kids with SEN due to lack of staff.

In a colleague’s primary school one parent confronted the head with, “I do not want him doing these art things. Just make sure he can pass the entry test to school D.”

Welcome to Hertfordshire, where each year the county proclaims Watford Girls Grammar School as a top comprehensive, alongside Watford Boys Grammar . They must be great schools: the head of one was made a dame and the other is a schools commissioner…..fancy that.

Mrs May is keen for Faith Schools to select all their kids on the basis of religion. Has she tried getting a non-believing family into a Jewish or Catholic school where the admission criteria starts with attendance at a particular place of worship and then to siblings? In encouraging division amongst the population and in promoting isolation amongst our minorities Mrs May is an ideal candidate for a visit from the Prevent people.

She is keen on new parent-sponsored single faith grammar free schools. Well, seeing as parents are not opening free schools but faith organisations predominate, she knows this is not going to happen. Perhaps somewhere like Leeds can have a Muslim Grammar School, a Jewish Grammar School, Hindu, CoE and Catholic grammar schools alongside a non denominational boys grammar, and a girls grammar nearby. Imagine the school run in Leeds.

Mrs May wants all schools to have, “an element of selection.” If grammar schools select the brightest are other schools to select the dimmest?

Her supporters say introducing more selective grammar schools is not going back to the days of selective grammar schools. Oh,my!

They say that the selection of the most academic 11 year olds will not create secondary modern schools and certainly not “sink schools” where expectations of exam success are non existent. Yes it will.

Grammar schools must be good because their students do well in exams, therefore we need loads of grammar schools. In fact, if these are the best schools let’s make all schools grammar schools.

What we could do is select all the academically able kids and put them in schools with thatched roofs. Then, when they achieve their good GCSEs we can call for the impositioin of thatched roofs throughout the country.

May pretends that children will move between the selective schools according to individual student progress, as if there is no limit on how many kids you can fit in a classroom.

Apparently, lots of parents who are in select, expensive catchment areas fear the imposition of grammar schools. But, Mrs May says, new grammar schools will not be forced on areas that don’t want them. Can we do the same with capital punishment ? Maybe impose it in Scotland only?

The chief inspector of schools says the pro grammar school argument is “Tosh and nonsense” and just about all the evidence points to grammar schools increasing social inequality. But what did we expect from a government which has introduced tests at 11, 16 and 18 designed to fail more students. 47% of English 12 year olds are classed as failures by their performance in tests -perhaps we could stamp this on an appropriate part of their anatomy, so they don’t forget their failings.

Each day I watch the girls come off the train from outside the catchment area of the oversubscribed selective/non selective school P and I wonder how they got places.

We don’t have to worry about the 11+, in Bishops Stortford 3 of the 4 secondary schools have Saturday morning entry tests and all claim to be comprehensives. I know of five schools that select up to 10% of their intake on aptitude for music or languages. Howzat!

Theresa May is right about selection by house price – you can get a 3 bedroomed semi for £500,000 in the catchment area of one of our highly praised schools. The children of educated, midlle class parents score highly on their primary school tests, usually with private tutor support. Of course, Ofsted say they are outstanding. Ofsted claimed my nephew’s white, middle class, catholic school with lower than average frees school meals, EAL students and SEN kids was, “highly inclusive,” and “outstanding.”

One of my part time staff coaches 18 boys from one school; money helps.

Of three agreed housing projects: School A is in an area of architectural splendour and the project had “no affordable housing.” School B has 145 houses planned and “no affordable housing.” Hertfordshire – one of the biggest in the country makes sure that its entirely Conservative MPs are not troubled by social integration.

Disgraceful Gove started the drive to put working class kids back in their place. Mindlessly, vacuous Morgan continued the slide and now the unsuspecting puppet Greening will be charged with driving even more teachers into other jobs, more children ringing Helpline in despair over their grades and more families accepting that education and British society is not for the likes of them.

Mrs May says that new grammar schools will have to accept poorer children. Does this mean that the 163 existing grammar schools don’t already pursue this sort of social justice? According to the Sutton Trust, in selective school areas 3% of the children in grammar schools were on free school meals. In the same locality18% of non grammar school children received free school meals.

The education system can encourage social equality. Rather than taking a small proportion of bright poor kids and sticking them in grudgingly benevolent grammar schools lets put massive resourcing into the schools in poorer areas. Get the best teachers with higher salaries and subsidised housing and create the infrastructure and local economy to employ the high achieving youngsters.

Watch them shine.