Opinion

Bimpe Archer: It's June, when thoughts already turn to the first day of school

Summer holidays are starting... time to think about the next school year
Summer holidays are starting... time to think about the next school year Summer holidays are starting... time to think about the next school year

IT must be summer – the roses are blooming in our garden, I’m going to bed when it is still daylight, Asda have started stocking their winter clothes and I’m filling in school admin forms for September.

I am more of a planner than a `sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’ sort of a gal, but, by dint of now having a school-aged offspring, I have been forcibly reminded of how formal education always made you feel like your life was being wished away.

Most parents have picked their schools with one eye on which post-primary they hope their child will go to. In seven years’ time.

It used to drive me crazy as a child, when I was gearing up for the summer holidays and the shops were running their `Back to School’ promotions.

On the last day of school you don’t even want to think the end of a summer that hasn’t yet begun, but there it was, rendered all too tangible by half-price pencil cases and school blazers you could “grow into”.

I suppose it won’t aggravate me quite as much now I am on the `parent’ end of the equation. I may even be grateful that there is an end in sight to the panic of rota-swaps at work and seven-day-a-week activity planning (or the guilt when that turns into watching other people do activities seven-days-a-week on CBeeebies).

But it is odd to be sorting out which days in October we will need to sign up our P1 child for `2 to 3 Club’ when he hasn’t even `graduated’ from nursery yet.

We have actually got two graduations this month, as he bids farewell to the daycare he has been in since I returned to work after maternity leave – it no longer caters for school-age children, hence the need to investigate the `2 to 3 Club’.

I find it a bit of an odd custom that has grown up in recent years. I mean, I’m not saying he’s only been playing around for three years, but… actually that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m no `tiger mom’, but that hardly warrants a mortar board and scroll.

Not that I won’t be bawling my way through a box of tissues and frantically snapping pictures on my phone. Such is parenthood – you know it doesn’t really matter, but you’ve never felt like anything mattered more.

So when I got to the bit on the form about “parent’s/guardian’s views/concerns about the transition’ I’m simultaneously impatient at having to take the time to come up with something to scribble down, and frustrated that the box is too small to fully express those all those views and concerns.

For nursery, the box was mainly taken up with my anxiety that his grammar might slip and “would of went” and “I seen” may start to creep into his vernacular.

It’s a pretty standard journalists’ nightmare, but looking back I realise they were probably wanting to know whether he mixed well with other children and if he had any allergies.

So I’m trying to restrain myself this time.

I won’t stress how important it is to me that he be encouraged to explore all aspects of being a child and not just automatically channelled into the traditional pursuits associated with boys. That he is allowed to continue to love flowers because they are “so pretty”, and cuddle his teddy bear because it reassures him.

I won’t ask that they have patience with him while he says ‘hello’ to all the snails when they go out on walks and that they laugh at the jokes which he tells so earnestly, but which really aren’t even mildly amusing.

I want to insist that he be encouraged play with as many girls as boys every day, so that he learns from an early age that we’re all just people and we can interact in different ways.

I really, really want them to make sure he doesn’t start saying “would of went” and “I seen”.

But it’s a lovely school and the brilliant teachers know much more about the five-year-old he will have turned by then than I do.

So I’ll probably just write `Hope he’s not too noisy’.