We are running the risk of developing a generation of fearful adults. If Professor Ken Robinson is right in his Ted Talk that young children are not afraid to be wrong, we soon sort that out. By the time they leave even primary school they are terrified.
The reason that we are afraid to allow our children to be wrong is that we occupy a professional space ever more crowded with punitive and far reaching measures and a rhetoric from the Secretary of State and her Prime Minister that, 'mediocrity will not be tolerated'. Well, maybe it's not being mediocre if we let kids get it wrong and then learn to deal with failure. The trouble is that, as soon as we think that might be a sound idea, we are reminded by some parliamentarian that failure is not acceptable.
In a culture where an Ofsted judgement of less than good - and now, for some 'coasting' schools it seems, even good schools are at risk - spells personal disaster for the school leaders and so they are afraid and they pass that fear on. This makes schools tense places to work. It's not the workload that is causing the profession to shed members, it's the climate of fear.
The trouble is that politicians decide on this punitive course of action and will not be diverted from it because any diversion will be seen as a sigh of weakness. And weakness begins to look like failure. and our politicians play a high stakes game. They are afraid of failure. And they pass that fear on.
