I found this in my notepad. It is from almost two years ago prompted from my experience of a brilliant parenting course run by the pre-school St Matthews Playgroup, Cotham, Bristol, my son attended then. Reading it now I am surprised by the passion I felt … Having recently been for a teaching interview which held a magnifying glass over the incredible pressures teachers are under in the school system today, what I wrote back then struck a chord … Here is what I said …

A parenting course I have been attending has awoken a passion in me about what absolute total sense a holistic approach to education makes – instinctively.

Education is a subject that provokes passion in us all … because we care so much about our children’s happiness and ability to succeed in the world we have brought them into.

Feelings in the group ran high during a session I attended recently because we were made so aware of the need to allow children to develop naturally, according to their own individual pace: the need for them to be given the time, the space and the right facilitation and support to understand their emotions and learn to come up with their own solutions to the problems and difficulties life throws at them every day.

And the more we felt the huge importance for those intrinsic skills to be developed, the more we kept questioning the way our education system works. It seems to undermine those needs. It doesn’t appear to be driven by human needs, it feels like more often that not, politics and economics are the driving force for the changes in schools afoot today … ticking boxes, producing mountains of paperwork to prove ‘standards’, squeezing as many children as possible into a class, for as long as possible, getting all parents working i.e. separating children from their home for long periods of time, the place where the most important education should be going on; well, where the secure foundations are embedded from which a child is best disposed to learn.

It all feels very segmented, and seems to be feeding into the hands of Affluenza, that hard hitting book by Oliver James examining the way our skewed modern values based on material desires are affecting our wellbeing. Record levels of anxiety and depression are reported in the ‘have it all’ world we inhabit …

To any human, feeling person who holds a sensitive respect for our world and the people in it, from babies to oldies, surely a holistic, organic, patient and properly nurturing approach to education is the only way forward – the path to ‘quality’ and the best chance of capturing that elusive sense of ‘happiness’ or general contentment to which us humans all aspire.

Thank you to Sue for leading such an amazing course. It had a deep impact!