As a fellow parent I couldn’t agree more with the recent blog post by Rosie Sherry.

Before making the big jump onto the property ladder (just before the markets went belly up) we were seriously considering sending our boy to the Steiner school in Edinburgh, which emphasises a holistic approach to education and places an emphasis on personal development before (but not at the expence of) academic achievement.

I was fortunate enough as a child to go to a state school that embraced similar ideologies and had always wanted a similar education for my child(ren). Sadly, the education I received which I value so highly has since been killed off by the ever restrictive pegagogies and curricula of the government, emphasising quotas and continual assesment within the education profession – a system that ultimately fails our children and demoralises the teaching profession.

It is sad that as a parent, choosing a particular kind of education for our children has become a privilege rather than a right and where a certain quality of education is only available to those who can afford it. This undermines the fundamental principles of the 1944 Butler Act which saught to remove a system of education that privileged those who can afford it by making education compulsory and free for everyone between the ages of 5-15.

It is even sadder that were the choice to exist, that I – and no doubt countless other parents – would choose an independent school over those offered by the state for our children. Not as an indictment of the teaching profession but of the increasingly restrictive constraints placed on teachers and pupils.

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