The Great British Childhood Robbery

Last June, following the Brown Cabinet reshuffle, the Education Guardian carried a spread ‘Under new management’ on the new departmental arrangements for education and children - see guardian.co.uk. What leapt out at me then was the sentence, ‘The government's ambition [is] to make the UK the best place in the world to grow up’. The rhetoric seemed to have lost all contact with reality: I would settle for moving from last place in the UN Children's Fund industrial countries assessment to about half way up - from twenty-first to, say, tenth. According to the Observer (2 August 2009), thirty children have been murdered or died as result of abuse in the two years since the Baby P scandal.

I have come to the conclusion that we British live in a culture which is almost totally out of touch with the emotional needs and creativity of childhood - but we only notice when there's a Baby P, or a young girl starves to death in her own home. How did nobody notice: neighbours, school, GP? I happened to be explaining to a Belgian child psychologist about my critique of boarding schools, and we got around to the young age at which children here start schooling - whether day or boarding. In Belgium it is six; in Scandinavia it is seven or eight. My Belgian friend said, ‘It's tough on teachers as well as kids.’ No argument. We were left with the question as to why it goes on.

Perhaps we can get some stronger language about this, something along the lines that children should not be robbed of their childhood by a society and pedagogy which prioritizes the convenience of [some] parents and industry over the developmental needs of children.

I have been re-reading John Bowlby's A Secure Base - his marvellous collection of accessible lectures. The one on ‘The origins of attachment theory’ is the best short introduction I know, and ends with a fine résumé of the research findings:

The literature is now enormous … a comprehensive and crit