Saturday schooling at what cost?

I’m in the middle of a week of 1500 miles of train travel. Over the weekend I was in Scotland for a friend’s wedding, getting back late last night. And tomorrow I’m off to Bradford and Liverpool for work.

One of the advantages of travelling by train is that I get to read the Telegraph. I’m not, unsurprisingly, a natural Telegraph reader, but even I can be persuaded to buy a paper when it comes with a free bottle of water nearly twice its value. As it is, I rather like the news pages of the Telegraph; I just tend to avoid the comment and business sections.

One of it’s Saturday news features was on schools offering Saturday classes for pupils (bizarrely this is dated 20 April online, although I definitely read it in Saturday’s paper). It highlights the positive results that pupils are achieving by making these classes compulsory.

I’m rather ambivalent about Saturday schooling – I grew up in a town with four big private schools that each had Saturday morning lessons and I remember being somewhat amazed that the kids dutifully trotted off to these lessons.

Undoubtedly providing extra tuition for children can be hugely beneficial, and Saturday seems as good a time as any to do it. But the question has to be at what cost?

My concern is that in making them compulsory, and as one teacher says “if they don’t, then Mrs Laycock will come around to their house and pull them out of their smelly pits”, we’re getting obsessed with exam results as the only thing a child has to achieve before they reach adulthood.

I haven’t got particularly high GCSE results, and if I’d really been pushed I probably could have got a couple of grades higher. But that doesn’t seem to have blighted my subsequent university and career prospects. In fact, although I’ve been required to list my GCSE results on application forms, I’ve never knowingly been rejected as a result of them. Equally, as an employer, I can’t say I’ve ever looked at GCSE results as a guide for the suitability or otherwise of a candidate.

So what did I get instead of a set of high results? Well, I could dutifully tell you I spent my Saturdays involved in a number of extra-curricular activities that taught me about communication, teamwork, leadership and lateral thinking. And although I was involved in loads of different things, in reality I probably spent many Saturday mornings hanging around with friends or watching the telly or playing on the computer.

I’d never want to deny young people who wanted to have extra tuition or an opportunity to do their homework away from home. I’m also not totally convinced that compulsory schooling at the weekend on top of compulsory schooling during the week is a good idea. Do we really want a generation of young people who only know the four walls of their classroom, and haven’t had the opportunity to develop their skills outside of an education environment?

Image courtesy of Wesley Fryer. Used under licence.