Parents: Help Your Child Succeed! Mastery for All

Published: January 8th, 2020

My last few blogs have focused on the concept of mastery, as an overall educational goal in schools; but with a difference. Mastery for All, my focus for this new year, explores this concept.

Parents: Help Your Child Succeed is the overall strap line for my books for parents. Why? Many parents often do not realise their own potential as part of the team educating their child. After all, school is where learning mainly happens. Yes – but, not all learning happens during those five hours or so spent in lessons. School is the starting point, the basis, the information, inspiration and the clarification of goals and topics: summarised by the term National Curriculum. Parents hold the key to their child’s success. Research shows us that parents who collaborate with schools, know what their child should learn and how, talk and practise school learning with their child at home – end up with the results they want. Success! So this is my first message of the New Year.

Mastery For All implies that every child can achieve at a pace and level that is right for each individual. That is the message for all schools. Mastery is not just for the high flyers. Okay – we have to have levels, and we have to push highly talented children as far as they can go. Arguably, many of these talented young people are our hope for the future. But that does not mean that others without such talents, or with alternative strengths, or who have Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, cannot also achieve individual mastery. Individuality is surely the key to resolving the mess that some parts of our education system are in (the SEND system in particular). Success for every child implies that educators look at the individual potential and characteristics of each child and work with parents to achieve the best – in whatever form.

An article in a recent magazine called ‘Get Well’ , sold in a well-known supermarket, has angered many parents of children with autism, with the strange (and highly insensitive) title, ‘Reversing autism: Re-ignite Your Child’s Brain.’ The reactions of these angry parents illustrates amongst other things the different perspectives that parents and professionals come from. This is surely part of the problem, in that education does not yet inspire that vital sense of togetherness and collaborative spirit that would make the difference and allow all children to succeed. Parents matter and it’s high time that educators and parents themselves start to recognise this fact. Why? Because all of our children could do better. We need to rethink the roles and relationships that support children and young people. At the start of this blog I mentioned the word ‘team’. How far could teamwork between school and home go; to make that vital difference between success and failure?

Start by finding out WHAT your child learns and HOW. My books will help – Support Your Child with SEND (Book 1), and at successive Key Stages (Books 2-4, by Sylvia Edwards are available from Lulu in printed form, and from Amazon, in printed form and ebooks. Visit my website: www.sylviaedwardsauthor.co.uk

Mastery for all is the aim! So let’s get together and resolve the issues.

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