CYP Now - Schools must focus on building local relationships

I’ve been talking with education leaders about inclusion and one of the challenges of the current school context that they identified was that attitudes and relationships between parents, children and schools have changed since the pandemic.

Alison O’Sullivan is chair of the National Children’s Bureau.

Some describe an underlying “anger” in families, driving a more litigious approach, often amplified by conversations on social media networks. In some instances, parents felt cut adrift by the pandemic and trust has been hard to re-establish. The relationship between parents and children has also changed, with even basic expectations, such as that children will go to school, being broken by the disruption of the pandemic closures.

But this change in national mood isn’t just driven by the pandemic. There is a wider change in social attitudes and expectations in a post-Brexit world, where strong opinions and national dialogue reflect less tolerance towards difference and diversity. With little sign of these trends reversing, the challenge for agencies and policymakers is to find a way of dealing with this changed social contract.

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