This year is my eighth year teaching kids who are out of school. I generally teach them in their home and we chat a lot in between the work. They can be out of school due to disruptive behaviour, crippling anxiety or any form of inability to cope in a school environment – no two stories are the same.

However, there are two patterns that have become clear in the conversations I have had over the years and I wanted to share these trends with you. Firstly, most of these kids feel that the reasons things didn’t work out for them are external; they feel it is someone else’s fault. Secondly, most of these kids feel that the solution to their predicament is external; someone else should solve their current situation. The fault is out there; the answer is out there.

As Key Stage 2 SATs begin to loom, I have read many posts complaining about the pressure schools are putting on our kids. There is anger at the system – why are our kids being subjected to testing at all? There is resentment of individual teachers – why are the kids being overloaded with past papers at the expense of creative learning experiences? There is criticism of the actual tests  – how can our kids be expected to pass tests that many adults are claiming to find impossible?

It got me thinking.

In every conversation I’ve had regarding any of the above complaints, I found myself commiserating and nodding along to the anger. It’s hard not to see these points of view. However, I think we are doing our kids a real disservice by approaching their experience in this way. Yes, the system is uncomfortable. Yes, the kids are worked incredibly hard to learn grammar and maths. Yes, the tests are flipping challenging. But how much is our handling of all of this contributing to their negative experience?

Like it or not, these tests are here for the entire state-educated nation. We can hate them but the kids are still having to sit them. The popular approach has been to reassure kids that these tests aren’t testing them, they are testing the school. They don’t need to worry about them; the school are at fault for putting them in this horrible situation. Again, I took part in this rationale and can see its short term benefits. However, I have changed my tune. I realised that, in giving our kids these platitudes, we are planting the early seeds of what I’m now seeing in the teenagers who have fallen out of the system. We’re effectively saying it is not their responsibility to work hard, it is the school’s. Their teacher/school is at fault for requiring this of them. The fault is out there.

My eleven year old has had to work incredibly hard this year but I am grateful for this. I want him to be a hard worker. I don’t want him to ever think that it is someone else’s responsibility for him to do well. I want him to understand that the consequences of not working hard will be his to own. By criticising the schools, aren’t we communicating that they should resent and blame people who expect them to work hard? How will this work when they carry this through to Year Ten? To their first job? To their relationships?

I hear the shouts that they are just kids – I get it, I do. But I have seen these patterns spread from the early years and cause much bigger hurdles in the later years and I just encourage caution. Kids don’t forget the times you have let them off the hook or criticised their teachers. These will be hurled back at you when you are trying to get them to stay focused at the start of Year 9. Surely we want them to grow up knowing that they have the power to forge their own paths and the responsibility for their own part in following them.

This is also my eighth year marking the SATs. Admittedly, I was shocked when I first saw the level of grammar that these kids were expected to understand. This year, it has been a quiet pleasure to see how they are all rising to the occasion. This generation really know their stuff when it comes to reading and writing and that is such a powerful life tool. If you can write well then you can think well and that is surely a gift we’d like our kids to have. Admittedly, the tests are causing external havoc but the kids are quietly getting on and working hard. May they always know they can do hard things.