Progress is not the same as success.

Working is schools across London for nearly 2 decades, I have heard this word tens of thousands of times. It is a real buzz word in the education world.

PROGRESS.

And it was a word that infuriated me when I worked in schools across London. It infuriates me much less now but it can still be irritating.

Let me explain.

As a class teacher, I was ‘responsible’ for the progress of between 20-32 students. Wow - that’s a huge responsibility. I put the word ‘responsible’ in inverted commas because the responsibility is not solely on the teacher. The responsibility, when you send your child to school, is on the the child, the parents, the senior leaders at the school and the teacher.

This was never the case in any of the schools that I worked at. And to be honest, this is one of the hundreds of reasons that I left teaching.

There is a complete and utter lack of appreciation for the success of the child and the focus just on PROGRESS.

I would reflect on the countless hours and hours and hours that I would spend with each individual child to help and support them with their learning. And the success that they would have with their learning would be insane. It would blow my mind every single time. The child who hated holding a pencil who could now write beautifully, the child who couldn’t grasp numbers 1-10 and could finally count ‘effortlessly’ to 100. You get my point.

And then these children would have their assessments and I would be called in to a ‘Progress meeting’ and I would literally be asked this question.

Why has he/she not made the progress that he/she could have made?

And as a younger teacher , I would just sit there and nod. I would blame myself. I would tell myself that they should have made more progress. And it’s nonsense. It was never my fault.

6 years later in those meetings I would answer differently and the senior leaders hated my answer.

How about the success of that child? How about the fact that they answered x, y, z question correctly? How about how hard they’ve worked to achieve the mark that was deemed not good enough?

But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

Well, sorry but I was not a miracle worker then and I am not a miracle worker now.

If you want your child to make extraordinary progress, then you’d better be willing to pull up your sleeves and support your child every singe day to make this insane progress that you want them to make.

It’s not just going to somehow fall out of a tree and land in their brain.

You want progress, put in the work. Do not just put that on your child’s teacher.

It is simply not attainable.