Classroom teaching – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

Reluctant Learners

One of the things I find most fascinating about teaching is how much better people are at giving advice about learning than they are at actually learning. We tell children to listen carefully, pay attention, practise, ask questions, accept correction, learn from their mistakes and not give up when something is difficult. All perfectly sensible advice. We then spend our adult lives doing almost exactly the opposite.

None of us like being corrected: we don’t enjoy discovering that we don’t understand something and we can become irritated when we can’t do something immediately. Given the opportunity, we will frequently find a way of blaming the person who is trying to teach us. I know this because I do it myself. We all do it. It is spectacularly difficult to avoid.

There is something peculiarly uncomfortable about being a beginner. You are, by definition, not very good at whatever you are attempting to learn and, worse still, you are having to demonstrate this incompetence in front of somebody who knows more than you do. It is not a comfortable position to be in. Most of us would much rather be the person who already knows what they are doing, which is presumably why so many of us find it easier to give advice than to receive it. There is a considerable difference between being interested in knowing something and being prepared to admit that you don’t know it.

Children, of course, have an advantage here, as they are beginners at almost everything. Nobody expects a five-year-old to be able to read fluently on their first attempt, or a six-year-old to produce a perfect drawing, or a child learning to ride a bicycle to glide elegantly down the road without falling off. Being bad at things is simply a part of childhood. As we get older, however, we become gradually less tolerant of our own incompetence. We also acquire identities: I am good at English; I am hopeless at maths; I am a languages person; I can’t draw; I’m not musical; I’m useless with technology. Such statements can sound like harmless descriptions of ability, but they can also become excuses that enable us to avoid the uncomfortable experience of being a beginner. If I have decided that I am simply “not a maths person”, then struggling with algebra is no longer an unpleasant stage in learning; it is confirmation of something I already believe about myself.

There is another problem, too, and that is that we don’t particularly like being corrected. Being told that you are wrong is not a particularly pleasurable experience, especially if you thought that you were right. Some children are remarkably sensitive to it, but adults aren’t necessarily much better. Watch somebody being taught to use a new piece of technology and you will see this in action. They press the wrong button, the person helping them says, “No, you need to do this,” and there is an almost irresistible temptation to reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to do!” I have spent enough time teaching to recognise this phenomenon in myself as well as in my pupils. There is a difference between wanting to know something and being willing to learn it. The first is easy: the second is the bit that requires some effort.

Learning requires us to expose the gap between knowing and not knowing. A pupil who answers a question incorrectly has just demonstrated something useful: there is a gap in their understanding, and the teacher now knows where it is. A student who refuses to answer because they don’t want to get it wrong is protecting their fragile dignity at the expense of their learning. This is just one reason why a classroom where pupils are genuinely allowed and encouraged to make mistakes is so important. If getting something wrong is treated as a catastrophe (or mocked by others), children quite reasonably learn to avoid situations in which they might be wrong, which is disastrous for the learning process.

But there is an even more subtle problem. Sometimes we don’t want to be taught because we believe we already understand. This is one of the reasons students can be so attached to rereading their notes. The material looks familiar, the words make sense and everything feels reassuringly comprehensible. Then they are asked to explain it without looking and suddenly the knowledge has mysteriously disappeared. It hadn’t disappeared, of course. It had never been as securely learned as they thought. Recognition is seductive, whereas retrieval is considerably less comfortable, and yet that uncomfortable business of having to drag something out of your own memory is often precisely what strengthens the learning.

Good teaching can be something of a paradox. A good teacher is supposed to make things understandable, but making something understandable is not the same as making it effortless. Sometimes the most useful thing a teacher can do is to allow a student to struggle for a little while: not endlessly, and certainly not pointlessly, but long enough for them to have a chance to work something out for themselves. This is particularly powerful in one-to-one teaching, when a tutor can focus their attention entirely on one student, without the pressure to move on with the rest of the class. This is also one of the reasons why one-to-one tutoring can be so intensive (and thus why I work in shorter sessions): the student is put under the gentle pressure to figure things out, they cannot pass the baton on to the next learner in the room.

There is a particular moment when you can see a pupil wrestling with a problem and you have to resist the urge to rescue them. You can almost watch the thought process happening. A student who is struggling does not necessarily need rescuing, nor should they be left to flounder indefinitely. Sometimes they need a carefully constructed question or a small suggestion, and sometimes all they need is another minute to think. Getting that balance right is one of the more difficult and hence rewarding parts of teaching. There is a world of difference between a teacher who refuses to help and a teacher who knows that sometimes the most helpful thing they can do is wait; knowing when to step in and when to hold back is the one of the most nuanced parts of teaching, and it is surprisingly difficult to get right.

Good teaching is not simply about explaining things clearly. Of course, explanations matter enormously and a teacher who cannot explain something clearly is not doing their job. But explanation is only a part of teaching. At some point, the pupil has to do something with the explanation, and that usually means attempting something that they cannot yet do perfectly. There is a slightly uncomfortable gap between understanding an explanation when somebody else is talking and being able to apply that understanding when left to your own devices. Good teaching has to cross that gap rather than simply making the explanation increasingly thorough.

It is a peculiar modern tendency to interpret difficulty as evidence of failure. A child finds something hard and we immediately ask what went wrong. We ask whether the teacher is not engaging enough, when all the evidence shows that engagement is a poor proxy for learning. We ask ourselves whether the explanation was insufficiently clear, rather than considering the fact that the student may just need a little more time to wrestle with it. Worst of all, we ask whether the work needs to be simplified or brought down a notch. But learning something difficult is, by definition, difficult; it’s not a problem to be solved.

I suspect that adults find this particularly hard because we have forgotten what it feels like to learn from the beginning. We have become accustomed to competence. The accumulated knowledge and skills of adulthood make an enormous amount of life feel automatic. Then, when somebody asks us to learn something genuinely new, we discover that we are not nearly as clever as we had become accustomed to feeling. It is humbling, and perhaps this is why adults can sometimes be so remarkably defensive when somebody tries to teach them something new.

The best teachers should be enthusiastic learners, cheerleaders for the process of acquiring knowledge. They should remember what it feels like to be confused, particularly when something that ought to be easy suddenly isn’t. They ought to know that horrible moment when everyone else appears to understand and you are still trying to work out what on earth is going on. A teacher who has recently been a beginner at something can have a rather different attitude to a struggling student, because they understand that learning does not feel like a smooth progression from ignorance to mastery. It involves wrong turns, false starts, frustration and the occasional exhilarating moment when something that made no sense five minutes ago suddenly does.

Learning requires a certain amount of intellectual humility. You have to be prepared to admit that you don’t know something and to accept that being bad at something is an unavoidable part of eventually becoming good at it. None of this is comfortable, but it is crucially important. We want children to become confident, independent and capable of coping with difficulty, but the route to all three involves an unavoidable period in which you are none of those things. Before we can become good at something, we have to be prepared to be bad at it.

Perhaps the most important thing we can teach children, therefore, is not simply how to learn but how to be taught. Being teachable is not the same as being passive. It means being willing to look slightly foolish from time to time, to allow somebody else to point out what you have missed, and then to have another go. It is not particularly glamorous, but it is a remarkably useful skill, and one that doesn’t become less important simply because we have left school.

Under the Radar

There is a particular kind of pupil who is every teacher’s dream and, rather ironically, one of the easiest to overlook.

They arrive on time. They have their equipment. They get on with the work without being nagged. They don’t shout across the classroom, throw things, wander around or demand to know when the lesson is going to end. If they don’t understand something, they quietly struggle with it rather than interrupting the lesson to ask for help. When another pupil behaves badly, they wait patiently while the teacher deals with it. When the teacher asks a question, they may know the answer but keep their hand down. They are, in other words, absolutely no trouble whatsoever. And that is precisely the problem.

Every teacher knows that classroom attention is finite. There are only so many minutes in a lesson and only one teacher at the front of the room. If three pupils are arguing, somebody has forgotten their book, another is refusing to work and somebody else is calling out every thirty seconds, it is inevitable that those pupils will consume a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s attention. The conscientious pupil sitting quietly in the corner does not create an urgent problem to be solved. They can wait. The trouble is that “can wait” can gradually become “doesn’t need anything”.

Anyone who has spent any time standing in front of a mixed ability class will recognise the problem. When I was teaching in schools, I was acutely aware of the pupils who required my attention because they were noisy, disruptive, distressed or simply determined to make their presence known. The reality was that they were impossible to ignore: they would put their hands up repeatedly, call out, wander over to the teacher’s desk, complain about the work or announce that they had finished when they very obviously had not. Meanwhile, there might be another child sitting quietly a few desks away, doing exactly what I had asked them to do. The temptation is always to assume that such a child is fine.

One of the things I eventually learned as a classroom teacher was that I had to make a conscious effort to seek out the pupils who were not seeking me out. It sounds absurdly obvious when written down, but in the middle of a busy lesson it is remarkably easy to forget and good teachers are hyper-vigilant to this danger. I would walk around the classroom deliberately, stopping beside students who had not asked for help and looking at what they were doing. I would ask questions of children who rarely volunteered answers and towards the end of my career moved increasingly towards a “no hands” policy for questioning. I made a point of talking to students who had been quietly working while I dealt with somebody else’s vocal crisis. Sometimes the answer would be, “Yes, I’m fine.” Sometimes it would be, “Actually, I don’t understand this bit.” Occasionally, the response would be something that made me realise that I had been making assumptions about a child I thought I knew rather better than I actually did.

There is a wider problem here, because the quiet pupil is not necessarily the same thing as the high-achieving pupil. We sometimes conflate the two. A child can be conscientious and completely lost. They can be desperate not to draw attention to themselves because they are embarrassed about not understanding. They can be working incredibly hard while producing mediocre results because nobody has realised that there is a fundamental gap in their knowledge. Conversely, a child who appears quiet and self-sufficient may be capable of considerably more than the work in front of them is demanding.

The classroom is a social environment as well as an educational one, and children learn very quickly how to operate within it. Some discover that the easiest way to obtain adult attention is to demand it. Others learn that being quiet, compliant and self-sufficient is rewarded with trust and independence. There is nothing inherently wrong with either mode of behaviour, but the consequence can be that the children who need the teacher’s attention least urgently receive the least of it.

This is one reason why I became rather fond of what I used to think of as “quiet checking”. I didn’t need to make a grand intervention or announce to a pupil that I had noticed them. Sometimes I simply needed to stand beside them and look at their work. Sometimes I would ask them to explain what they were doing. Sometimes I would deliberately ask them a question that I knew they were capable of answering, simply because I wanted to hear their voice in a classroom in which the louder pupils had rather more presence.

It is important not to turn this into another job for the child. Telling a quiet pupil that they need to “put their hand up more” is not the answer and I am agog at how often a client’s parent will convey this to me as “feedback” from their child’s school; I had thought those days were over, but I’m afraid there are still thousands of teachers repeating this empty mantra as if it were gold dust. If a child has spent years learning that other people are louder, more confident or more demanding than they are, telling them to become louder is basically telling a timid person that the solution to their problem is to be more extroverted. In truth, it’s the adults that need to change their methodology.

Tutoring is particularly valuable for children of this kind. One-to-one tuition does something that is almost impossible to reproduce in a conventional classroom: it removes the competition for attention entirely. There is no disruptive pupil waiting to be dealt with. There is no classmate calling out the answer before another child has finished thinking. There is no embarrassment about asking a question in front of twenty-nine other people. There is no need to decide whether your problem is important enough to interrupt the teacher. The teacher is already there, and they are there for you. For some children, this is simply transformative.

I have had students who are perfectly capable academically but are extraordinarily reluctant to ask questions in school. They don’t want to be the person who holds everybody else up, or they don’t want to admit that they don’t understand something that their classmates appear to understand. They would rather go home confused than raise their hand and expose that confusion publicly. In a one-to-one lesson, that inhibition often disappears quickly and the child learns, with my encouragement, to interrupt me as often as they wish. There is nobody else to impress, nobody else to keep up with and nobody waiting impatiently while you work something out. You can say, “I don’t understand any of this,” and instead of feeling that you have just made a public declaration of inadequacy, you have simply given your tutor some useful information.

This brings us to the huge advantage that one-to-one tuition boasts over whole-class teaching. In a classroom, a teacher has to make decisions about what the entire class needs. Even the very best teacher cannot spend twenty minutes exploring one student’s misunderstanding while twenty-nine other pupils sit around waiting: but a tutor does not have that problem. If I discover that a student has misunderstood something fundamental, I can stop and deal with it. We can approach it from another direction, I can give them another example, I can ask them to explain it to me and, most importantly of all, I can discover precisely where the misunderstanding occurred and deal with that rather than simply repeating the explanation that didn’t work the first time. Equally, if a student understands something immediately, I don’t need to spend another fifteen minutes explaining it to the entire group. We can move on immediately: the lesson belongs entirely to that child.

I suspect that most teachers, if asked, would be able to name the pupils who have demanded the most of their attention. We remember the ones who made us laugh, the ones who drove us mad, the ones who needed pastoral support and the ones whose behaviour seemed to occupy an extraordinary proportion of our working lives. The quieter children are sometimes harder to remember. Tutoring can give them a voice.

In praise of boredom

One of the strangest conversations I have with parents takes place every summer. It usually begins with a degree of anxiety.

“What should my child be doing over the holidays?”

The question is perfectly understandable. Parents are bombarded with messages about the dangers of lost learning and the importance of maintaining academic momentum. The implication is often that six weeks spent doing anything other than educationally enriching activities represents an existential threat to their children’s development.

I understand the concern. Last week, I explored the evidence that long summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities and the research in this area is difficult to ignore. Children do forget things over the summer and those from more affluent backgrounds often have access to experiences that continue to support learning long after schools have closed their doors. A knowledge of this can convince some families that it is their duty to be providing a plethora of enriching and exciting activities throughout the summer, in a desperate bid to avoid disadvantaging their children.

Yet there is a danger in taking this argument too far. If we are not careful, we can end up viewing every moment of childhood through the lens of educational productivity. The logical conclusion is absurd: a summer spent quietly reading, daydreaming, wandering around the garden and yes, complaining of boredom, becomes infinitely less valuable than one packed with endless organised activities and carefully curated experiences. In fact, the reality of learning and progress is a great deal more complicated than that.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about education is the idea that learning and development only takes place when somebody is active. Schools reinforce this impression because they are places where learning is expected to be visible. Exercise books are continuously filled with what we laughably like to call “evidence of progress” and the regular book checks I faced as a teacher, in which Senior Management went hunting for said “progress” is one of my least favourite memories from my time at the chalk-face.

Here’s the truth. The human brain is doing a remarkable amount of work when it appears to be doing very little. Neuroscientists have long known that memories continue to develop after initial learning has taken place and learning is not a single event but a dynamic process. Information is encountered, encoded, reorganised and gradually integrated into existing knowledge. Sleep plays an essential role in this process, but extended periods of reduced cognitive demand appear to matter as well. Far from switching off when formal education pauses, the brain continues to sort, organise and strengthen what it has already encountered.

Students frequently assume that more study automatically leads to more learning. In practice, there comes a point at which additional effort produces diminishing returns. The brain needs opportunities to process information rather than simply receive it. The brain is not a machine that performs best when operating continuously, rather it requires periods of activity and periods of recovery. Schools are designed to provide the former. Summer holidays, at their best, provide the latter. Anyone who has ever solved a problem while taking a walk will recognise the phenomenon. Many of our best ideas arrive not when we are concentrating intensely but when our minds are allowed to wander. Writers experience it, as do scientists, mathematicians and artists. We have all, I think, had the peculiar experience of abandoning a difficult problem only to discover that a solution presents itself hours later whilst we are doing something entirely unrelated.

Researchers have become increasingly interested in what is known as the brain’s “default mode network”, a collection of interconnected regions that becomes active when we are not focused on a specific external task. Although there is still much that we do not understand, this network appears to play a role in reflection, imagination, planning and the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. In other words, some of the brain’s most important work, the cognitive capability that defines us as a species, takes place when the brain appears to be doing nothing at all.

Boredom has a terrible reputation. Understandably, parents dread hearing the words “I’m bored” and children often speak of boredom as though it were a form of mild torture. Yet, boredom may be considerably more useful than we give it credit for. Psychologists increasingly view boredom not as a defect but as a signal. It tells us that our current situation is no longer sufficiently stimulating and encourages us to seek something more engaging. Without boredom, there would be little motivation for humans to explore, create or discover.

None of this should be taken as an argument against educational enrichment. Reading remains valuable. Museums remain valuable. Family outings remain valuable. Summer programmes and holiday clubs can be transformative, particularly for children who might otherwise lack access to such opportunities. What we should resist, however, is the temptation to view childhood as a continuous optimisation project. Not every hour needs to be productive. Not every activity needs to be educational. Not every moment of apparent idleness represents a missed opportunity.

Thinking back to my own childhood, I can remember long stretches of summer holidays that felt endless. There were no smartphones and no streaming services and entertainment was not available at the touch of a button. We had three television channels and they were not available 24 hours a day. If there was nothing worth watching, there was nothing worth watching; there was no infinite scroll waiting to rescue us from our own thoughts. Many of the activities I remember most vividly emerged directly from boredom. An improvised fashion show in which a group of us demonstrated the new and interesting ways that we could wear our PE kits (knee socks became evening gloves). Designing and building a showjumping arena in my back garden with a next-door neighbour. Collecting worms into an improvised wormery, courtesy of some grass clippings and a shoe box. (Don’t worry, my father made me release them). This is not empty nostalgia. Boredom acts as the bridge between passive consumption and active engagement. Faced with enough boredom, children begin to create their own solutions.

The challenge, of course, is that not all boredom is equal. There is a world of difference between a child who is bored in a secure environment filled with books, opportunities and supportive adults and a child who is bored because there is simply nothing available to engage them. This is one reason why discussions about the summer holiday can become so complicated. The same period of unstructured time that encourages creativity and independence in one child will reinforce disadvantage in another: during lockdown, we saw this in extremis and the educational gap between the haves and the have-nots is even wider as a direct result of that time.

The solution is not to eliminate boredom altogether, nor is it to ensure that every moment of the summer holiday is carefully programmed. Instead, the challenge is to create environments in which boredom can become productive pressure rather than a frustrating, inescapable trap. Perhaps this is where modern childhood has become particularly complicated. Many adults, myself included, worry that children spend too much time on screens, and their attraction is precisely because digital devices are extraordinarily effective boredom-elimination machines. In the modern world, the moment boredom begins to appear, it can be instantly suppressed with videos, games or social media. While there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities, one cannot help wondering how many opportunities for creativity and self-directed exploration disappear along with the boredom we so fear.

The widening summer gap

Last week, I explored the surprisingly complex history of the long school summer holiday and explained why it owes much more to Victorian urbanisation and changing attitudes towards leisure than it does to children helping with the harvest. This week, I want to ask a more uncomfortable question. What if the six-week summer break is actually bad for learning?

Few aspects of the school calendar are as fiercely defended as the summer holiday. Mention the possibility of shortening it and you can practically hear the collective gasp from children, parents and teachers alike. The long break has become so deeply embedded within our culture that it feels almost untouchable. Yet educational researchers have spent decades examining its effects and their findings are not always reassuring.

The phenomenon has become known as “summer learning loss” or, more recently, “summer learning decay”. The idea is simple enough. During a lengthy period away from formal education, children inevitably forget some of what they have previously learned. Any teacher who has stood in front of a class in September will recognise the experience. Skills that seemed secure in July suddenly appear less robust. Knowledge that was readily accessible has become harder to retrieve. Time must be spent revisiting old material before new learning can begin.

For years, many teachers viewed this as little more than an anecdotal observation. More recently, however, researchers have attempted to measure the effect. The evidence suggests that some degree of forgetting is not only normal but essential. Human memory is not a filing cabinet in which information remains permanently preserved. Unless knowledge is revisited and used, some of it will inevitably fade; it’s part of the learning process and I have explored this in multiple posts previously.

The real question is not whether children forget things during the summer. Of course they do! The more important question is whether some children forget more than others and what impact this has upon social mobility. This is where the debate becomes particularly interesting and, perhaps, politically uncomfortable.

Research has repeatedly suggested that lengthy summer holidays can contribute to widening educational inequalities. While children from affluent families often continue to encounter enriching experiences throughout the summer, those from less advantaged backgrounds may have fewer opportunities to do so. The difference is not simply a matter of expensive foreign holidays, despite what the glossy brochures and people’s social media feeds might suggest. A child does not need a fortnight in sunnier climes to benefit educationally from the summer break. Reading books at home, visiting museums, engaging in conversations with adults, taking part in organised activities, attending sports clubs or simply having access to a rich variety of experiences will all contribute to learning. The issue is that these opportunities are not distributed equally.

The notion of a “summer learning loss” implies that all children are moving backwards at the same rate. In reality, some continue moving forwards while others stand still or drift backwards. As a result, the gap between them widens. When schools close, they temporarily suspend one of the few institutions in society that provides broadly equal access to educational experiences. During term time, children spend their days in classrooms following the same curriculum, guided by the same teachers and exposed to many of the same opportunities. The moment schools close, those shared experiences fragment. Some children return to homes filled with books, enrichment activities and educational experiences. Others do not.

Although private tuition is often perceived as the preserve of affluent families, I actually work with students from a remarkably wide range of circumstances. While some of my students return in September eager to discuss the novels they have read, the museums they have visited or the places they have travelled to, others return having spent six weeks trying to occupy themselves while their parents worked long hours and household budgets remained under pressure. The difference is not a matter of intelligence, effort or aspiration: it is entirely a matter of circumstance.

The issue of the summer break extends beyond academic challenge. Summer holidays can also expose wider inequalities relating to nutrition, childcare and wellbeing. During term time, schools provide structure and routine. They offer access to sports facilities, social opportunities and, for some children, reliable meals. The long summer break removes those supports for several weeks. It is no coincidence that many communities now operate holiday food programmes and summer activity schemes. Such initiatives exist because policymakers have recognised that the holiday period creates challenges for some families that simply do not exist for others.

None of this means that summer holidays are inherently harmful. It is important not to romanticise schooling to the point where children become educational battery hens, permanently confined to classrooms in pursuit of ever-higher examination results. Childhood should of course include freedom, exploration and opportunities for experiences that cannot be timetabled. The trouble is that for many children, such imaginings are exactly that.

Many of the strongest arguments in favour of the long summer holiday have little to do with academic attainment. Childhood memories are often formed during these extended periods away from school. Friendships deepen. Independence develops. Families spend time together. Children discover interests that may never appear on a curriculum document. Even from a purely educational perspective, there is something to be said for allowing young minds occasional periods of rest. The challenge, therefore, is not as straightforward as deciding whether summer holidays are good or bad. The evidence suggests that they may be both.

For some children, the summer holiday is a period of enormous enrichment. They read widely, travel, attend camps, develop hobbies and return to school refreshed and inspired. For others, it can represent six weeks during which educational progress stalls and social inequalities become more pronounced. The same institution can simultaneously be a source of joy and a mechanism through which disadvantage grows. This helps to explain why proposals to reform the school calendar have repeatedly resurfaced. Some countries spread holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates for this argue that shorter breaks reduce learning loss while providing families with regular opportunities for rest. Others favour targeted summer programmes designed to support students who are most vulnerable to falling behind.

Yet reform remains politically difficult. Parents organise childcare around existing arrangements and teachers (many of whom are also parents) value the opportunity for genuine recuperation after a demanding academic year. Entire sectors of the economy, from tourism to hospitality, depend upon the predictability of the summer season. The school calendar may have evolved by accident, but it is now supported by a vast network of social and economic interests.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that educational inequality does not disappear when schools close their doors in July. If anything, it becomes more visible. The six-week summer holiday acts rather like a magnifying glass, revealing differences in opportunity that are often less obvious during the school year. This does not mean that we should abolish the summer holiday, nor does it mean that children should spend August completing worksheets. It does, however, require us to think carefully about who benefits most from our current arrangements and who pays the price.

The summer holiday remains one of the most cherished features of childhood. For many families, it provides treasured memories that last a lifetime. Yet it is worth remembering that not all children experience those six weeks in the same way. While some return to school carrying souvenirs, stories and new experiences, others return with little more than the knowledge that another summer has passed. If educational inequality matters to us, then what happens outside the school gates may be just as important as what happens inside them.

School’s out — but why?

Every year, as June gives way to July, a familiar ritual unfolds across the UK. Exercise books are collected in for the final time and children emerge through school gates with the exhilarating knowledge that six weeks of freedom stretch ahead of them.

To all of us, especially those of us that have always worked in education, the school summer holiday feels as inevitable and natural as the changing of the seasons. Yet the long break that dominates the school calendar is neither ancient nor inevitable; it is the product of centuries of social change, economic necessity, political compromise and cultural expectation. The story of why schools close for such a lengthy period in summer reveals much about how Britain itself has evolved over the generations.

One of the most persistent myths surrounding the extended summer holiday is that it was created so that children could help to bring in the harvest. This is an explanation repeated so often that it has acquired the status of common knowledge. In reality, the agricultural calendar was far more complicated than the popular story suggests.

It is easy to forget that, prior to the 19th century, there was no single national pattern for schooling. The existence of any education at all was patchy, irregular and highly localised. Where schools existed, their calendars reflected local circumstances rather than national rules. In rural areas, children were often absent from lessons at various points throughout the year, whenever their labour was required. Spring planting, autumn harvesting, bird scaring and countless other agricultural tasks took precedence over attendance. In many communities, children simply came and went according to the needs of the farms on which their families lived and worked. If you haven’t come across it before, I would highly recommend the podcast called Lessons from History, produced and presented by Daisy Christodoulou and Elizabeth Wells, which offers a fascinating account of how English schools developed and how the education system as we know it today evolved.

One of the most obvious and glaring errors in the summer-holidays-were-for-the-harvest myth is that the harvest took place in very late summer and early autumn, not during the height of summer. If school calendars had been designed solely around agricultural labour, the longest breaks would likely have fallen considerably later in the year. In reality, 19th century children missed school at multiple times throughout the farming cycle. What has emerged as the modern pattern of the long summer holiday owed far more to urbanisation than it did to agriculture.

The industrial revolution transformed Britain from a predominantly rural society into an increasingly urban one. Millions of people moved into towns and cities, where factories, mills and workshops became the defining features of daily life, especially for children. At the same time, reformers were beginning to argue that literacy and numeracy were becoming essential for individual advancement and for national prosperity. Throughout the 19th century, governments gradually became involved in education, which had previously been the domain of the church and charitable groups. The landmark Elementary Education Act of 1870 established a framework for widespread schooling, while subsequent legislation made attendance increasingly compulsory. As schools became more regulated, so too did their calendars, and the haphazard patchwork of local customs slowly gave way to more standardised arrangements. The rise in city dwelling helped to create the need for a long summer break as Victorian urban centres were crowded, polluted and often unsanitary. Many classrooms lacked adequate ventilation and public health concerns loomed large. Disease was known to spread readily in densely populated environments, so educational authorities increasingly viewed summer closure as beneficial to public health.

At the same time, a burgeoning middle class was developing new attitudes towards leisure. The 19th century witnessed the birth of the very concept of the modern-day “holiday”. Expanding railway networks allowed families to travel more easily than ever before and seaside resorts began to flourish. Places such as Blackpool, Brighton and Scarborough became symbols of a new culture of recreation and, for families who could afford it, summer increasingly became associated with travel, fresh air and an escape from urban life. Educational planners thus found themselves balancing multiple interests. Farmers still required flexibility, urban authorities were worried about public health and the rising middle classes began to demand opportunities for family time and travel. The emerging solution was a substantial summer holiday, something that could broadly accommodate everyone.

By the late 19th century, the shape of the school year was becoming something that we would recognise. Although regional variations remained, many schools were operating with a lengthy summer closure accompanied by shorter breaks around Christmas and Easter. The arrangement reflected compromise rather than grand design. No single committee sat down and invented the six-week holiday. Instead, it evolved gradually from the interaction of social forces.

The 20th century cemented the emerging pattern. As Britain became wealthier, holidays became accessible to an even larger proportion of the population and the introduction of paid annual leave transformed family life. What had once been the privilege of the affluent increasingly became an expectation for working people. The school summer holiday and the expectation of a family summer holiday thus became intertwined. The development of the tourism industry strengthened this relationship further. Hotels, guesthouses, transport providers and seaside attractions all adapted to the predictable rhythm of the school calendar and entire local economies came to depend upon the influx of families during the summer break. The holiday season became not merely an educational arrangement but an economic institution.

The later 20th century brought additional changes that we perhaps underestimate or take for granted. Firstly, rising car ownership expanded travel opportunities. After that, foreign holidays became increasingly common and it is easy to forget just how recent that change has been. When I was a child, I remember being thoroughly impressed and somewhat bemused by the families who went to Spain every year: in the 1970s and 1980s, it was still not common practice for all families to go abroad. Families heading to airports during the summer holidays is now so deeply embedded in our culture that if one listens to the popular press it is easy to imagine that it is virtually a universal human right.

The endurance of the long summer break has not been without controversy. Critics have frequently argued that lengthy interruptions to learning can hinder academic progress and this is something I plan to explore next week. Educational researchers have identified what is sometimes called “summer learning loss”, the tendency for some students to forget material during their extended periods away from the classroom. Concerns are particularly acute for disadvantaged children, who may have fewer educational opportunities outside the classroom. Supporters of the traditional model counter that children need time for experiences that formal education cannot provide and that summer holidays allow opportunities for reading, exploration, creativity, employment, volunteering and family life. There is no denying the fact, however, that these opportunities are afforded much more to the “haves” rather than the “have-nots”.

Successive governments have occasionally explored alternatives. Some countries operate different systems, distributing holidays more evenly throughout the year. Advocates of year-round schooling suggest that shorter, more frequent breaks could improve retention and reduce childcare pressures. Yet proposals for significant reform have repeatedly encountered resistance from parents, educators and businesses alike. The existing calendar is far from perfect, but it is deeply embedded within British society. The complexity of England’s educational landscape, with its mixture of local authorities, academies and independent schools, makes wholesale reform considerably more difficult than it might first appear.

The school summer holiday is not a fossil from an agricultural age, as popular mythology suggests. Rather, it is the outcome of centuries of adaptation to changing economic, social and cultural realities. It emerged from a society struggling to reconcile the demands of farming, industry, education and leisure. It survived because each generation found new reasons to preserve it. To a certain extent, it continues for no better reason other than the fact that changing it would be so difficult.

School Daze

Before reading any further, try a simple experiment. Think of a teacher from your school days. Not necessarily the best teacher you ever had. Not necessarily your favourite. Just the first one who comes into your mind.

I have no doubt that somebody came to you almost immediately. You may be able to picture the classroom. You may remember the sound of their voice, the clothes they wore or a particular phrase they repeated endlessly. You might even recall a specific lesson, despite the fact that years or even decades have passed since you last sat in front of them.

Now, try remembering what you ate for lunch three days ago. Chances are, you’re finding that rather more difficult. This curious imbalance lies at the heart of one of the most fascinating questions in psychology. Why do so many of us retain vivid memories from our school days while forgetting vast stretches of our adult lives?

As a tutor, I am frequently reminded of just how powerful these memories can be. Mention Latin and people often respond not with a discussion about language but with stories about school. Sometimes they remember an inspirational teacher. More often, they recall a terrifying one. They may remember little about the subject (most usually Caecilius est in horto) but they do remember the smell of the classroom and the location of the windows. Such memories remain remarkably persistent.

The human brain is not a recording device. Most of us intuitively imagine memory as something like a video archive, faithfully storing the events of our lives for later retrieval. In reality, memory is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by emotion. Not only is the brain constantly making decisions about what information is worth keeping and what can safely be discarded, it reconstructs those memories each time it brings them to mind. From an evolutionary perspective, the process makes perfect sense. A memory system that preserved every detail of every day would quickly become overwhelmed. Forgetting is not a flaw in the system, it is one of its most important features. The interesting question, therefore, is not why we forget so much but why we remember certain things so clearly.

One answer lies in emotion. Psychologists have long known that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be remembered. This does not necessarily mean dramatic or traumatic events (although those are often disturbingly persistent). Embarrassment, excitement, pride, anxiety, surprise and even mild humiliation can all strengthen memory formation. School provides a quite remarkable number of opportunities for such emotions. The first time a child answers a difficult question correctly or incorrectly in front of their peers. The panic of forgetting a line in a school play. The pride and embarrassment of winning a prize. The horror of realising that homework has been left at home. The embarrassment of calling your teacher “Mum” in front of a class (actually, I’ve even been called “Dad”, which was interesting). Such experiences may seem trivial to an outside observer, yet they provoke heightened emotions at the time and hence become deeply embedded in our memory.

Teachers frequently become part of this process. The teachers we remember are not always the most effective educators. More often, for better or for worse, they are the ones who made us feel something: who inspired us, frightened us, encouraged us, challenged us or infuriated us. Emotion acts like a preservative, signalling to the brain that a particular experience may be worth keeping long-term. Even now, my oldest friend and I can remember how terrified we were of our needlework teacher when we were 13. Her favourite method of crowd control was ritual humiliation. “Everyone gather round to see how badly Ros is doing this,” is a classroom memory we will both take to the grave. To this day, I genuinely wish I had found the courage to defend my friend and told that teacher exactly where she could shove it. Exclusion would have been 100% worth it.

School provides us with a series of novel firsts. Much of adult life is surprisingly repetitive and the very predictability that makes adult life manageable can make it difficult to remember. One Tuesday begins to resemble another. Childhood is different, since everything is happening for the first time. Our first day at secondary school. Our first examination. Our first close friendship, the loss of which can be our first taste of heartbreak. Our first major disappointment. Such experiences define our narrative. All of this helps to explain why our memories of school often feel so vivid. It was not necessarily that school itself was more memorable than adult life. Rather, our experiences in school were a plethora of firsts, which our growing brains identified as key events in our evolving self-definition.

In addition to the inescapable fact that our school days introduce us to a series of first-time experiences, it is also important to remember the profound effect that experiences have on us when they happen during our younger years. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”, one of the most intriguing findings in memory research. When older adults are asked to recall events from their lives, they tend to remember a disproportionate number from childhood, adolescence and very early adulthood. Memories from these years appear unusually durable. I have witnessed this first-hand as I have watched my parents age: both of them, now in their 80s, talk more about their childhood and their youth than they have ever done before. Researchers continue to debate exactly why this occurs, but it is a recognised side-effect of ageing and several explanations have been proposed. Our younger years are often characterised by major life transitions and significant personal development; we form identities, establish relationships, make important decisions and experience many of life’s defining moments. That period also coincides with a time when the brain is laying down new neural pathways and thus appears to be particularly sensitive to memory formation. I find this the most interesting part of current theory: many neurologists believe that the changes that the brain is going through during adolescence and our early 20s are as significant as those that happen during our first two to three years of our lives.

For all of us, education is not simply something we experience, it is the environment within which much of our identity is formed. For some people, the experience is something they never quite recover from, and a significant challenge faced by schools is managing the feelings and prejudices projected by some parents for whom school was a thoroughly traumatic experience. For some, school was such a place of struggle and of negative comparison of oneself to others that it becomes associated with entirely negative experiences. School is where many people first encounter challenge and failure and it can be difficult for some adults to let go of the powerfully negative associations they may have towards education as a result.

All adults inevitably revisit their own experiences of school when their own children join the classroom. This sparks memories and every time a memory is reconstructed, it is updated and made more vivid. The past remains alive because we keep returning to it. This process can sometimes create the illusion that we remember school more accurately than we actually do. Every act of remembering involves a degree of reconstruction and we do not retrieve memories so much as rebuild them. This helps to explain why siblings who attended the same school often remember it so differently. They are not recalling a shared objective reality: they are reconstructing experiences through the lens of their own emotions, personalities and subsequent lives.

As somebody who has spent much of my professional life working in schools, I find all of this both fascinating and sobering. Teachers rarely know which moments students will remember. The lesson that took hours to prepare may vanish entirely from memory, whereas a careless throwaway comment may still be remembered forty years later. I am painfully aware of this. Our school experiences occur at precisely the moment when our identities are taking shape, when all of our experiences are new and our emotions feel most intense. The result is a collection of memories that can remain astonishingly vivid for the rest of our lives.

Endgame

As I write, there is one more optional paper outstanding for the OCR Latin GCSE, albeit one that very few of my students will be sitting. By the time this piece is published, all of the examinations will be over.

For those of us who work in education, the end of the examination period marks not only the conclusion of a set of assessments, but also a kind of letting go. While we can explain, reassure, encourage and prepare, we cannot sit the papers for them. When the scripts are placed down on the desk and the clock begins its inexorable march forward, that student must go it alone. The weeks leading up to that moment are often characterised by a steady accumulation of worry. Students fear forgetting what they know. They fear difficult questions, poor sleep, unexpected illness and disappointing results. Even the most capable candidates are rarely immune. Indeed, some of the highest-achieving students often carry the heaviest burdens, acutely aware of the expectations they have placed upon themselves.

Alongside the students stand their parents. Public discussion of examinations often overlooks them, yet many experience the season as a prolonged period of helplessness and worry. They can provide revision resources, quiet spaces and encouragement, but they cannot sit the papers either. They must watch their children navigate stress, self-doubt and exhaustion and, quite naturally, absorb all of those emotions themselves.

Teenagers are notoriously good at emotional projection. Adults who work with teenagers often report walking into a room feeling calm and leaving feeling worried, pressured, angry or overwhelmed, all without immediately understanding why. In psychodynamic theory, it is purportedly possible for someone to unconsciously induce another person to experience feelings that they themselves cannot comfortably hold; rather than saying “I feel anxious”, the anxious person behaves in ways that leave everyone around them feeling anxious. Psychoanalysts have long reported experiencing sudden feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, irritation or helplessness that seem to originate in the patient’s emotional world rather than their own, and they are trained to reflect on their own feelings after a session and identify whether those feelings may reflect those of their clients.

In a similar way, tutors can become vessels into which the worries of students (and indeed their parents) are poured. A student arrives at a session convinced they have forgotten everything. A parent sends a message late in the evening asking whether their child is doing enough. Another student worries that a single mock result has predetermined their future. A parent fears that one poor performance will close doors forever. Perhaps most significantly at this point in the process, a parent accepts their child’s report of a disastrously poor performance in an examination as gospel: in fact, as I have written about before, research shows that students are generally very poor at assessing their own performance.

One of the less discussed realities of educational work is that emotional labour forms a substantial part of the job. We carry confidence when students temporarily lose theirs. We maintain perspective when parents struggle to see beyond an approaching exam date. We absorb fears that we know are disproportionate while simultaneously respecting the fact that, to the person experiencing them, they feel entirely real. During the examination season, this responsibility intensifies. Every session acquires a heightened significance and every practice paper feels loaded with meaning. A student’s disappointment over a dropped mark is rarely about the mark itself, it is about what they believe that mark represents, which is weakness and failure. The role of the educator becomes part teacher, part interpreter and part custodian of perspective.

When I worked in schools, this experience was concentrated within a single cohort. There was a collective rhythm to the year. One group of Year 11 students moved together through the same milestones, the same assemblies, the same revision sessions and eventually the same examination timetable. Their anxieties often echoed one another. For better or for worse, there was a shared atmosphere in the classroom and across the school. The pressure was intense, but it was unified.

Independent tutoring has altered that experience in unexpected ways. Rather than accompanying a single cohort through a common journey, I now work with numerous individual students, whose educational lives rarely intersect. I work across two examination boards and across all the myriad of choices that their teachers can make (hence the variety of end-dates I mentioned in my opening lines). Their examination timetables differ, their schools differ and (to be brutally frank) the quality of the teaching they have received also differs.

The cumulative effect can be surprisingly profound. While a classroom teacher may be carrying the concerns of thirty students in a single year group, an independent tutor may be carrying the concerns of dozens of individuals whose worries arrive separately and require separate attention. There is no collective narrative, rather there are multiple overlapping stories, each wildly significant to the person who is living it.

This is not a complaint. On the contrary, it is one of the privileges of the profession. Trust is not given lightly, particularly by adolescents navigating one of the most scrutinised periods of their education. To be entrusted with those concerns is an honour. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that educators remain untouched by them. This year, it has been particularly challenging, for we have also been in the process of trying to move house. We accepted an offer on our property back in February and since then we have been playing the horrifically stressful game of strategy with agents, solicitors and some very anxious, very inexperienced first-time buyers. At last, as of this week, it looks like the deal is about to go through. Given the period of anxiety-inducing uncertainty that we’ve been through during the run-up, I’m almost looking forward to the stress of packing.

As examinations take place, many teachers and tutors find themselves carrying a quiet sense of responsibility that extends beyond any rational measure of their influence. We know that success or failure does not rest solely on our shoulders. We know that students ultimately achieve through their own effort and ability. Yet anyone who cares deeply about their work will recognise the feeling. We celebrate their successes personally and experience their disappointments personally too.

This is why the final examination of the season often brings relief not only for students but also for those who have supported them. The relief is different, of course. Students are relieved because the challenge is over. Teachers and tutors are relieved because the waiting can finally begin. There are no more last-minute questions, no more urgent revision plans, no more attempts to compress confidence-building into the final twenty-four hours before an exam. The work has been done. The papers have been written and nothing further can be added.

The weight that educators carry during examination season is rarely visible from the outside. It does not appear in timetables, performance measures or inspection reports. It is measured instead in conversations, emails, reassurances and moments of calm offered to students who need someone to remind them that an examination is important but not defining.

Results day remains ahead, of course. There will be celebrations, surprises and occasional disappointments. Yet results day belongs to a different emotional landscape. The uncertainty of preparation has ended. The long months of revision have passed. Whatever happens in August, the students have already done the hardest part: they have walked into the examination hall and faced the challenge.

Ghosts in the Machine

The last time I wrote about the professional use of generative AI was exactly a year ago. I had discovered that Chat GPT was surprisingly effective at constructing Latin sentences and was delighted that I could use it for such tasks as churning out examples of the ablative absolute. That’s about as far as I expected its capabilities to go and it already felt like a jolly useful gift.

Since then, I have made what I now realise is shamefully limited use of this quite remarkable tool. Only now am I just beginning to understand its full potential and the first epiphany has been that to experience those, one has to pay for it. Who knew? The fee is not huge, in fact I am currently working on the most affordable package which costs me £7 per month. With the work that it helped me to produce in just a couple of hours, it has already paid for itself one hundred times over.

Teachers, you must listen: if you have not already done so, make exploring the capacities of AI for resource-building a priority this summer. It will pay dividends. As this year’s GCSE Latin exams draw to a close and my attention is turned to the new set texts for the coming years, I promised myself that I would explore the possibility of using AI to generate materials. I have been blown away by what it can do.

Recently, I agreed with one of my lovely contacts that, during the summer holidays, he would give me some guidance on how to use AI to do this. Although I have started to have a go on my own, I still plan to meet with him, as the benefit of talking to someone who is much further down the road with something than you are is enormous. Simon Beasley, a fellow tutor and classroom teacher, has been using AI to generate resources, reduce workload and raise standards within his department for some time. I now understand how it is that the new generation of Classics teachers are pumping out such huge quantities of high-quality resources in their limited spare time. In my day (she says, waving her stick), I was doing so from scratch and I was pretty prolific in churning out stuff; these days, the sheer amount that my successors are able to produce is simply jaw-dropping. I had thought that they just had even less of a life than I did during my early years of teaching: I now appreciate that it is all thanks to AI.

So, what can it do and what are the pitfalls? Both questions are hugely important, because the use of AI is frankly dangerous unless you know what you’re doing. I don’t mean “know what you’re doing” when it comes to the AI itself — frankly, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, how it does it and whether we are soon facing James Cameron’s rise of the machines. I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What I mean is, you need to know what you’re doing in the subject you are asking it to help you with. Because, fellow humans, AI definitely can and does hallucinate. Ignore this at your peril.

Firstly, what it can do. I have been using Chat GPT to help me to prepare practice papers and revision questions for the new set texts. Rather wonderfully, it told me how to train it to do so. I asked it what to do and it told me that I need to give it as many examples as possible of past papers, which is no problem as I have them all: this in itself was the first revelation of being a paid user — you can upload a seemingly limitless number of files and it will read and analyse them in milliseconds. What then happens is you enter into an extended dialogue with it as you invite it to start generating what you want it to create for you. You critique its output and it learns as you do so. Even more wonderfully, it evidentially starts to develop its own instincts for what it is that you’re looking for and reflects this back to you. Furthermore, due to its capacity to “look” at multiple examples of past papers alongside each other in a way that the human brain struggles to do, it is able to point out patterns, quirks and minor changes in how the board have presented and structured the papers over the years, some of which I had never even noticed. The fact that it can do so in seconds is merely an added bonus. To be clear, it is actually generating the resources for you, right down to the fact that it can produce them as a Word document for you to download and edit. It’s unbelievable. I am still reeling from the excitement at what it can do.

Now, on to the pitfalls. There are three things that I think new users of AI need to be aware of in order to make safe and productive use of it. Firstly, Chat GPT is only as good as the instructions and the material that you provide it with. Computer scientists back in the 20th century had already developed the acronym GIGO, standing for “garbage in, garbage out”, summing up the principle that if flawed, incomplete or incorrect data is entered into a system, the resulting output will inevitably be just as flawed and useless, sometimes more so. If you’re not clear and explicit, and/or if you provide it with limited exemplars, you won’t get anything good out of your project. So far, so obvious.

Secondly, Chat GPT can and does hallucinate. I don’t know enough about how AI works to understand why, but it is the spookiest thing about it. In some ways, I guess it reflects how it is not merely a computer but a generative entity with the capacity to learn, one which mimics human thinking; humans go off at wild tangents and get things spectacularly wrong, and so does Chat GPT. Being of the capacity that it is, way beyond what a single human brain is capable of, it does so on a spectacular scale and you have to be aware of this.

For example, for my first project, I asked it to help me to develop some practice papers and questions for one of the new prose texts, which is an extract from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the tale of Cupid and Psyche. I provided it with all the past papers from previous years on different texts, it analysed the board’s questioning style and created a style guide for how OCR formulates its exam papers. After a bit of back and forth with me pointing out what I felt it had got wrong, we were ready for it to start producing something for the new texts, so I provided it with the exact lines of the text that the board have prescribed. I anticipated no issue with this, having pasted the lines directly into the chat. Yet, when we were part way through the second paper, it told me that it thought “Juno’s speech” would be a good choice for the 8-mark style question. Now, I have prepared the new texts, but I do not yet know them well; despite this, I felt sure that to my memory there was no speech by Juno in the prescribed lines. I hunted through the published version of the prescribed text and then asked Chat GPT where it was getting what it called “Sections 14 and 15” from, since the board have divided the text into 13 sections only. It then cheerfully informed me that I was right: it had made up Sections 14 and 15.

This brings me to my third and final warning about my new best friend. It is remarkably charming and winsome. It is built to be agreeable and it rarely pushes back against you. It also presents its hallucinations as facts and, when you point out that it is talking out of its proverbial derrière, it cheerfully agrees with you. There is a danger here, perhaps in the same way that there is a danger when working with excessively amenable colleagues: you can end up in serious trouble, because there is nobody willing and able to tell you when you’re getting it wrong. To mitigate against this, I have learned is to poke it and challenge it robustly, to play devil’s advocate. Otherwise its capacity for people-pleasing could be quite catastrophic.

In my darker moments, I suspect that this is how it will take over the world. With a smile on its face.