Kitty is my eldest daughter. She's just coming up to 13 as I write. From when she was a toddler, she was always very gregarious and sociable, full of so much confidence that I used to agonise over how to encourage her spirit whilst still letting her know her place. She made friends easily at school and although she struggled with literacy at the beginning, she was always very bright verbally, very adventurous and well co-ordinated physically.
Then she got to about eight years old and suddenly started to have problems with bullies. Two particular bullies at her school, who picked on her, as bullies always do, pretty much at random. To start with, she told them where to go and stood up for herself. But as time went on and the bullies became more devious, often framing her so that she was torn between letting them abuse her and getting into trouble with the teachers. Being a very independent spirit, Kitty struggled through this on her own for quite a while before she told me about it, but when she did I went into the school to try to sort things out.
Well, you know the score... from the word Go, the teachers were all locking their shields together and telling us it was all in our heads. It turned out that the parents of these bullies were volunteer classroom assistants in the school, and it soon became clear that the regular staff were prepared to allow Kitty to live in misery in order to avoid risking the loss of their valued volunteers.
We battled with it until half way through year 6, just four months after I'd taken Sophia out of school. After one extremely dissatisfactory meeting with the headmaster, I said to myself, "Before, I thought this was the only way, but now I know we have a choice: I don't have to keep sending her in there to be abused." So I took her out as well.
In the following six months I discovered that my Kitty was a shadow of her old self: she now walked with a stoop, and spoke very negatively of herself, had no confidence in her abilities and had become extremely reluctant to try anything new, for fear of failure. She was convinced that she was ugly, worthless, and stupid. The merest suggestion of reading and writing would bring on crying fits, during which more shocking details about what she'd had to endure at school were reluctantly revealed. Where I'd thought her to be just a little behind with her literacy, it transpired that she was struggling so much with it that it was severely holding her back in all subjects. And yet, at each parent's evening I'd attended I'd been assured that she was "achieving all targets".
She started secondary school six months later, as we'd planned, hoping for a bright, fresh new start. Sadly, two kids from her old school were in the same class, and they were eager to carry Kitty's baggage from primary school into the new one. Besides that, I was deeply unhappy with the standard and quantity of work that was being done in the school. I struggled to get her the support she needed to improve her literacy, but when tested, the school declared that she was "only" a year and a half behind, and so didn't warrant extra help.
Then some very worrying things started to happen that made me suspect that it was the teachers and not just the kids, who were bullying her. She was suspended from classes one day because a teacher merely "suspected" that she had said "the F word" out loud in class. Not only was this absurd from the point of view that Kitty's the most square kid I've met, but also because the teacher's doubt was over whether she'd said the F word or "foot" - Kitty has a home counties accent, so those two words would not sound alike from her!
No attempts to reason with the head of year did any good. She even tried to bully me when I went in to try and discuss it with her, as well as Kitty's other issues there. She shouted me down, interrupted constantly until I felt compelled to stand up and say firmly to her, "I'm not one of your pupils, Mrs. A." And then, when I expressed that I was unhappy with the outcome of the meeting, she laughingly offered to take me to see the head, in a tone and way that told me "go ahead, it's a racket here, we all stick together so you'll get nothing from him that you didn't get from me".
And all the time, poor Kitty's confidence was being cut to ribbons, and she'd been fragile to begin with. I decided that the negligible educational gain that the place offered, it just wasn't worth the enormous personal cost to both Kitty, myself and all of us as a family. So I took her out permanently. As this had been supposedly the best school in the area, I didn't think it worth bothering to find another for her only to get more of the same, and have kept her out since April 2009.
Interestingly, since that time, another two children from that same year in that same school have been taken out to be home educated by their parents. So we're even more sure than before that it wasn't "just us"!
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