Celebrate Failure, Sing Badly, Write Your Own Report

I read this aloud at supper to mock it. By pudding the house had adopted all three, and the first report due was mine.

Reports, then. Our eldest, fourteen, wrote his in four minutes. It used the word “excellent” nine times, twice about PE, for which he has a note from me. Mine took the evening. Packed lunches: consistent. Reading log: signed, often on the right day. Homework: has occasionally done it herself. Under Areas for Development I wrote “none at this time”, which the youngest crossed out.

Failure next. A consultant who visited Monkton in 2021 reported the failure awards, and noticed that the examples given were pupils who had gone on to amazing achievements, like rowing for Great Britain. A Year 12 pupil explained the idea: if you do something wrong, you are not “going to just be judged for that one thing”. We held our assembly on Sunday. I nominated the time I reversed into the school gate. The children nominated four of mine, none of which went on to row for Great Britain.

Then the choir. George Bevan, a music teacher at Monkton, started the Choir Who Can’t Sing in January 2012 after noticing at whole-school hymn practice that teenage boys tend to “sing” where they speak, some two octaves from where he was aiming. Some 25 boys and male staff turned up to the first rehearsal for five-note scales. Afterwards, boys kept knocking on his door for singing lessons. “I’m not even a singing teacher!” he wrote.

In 2017 he described what happens when a new pupil tells him he can’t sing: he offers the Choir Who Can’t Sing. “Oh, I can sing.” “Oh, you can be in chapel choir then.” There is, he said, “no way out of it really, and I don’t pressurize them”.

I tried this on my husband, who claims he can’t sing. “Oh, I can sing,” he said, and joined the only other choir we have, which is the shower. My report came back for a rewrite. Under Areas for Development, the youngest has written: sings.