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My Child is Struggling in Mainstream School, What Do I Do?

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Danny Harrington, Founder and Managing Director of ITS Education Asia, has some solutions

As a parent with the onus on you to make a choice about which school your child should go to, you will undoubtedly follow your personal belief of what a “good” school looks like and make every effort to get your child access to that school. And frankly, if everyone was able to get their children into the school type of their choice and those children then thrived and flourished in that school, all would be well in the world. But it doesn’t work like that.

Far too many children flounder – some obviously, some less so – but there is a tendency to persevere, to hope things will turn out alright or to feel that’s just the way it is. And that can often be traced back to that foundational belief of what a “good” school is. If you have chosen a “good” school according to your principles, then the school must be good, and the fault must lie with the child. But it’s not really a question of blame. It’s just a fact that schools have to deliver a fairly homogeneous experience to a population that is inherently heterogeneous and thus there are always going to be children who do not thrive in that particular school. And don’t forget, your child is not you.

One answer of course is to change from one type of mainstream school to another. For younger children especially, this is almost always the best (or at least, least worst) approach because the crucial work for these age groups is socialisation and varied group activity. It can be a solution for older teenagers as well, but it does depend immensely on how well you have identified the reasons your child is not thriving. We have seen, for example, increasing rates of children diagnosed with ADHD in the past two decades. Whatever the reason for this, the main concern for those diagnosed, and their families, is how it impacts on crucial elements of growing up, including schooling and education and the outcomes from them. Staying in a mainstream school is often not the ideal way forward.

If your child is not thriving in a traditional school environment, you must be prepared to ask the hard questions around whether an alternative would be better. Keeping the kids in mainstream school is the easier route, but surely if they are struggling then it is only easier for you. Not them.

Younger children can be considered for home schooling if a) you feel competent to manage it and deliver some of it, b) you have the time and resources to do so and c) you have a network of homeschoolers to make your community (much easier now with online options). For teenagers completing high school though, home schooling is not usually a good idea. You will not have the competence to teach, or even manage, their curriculum; they will not have the competence to learn or manage their preparation. That is where ITS Education Asia comes in.

At ITS Education Asia, our full-time students have exited mainstream schooling for a host of reasons and found their feet in a completely different environment. One-on-one teaching, FLIP pedagogy, adjusted timings, flexible arcs to exams – there are all kinds of elements that can be adjusted to fit the system to the child instead of the child to the system.

If your teenager is struggling in school, come and chat. What we do is not for everyone but at least you will have done something.

Danny Harrington is the Founder and Managing Director at ITS Education Asia, Hong Kong’s only alternative schooling provider accredited with Pearson for IAL and IGCSE.

To sign up for a consultation, visit www.itseducation.asia.

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