Why we’re starting a primary school.
I’m not a fan of talking about my kids online but I can’t tell the story of Platform Education without talking about its inception… and that means telling the story of Ethan and Ollie.
When Ethan started school a few years back he fitted in just fine. He seemed to sit on the right side of the bell curve and responded well to the structure of school.
But when Ollie started, he was a square peg in a round hole from the get go.
This was super surprising because he’d had a stellar childcare career. He had great relationships with all his carers, a big group of friends and was super social, engaging and was using letters and numbers before his big brother.
But by the end of term 1 of his Prep year at school we had been called in to see Miss Mary about his lack of progress.
We didn’t make a big fuss. It was only term one of prep. Nothing to worry about here. But as the months kept passing, the requests to see Miss Mary became ever more frequent and Ollie was clearly struggling.
Ollie had difficulty with literacy and numeracy and was already doing small group work with other kids that were likewise ‘falling behind’. He was also starting to be disruptive in class and acting out in the playground.
By the end of the year he was telling us he was dumb, stupid and was bad at school. He was absolutely shattered and had gone from being a happy, quirky, outgoing little guy to being withdrawn, insecure and sad. We were heartbroken.
Things kept getting worse in Grade One and the school sent us to see a pediatrician. Luckily, we were referred to a fantastic speech pathologist who started work on pure phonics and within two 30-minute sessions it was like CLICK the lights went on. Ollie was decoding three syllable words within a month and his behavior at school, temperament at home and outlook on life lifted 100%.
Just as he was improving there was an incident in Ollie’s Chinese class. In our family this has come to be referred to as the ‘incident which shall not be told’ and I won’t divulge the secret here. Needless to say it brought things to a head with the school Principal.
We asked for a change in Ollie’s class schedule which was to ditch the Chinese class until he was on top of his English literacy. But the school weren’t able or willing to be flexible with the schedule. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
And that’s when I realised the one-size-fits-all model of education — really doesn’t fit at all.
I’d seen a conga line of little kids outside the Principal’s office. Kids who were lovely little people in the playground and at home but were clearly not coping in the system. I’ve since heard over 100 stories of children who use all their mental energy trying to ‘function’ at school they never get around to being educated. And the statistics back up the anecdotes.
In pursuit of a universal education, governments and schools have designed pedagogy and processes for the average, while a substantive minority, on both sides of the bell-curve, endures a system ill-designed for them.
International PISA (Programme for International Assessment) results show an increasing number of children in Australia are getting left behind, while there has been a 30% decrease in students performing at the highest level.
The effects of this one-size-fits-all approach are that in Australia 1 in 7 primary school children are experiencing mental ill health, rising to 1 in 4 adolescents. Home-schooling has risen 84% in 6 years and 50% of teachers quit the profession within 5 years of graduation.
So here begins the story of Platform Education. Our pursuit of a customised and personalised education for Ethan and Ollie, and all families, like ours, who have kids that are square pegs in round holes, high-achievers, misfits, fidgeters, crazy talented, flipperty-jibbets, gifted, restless, creative, zany, insatiably curious, a little bit slower than others, or a little bit faster than most, or just kids who can’t bear to endure an an inflexible education system for a moment longer.
Head to www.platformeducation.co
Onwards and upwards!
