Fiona Looney

Your child will soon grow into that jumper

ITHINK it is the jumpers that do it. Because no mother has ever bought her big school-bound child a jumper that is a snug fit, they appear on the front of every newspaper, these new junior infants, looking as though they are not so much wearing their new school jumpers, as wrapped up in them. They look like babies. They are babies.

It doesn’t matter whether your own child is starting school, or whether those smiling, anxious days are long behind you and them, there is something about those photos that must melt even the most cynical heart. All these excited little people, taking those first, tentative steps on a journey that will end some 14 odd years from now, with bigger versions of those jumpers falling apart at the seams and parents tearing their hair out over honours maths.

Somewhere in between, these shiny little four and five-year- olds will become the people who will lead our country, mould society and maybe change the world. But right now, today, their greatest ambition is to commandeer the best building blocks in the classroom and their parents’ biggest concern is that they won’t go to the toilet on the floor.

There is something poignant as well about all these little scholars’ total lack of awareness of the scale of their incarceration ahead. Most parents can recount at least one story of a child who happily announced, at the end of their first day in school, that they wouldn’t be going back. My own son decided to ‘give it a week’. None of them has any concept that they are obliged to remain in this brand new system for 14 years. When you think about it, that’s longer than the average life sentence.

Yesterday, in our home, we’d the cameras out again as the boy who said he’d give it a week headed for secondary school in yet another oversized uniform, this one with trousers that I turned up with the flimsiest of stitches, in anticipation that his current dramatic growth spurt will necessitate me undoing my handiwork before the mid-term break. It was another milestone.

This week always brings its share of anxieties — a new classroom, new teachers, new classmates, a seating pattern that puts your child beside a troublemaker, a timetable that means they’ll be crippled from carrying too many books.

But somehow, they get through it. And they do so because, in spite of its many shortcomings and its shameful lack of proper funding, we trust our education system. Whether we are depositing a four-year-old by the hand or waving off a 16-year- old with a half-hearted threat about not forgetting their key, we fundamentally believe that the school system I CAN’T understand all the fuss about a so-called value-based property tax. Given the continuing and relentless decline in house prices, isn’t it most likely that all our houses will all be totally worthless by the January 1 implementation date? exists solely to develop, nurture and stimulate our children and to help us mould them into the adults they will become upon leaving it.

FOR all that we might have problems with i ndividual teachers or seemingly absurd school rules, nobody honestly believes that either the teacher or the rule has been put in place just to thwart their child. Whatever problems an individual child encounters along the road of education, there remains a sense that everyone — child, parents and teachers and school — are all working towards a common goal, that of turning a small person into a decent, honourable big person with the right skills and confidence to allow them take their place in the big, bad world.

If you are a parent of one of those adorable, over-wrapped junior infants, then please allow me this, from the benefit of three children and more than 20 years of these first tentative weeks back in school: trust your child’s teacher, trust their school, and trust the system.

For all our current economic woes, Ireland is a better place now than it was when you left school: and much of the credit for that must go to our education system. Trust it to continue to deliver for your children. And trust me, if that 14 years seems like a lifetime now, it will be over in the cruelest blink of an eye. And now, let’s all go to the pub for lunch.