The 11+ must not be the death of childhood

by Amy Kinross, Head of Data, 11+ and Designated Safeguarding Lead

For many, the 11+ has become a whispered symbol of the burial of childhood: the beginning of hothousing and the end of curriculum breadth. The mouse-clicks of silent pupils navigating various online platforms are church bells, tolling for the death of joy and creativity in learning as humanities, sports and the arts are put aside in favour of endless English, mathematics and Reasoning papers. Dinner parties across London ring out their traditional funeral chorus:

“We said we’d never tutor, but…”

Small shoulders hunch over, clubs are cancelled, and school trips become but a distant memory. All of this, despite our knowledge of a post-Covid decline in children’s wellbeing. NHS England reports rates of mental health disorders in our young people have at last steadied from 2022-23, with 15.7% of our 8–10-year-olds currently experiencing a mental health disorder of some nature, but this comes after a sharp rise that began pre-Covid in 2017 and has far-reaching implications for adulthood.

All Pastoral and Safeguarding Leads know these stats – and so do ISI, hence the framework’s push for schools to “actively promote” pupil wellbeing. Much is being made, currently, of positive wellbeing, and it’s an easy buzzword to add to development plans, but it’s important to understand that you cannot create it simply by making resilience a school value or putting up a board display. We have to show our children what taking care of our wellbeing looks like actively: to model it until they understand, just as we might model column subtraction. Not just through PSHEE, and assemblies, but through the design of our curriculum itself. When we, as adults, maintain positive wellbeing while performing at our peak, we do not do so in isolation, but with the support of our personal toolkits: family and friends; sleep; exercising and fresh air; our pets; hobbies outside of work; imposing a time-limit on our evening doom-scrolling.

Ultimately, the key to positive wellbeing is not in avoiding challenge, but in creating sparks of joy within it, however small. We work hard at Kew Green Prep to give our children regular sparks of joy – a class assembly, a history ghost story, choral poetry, interschool maths quizzes, a football tour, music performances, trips to the Globe, building robots in STEM club, and many more – alongside the necessary academic rigor that will support their ambitious aspirations. As Head of Data, 11+ and DSL, and also leading the school-wide wellbeing strategy, the elements of my role may seem an impossible balancing act – inevitably at odds. But for me, this combination symbolises opportunity, and my commitment to being a passionate advocate for these sparks of joy within challenge: for genuine wellbeing. It’s not always easy, but staff are endlessly creative, and our data supports our approach: happy children achieve well.

Our value-added is higher than ever at 11+, with academic, music, art, drama, STEM and sports scholarships and several children gaining places at highly competitive senior schools. We are proud of our Year 6s, and we are proud that through our determinedly broad 11+ curriculum, we have modelled for them the best way to approach any challenge in their adult lives: with hard work, a dream, and a wellbeing toolkit. The church bells are ringing out in joyful celebration, indeed.