Department for Education concludes that children are suffering from excessive exposure to measurable knowledge and insufficient opportunities to express their relationship with multiplication.
LONDON, ENGLAND: Britain's education establishment has discovered that children are not flourishing at school, and has ordered an urgent review of whether the nation's long attachment to reading, writing and arithmetic has been stopping pupils from picking up the emotional skills they'll need to survive a modern government department.
The alarm follows a fresh round of argument over what schools are actually for, including a Financial Times look at why children are struggling to flourish at school.
Education specialists have answered with five government-approved feelings to replace the traditional three Rs. Their reasoning is simple enough: a child who can't read, write or calculate should at least be able to describe the disappointment using the correct terminology.
The five are Resilience, Inclusivity, Empowerment, Emotional Awareness and Sustainable Enthusiasm. Reading survives as an optional activity for children who would like to find out what those words mean.
Why Maths Is Now Considered Emotionally Aggressive in British Classrooms
Under the emerging philosophy, teachers would stop asking pupils whether seven multiplied by eight makes 56. Children would instead explore how the number 56 makes them feel, and whether some other answer might offer a more inclusive mathematical experience.
A pupil who writes 42 could still pick up credit for confidence, creativity and the courage to challenge established numerical convention.
Educational consultants argue that multiplication tables put needless pressure on children by insisting that numbers have relationships that were settled long before the children were born. One proposed fix would let every child build a personal multiplication table that reflects their individual identity.
The Treasury, it should be said, has been doing this for years.
A Westminster education adviser defended the shift, explaining that the real purpose of modern schooling isn't to produce children who know everything. It's to produce adults who are comfortable knowing a good deal less.
"Knowledge is important," the adviser said, "but knowledge without emotional validation is simply information behaving aggressively."
Parents are not convinced. One South London father said he'd gone cold on the whole programme after discovering that his 12-year-old daughter could discuss her emotional boundaries for 40 minutes but couldn't work out the change from a £20 note. He was advised to stop imposing monetary expectations on a developing personality.
Government Finds Pupils Are Unhappy, Orders More Assessments
The problem isn't entirely theoretical. According to the OECD's PISA 2022 results for the United Kingdom, only 64% of British students surveyed reported feeling that they belonged at school, against an OECD average of 75%. A further 25% reported low satisfaction with their lives.
Those are serious numbers, and they point to schools needing stronger relationships, better support and more chances for children to succeed.
British officials, naturally, have found the most efficient remedy available: another questionnaire.
Children would fill in a weekly 48-page Emotional Flourishing Assessment, rating their happiness, optimism, sense of belonging and confidence that somebody in Westminster understands the difference between a child and a spreadsheet. The results would go into a national database, where they'd be turned into statistics cheerful enough to justify the programme.
A child reporting unhappiness would be classified as "pre-flourishing." A child refusing to fill in the questionnaire would be classified as "independently flourishing." A child asking why any of this was necessary would be recommended for advanced critical-thinking instruction, provided the critical thinking stopped short of government policy.
Teachers, meanwhile, would get compulsory training in spotting emotional distress, building emotionally safe classrooms and writing encouraging emails to the parents of children who haven't turned up since March.
School Attendance Crisis: Teachers Ask Whether Anybody Remembers Teaching
The Department for Education's own pupil absence statistics for England show that 18.14% of pupils were persistently absent in the 2024/25 academic year, meaning they missed at least one session in ten.
One London headteacher suggested that getting pupils into the building might be a handy first step toward getting them to flourish inside it. The idea was reportedly dismissed for leaning too hard on physical attendance and not enough on the more progressive notion of aspirational presence.
Teachers have also floated smaller classes, orderly lessons, interesting subjects, competent instruction and enough time to develop real skills. Those suggestions were referred to a committee, since they involve practical solutions and might set an unwelcome precedent.
For decades Britain expected schools to educate children. Now schools are expected to educate them, mend their emotional health, correct social inequality, prepare them for employment, teach digital citizenship, prevent climate change and make sure nobody feels uncomfortable about fractions. Somewhere in there, somebody may eventually have to ask whether a school can do all of that and still find an hour for a spelling test.
A maths teacher from Croydon offered a compromise.
"Teach them to read. Teach them to count. Teach them to think. Then let them decide whether they're flourishing."
The proposal was judged dangerously straightforward.
Officials have recommended a sixth approved feeling instead: Gratitude Towards the Department for Education. Children who fail to show it will attend a resilience workshop. Parents may appeal, as long as they can complete the 76-page application in triplicate.
Five Humorous Observations About the Five Approved Feelings
- A twelve-year-old who can talk for forty minutes about her emotional boundaries but can't make change from a twenty. That's not a child. That's a tiny divorce lawyer.
- They want a 48-page questionnaire every week to find out whether the kids are happy. You know what makes a kid unhappy? Forty-eight pages.
- "Independently flourishing" is what they call a kid who refuses to fill in the form. In my house we called that one "grounded."
- Persistently absent means missing ten percent of school. Ten percent! I've had gym memberships with better attendance, and I was paying for those.
- Everybody's very keen that the children feel validated. Meanwhile my bank hasn't validated my parking since 2019.
Disclaimer: This is satirical journalism. The government proposals, policy announcements and dialogue are comic devices rather than verified official actions. This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Both report feeling at least four of the five approved feelings on most days, and the fifth on Sundays. More UK satirical news and the British Onion can be read without an emotional risk assessment.
SOURCE: https://www.ft.com/content/1ef0813e-843a-477b-bca8-457afba61ed4 https://prat.uk/?p=51971
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