Learning to be good parents

A new course is helping to equip the teenagers of today with the skills they will need as the families of the future. By Maureen O'Connor

It is a far cry from 13-year-olds running off to marry Turkish waiters. These 13-year-olds are solemn, well scrubbed and infinitely serious about the awesome responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. No, they don't think early marriage is a good idea: 20 is soon enough, says Nevina firmly, 30 would be better, say some of the boys.

They think babies are a joint responsibility, they need two parents, it's a good idea to discuss family life and parenthood while you're at school, and they would like to live their lives rather differently from the previous generation. Adults, they obviously think, though they feel it impolite to say so, have made a bit of a hash of it.

These paragons of sober good sense attend Mossley Hollins High School, a community comprehensive in the Pennines on the fringe of Greater Manchester. The reason they are so forthcoming on subjects that some of them admit they had given little thought to until recently is that they have just come through a new Education for Parenthood course which is being tried out in five secondary schools in the North.

Their teacher is Jean Madden, who took over as head of technology last September. One of her responsibilities is to run a GCSE course in Childcare, a popular option but unfortunately only with girls. "I did once have a boy at another school who went on to be a nursery nurse, but on the whole this is not something boys are keen on. And while teenage girls do think about becoming mothers, boys generally aren't thinking about fatherhood at all at this age." The boys in her class take the point. If they look ahead, they say, it is jobs and careers they are thinking about, not being a dad.

The Children's Society, which devised the new course, agrees. The society found in a preliminary survey that two thirds of existing parents felt that they should have been better prepared at school to bring up children.

The course takes the form of a comprehensive pack of teaching materials and a training scheme for teachers wanting to use them. It has been designed with the whole of the national curriculum in mind. Every aspect of it has been mapped across subjects and attainment targets, taking account of cross-curricular themes such as citizenship, health and environmental education, and core skills such as communication and numeracy, so that ideally it can be taught wherever a topic seems most appropriate.

For instance, a number of topics under the general heading of "What it Means to be a Parent" might be dealt with in a school's personal and social education slot, or could be tackled through English literature, or art or religious education. A study of family patterns could be dealt with in history or sociology and used to develop statistical and graphical skills. Even the new General National Vocational Qualification courses have been included in the matrix.

At Mossley Hollins School, 13- and 14-year- olds have done two six-week courses as part of their personal and social education lessons. Ideally, Mrs Madden thinks, this should be followed up by them next year and the year after, because some of the material demands a level of maturity in discussion which they do not yet have. But she was pleased that when she organised a debate on "a man's place in the home" most of the students seemed to have come to terms with the idea that family life these days is a joint enterprise.

She has also been able to persuade some of her colleagues to pick up themes of family life in art, languages and religious education lessons. "This is something which can only be introduced with the support of a school's senior management," she says. "The curriculum is overloaded, in PSE as well as other subjects, so there has to be a real commitment from the top."

One of her early projects was to use photographs showing happy and not so happy scenes from family life which the pupils had to comment on. The chart-topper was the wedding photograph, which worried her because she felt that girls were regarding that as an end rather than a beginning. The pictures which alarmed the children were of a mother smoking in front of a child and a child being smacked. But equally significant, Mrs Madden thought, especially for her RE colleagues, was that the pupils, from a fairly traditional community, had no interest at all in a photograph of a baptism.

"I think this is as important as anything we teach," she says. "Many of the major problems in schools are caused by parents who do not have proper parenting skills. If you are going to change attitudes then it is much more effective to do it when people are young."