There is something uncanny and magical about a school at night, the windows blazing as you approach in the rain through a patent-leather car park. I’ve been visiting secondary schools with my daughter and every time I walk through the doors of another sprawling maze of linoleum and cubist self-portraits I lose my breath a little. It’s not just the act of entering these buildings, with their smells of piss and pasta and their rickety architecture of adolescence, though it is this a bit. It is this a bit because for all the million-pound immersive experiences where you step inside, I don’t know, the mind of Beethoven or whatever and drink wine from a shoe, there is no faster way to take an adult back in time than by leading them into a suburban school at 6pm on a Thursday.
There we are again, 14, greasy and livid, trying to make decisions about the life we want to lead by picking either French or biology. There we are again, every encounter a humiliation, prickling with lust and allergies, every feeling 100ft tall and made of wax. Visiting a secondary school is like using Ozempic or Botox – on the pavement outside you are large, adult, but when you walk inside you’re shrunk back 30 years. A similar thing happens, actually, when confronted with the new price of things, of train tickets or dinner – a sense of being blown backwards through adulthood, to when such luxuries were similarly out of reach.
Part of this teenage-ifying in school, though, involves cheating. As we walk through the classrooms, I find myself struggling to work out what I’m meant to be asking. Somebody suggested I think about what I might have needed to know about a school at age 12, but I dismissed them because, honestly, nobody should be taking advice from a depressed pubescent, however imaginary. Instead, I linger beside a better-prepared stranger and co-opt their questions. “How many children stay on for sixth form?” Good one. “Do you stream pupils in maths?” Interesting. Left to my own devices, I would ask teachers about how tired they are, and teenagers if they think my trainers are cool (yes).
So it’s this a bit, this time machine, but the bigger shock for me, returning to school, is learning how little I know. And this happened on every visit at least once – the student showing us around would lead a little group into a classroom and, in three or four straightforward sentences, explain a subject in a way that instantly clarifies it for me. “What’s economics?” asked my daughter and the teenager, without missing a beat, said (and, of course, I’ll screw it up here, because I was there in the room as a mum going through something rather than as a newspaper journalist of 20 years, but…) “It’s about understanding how and why we all make choices about what to buy and sell, and how these decisions affect us,” explaining briefly using the examples of war and elections and oil.
Admittedly, my education was largely based around the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and poking a sharp pencil into a flat eraser, but I felt a shiver go through me as I learned a thing.
It happened again in the religious education classroom, when another teenager explained how, really, RE was very little to do with, say, Jesus, and actually all about philosophy, and went on to explain this very lightly and intelligently using the concept of “God”. For anyone considering an Open University course, I can highly recommend instead just walking through any Year 7 open evening with a GCSE student called Maya.
And these kids! I don’t know many teenagers – my life is largely populated with the young and the old – so I was unprepared for just how fabulous they were. Energised, confident, smart, honest, funny, they made eye contact with grownups, were kind to the 10-year-olds, and waited patiently for those of us loitering in the food science room for another mini banana muffin. I was impressed, slightly awed, a little heartbroken, too. Because, I hated school. I was angry and indifferent, baffled by much of the work and forever distracted by friendship and the project of getting older.
All this complicates these new school visits even further, because I can’t quite picture what a good school might look like. I can’t entirely imagine a school in which a person could thrive and learn and be happy. I know there are plenty of young people today who feel the same – eavesdropping in a playground last weekend, I heard two mothers calculating the fines they’re expected to pay the council as none of their teenagers will go to school – and I know, of course, that the schools are struggling, too.
I was startled, on the tours, by flashes of modern discipline, such as misbehaving pupils sent to “isolation”, but I also became increasingly aware of how the things the tours showed us were not necessarily the things we needed to see. We don’t only need, for example, to see a lamb’s heart being dissected, or to do a quiz about Henry’s wives – we also need to meet the school’s saddest students, and read the Snapchats on its hidden phones and be invisible in the canteen at 12.30.
Last night, we emerged into the rain vibrating and got some chips to eat very fast on the bus. When you leave school, you’re meant to be an adult, prepared for the world. Instead, I left school this time feeling younger than ever.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
