Abingdon News No.40

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Abingdon News
The soundtrack to my youth was Britpop
rather than Gershwin or the Beatles, but
my experiences growing up were much
the same as those of my parents or
grandparents. When I look at my teenaged
son on Instagram, texting, downloading
apps and gaming, I don’t think the same
can be said for his generation.
Teenage years have always been fraught.
It’s a time when everyone is self-conscious
and this is exacerbated for today’s
children. As well as the stress of living
through adolescence, they are required to
virtually record every moment. Teenagers
have always wanted to appear “in”, so
imagine how much greater this pressure is
when the snapshots of your daily life have
to be constantly uploaded to Snapchat.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, most
of our lives are pretty mundane: going to
school, watching TV, having supper, being
ordinary - which all looks very dull on
Facebook or WhatsApp.
There is pressure on teenagers to
sensationalise their lives: it’s not enough
to have a good time, you have to be seen
to be having an amazing time, and the
flipside is that if life is dull, then the world
has to be abysmal, and the unspoken
influence is that the mildly disappointing is
transformed into depression.
No wonder mental health issues are on the
rise. This is made worse by the increase in
the sexualisation of the male body image
so that boys are now experiencing what
girls have had to face for years. Boys
want to look perfect. Academically, the
expectation is also perfection: you work
hard, get good grades, only for the media
to inform you that the success is due to
grade inflation, not your efforts. Your future
seems to hang in the balance at an early
age with perfection being the only goal.
So how do we counter this trend
at Abingdon to support and
protect our boys?
Central to this is understanding that
everyone is different, and success,
happiness, wellbeing, can take lots
of different forms. It is important that
there is not a “type” to which the boys
must conform, but instead we celebrate
and revel in differences, in terms of
backgrounds, ethnicity, interests and skills.
This is why our Other Half programme is
so important.
School should be a place where you can
explore something new and challenging,
safe in the knowledge that disappointment
might follow but that there is a support
network there to help you. As the story
of almost every entrepreneur will show,
learning to fail and how to then bounce
back is an invaluable life skill.
Pastoral care is paramount. In those
crucial adolescent years our tutor to pupil
ratio is 1:10 or less. Boys see their tutors
every day so they know the boys very well
and can quickly pick up on something
amiss. PSHCE is timetabled and thorny
issues are openly discussed. We have
four counsellors in school enabling boys
to find support outside of the teaching
staff if they want to. Boys know it is OK to
find life difficult and to ask for help: they
don’t have to “man up”. Finally there is
peer support. Older boys mentor younger
boys, prefects are trained how to listen,
pupils are encouraged to raise concerns,
and everyone is taught that the root to real
wellbeing is to reach out to others.
To return to my Britpop past, Blur famously
claimed: “There’s no other way/All that you
can do/Is watch them play.” At Abingdon
we feel it is crucial to give our pupils the
freedom to “play”, but we know that
“watching” them also includes picking
them up when they stumble or fall.
Pastoral Care
by Deputy Head (Pastoral) Mark Hindley