Becky Pruce

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

I wish *so* much that people understood this more, it's really bloody difficult to navigate 😫

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

What a wholesome, special birthday. Appreciate life so much 💫

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Our last weekend of raising money for tiny lives! https://t.co/aHxRZVSUI3

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

How am I 30 in a few days!!! Crazy

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Nothing more wholesome than a baby class with fellow NICU babies, literally warms your insides ♥️

[NHS @NHSuk]

It’s #CervicalCancerPreventionWeek.

Cervical screening can help stop cancer before it starts. If you missed your last one, book an appointment with your GP practice. You may also be able to book with your local sexual health service.

➡️ https://t.co/LCjzeeGWbY

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

@debsjohnson99 Haha all good so far!! Xx

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Lying here doing the night feed listening to the house get absolutely battered. Will we wake up to a fence? Will our bins make it through? Have all my plants snapped and ended up at number 4? 😂

[mark smith @markismith50]

Yeah, yeah, people will say it's a Challenge Cup dead rubber. I totally get it.

But in the context of our season, where we are and where we've come from, that is an absolutely HUGE result for us.

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Said this a million times but honestly nothing angers me more than taking Archie for a respiratory appointment and walking past a tonne of people smoking at the doors of the hospital like pls let me have an entrance where he doesn't need to breathe that in thanks

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Our initial target was to raise £500, we're now nearly at £1,000 🥹 thank you so much everyone. Link is open until the end of January #nicu
https://t.co/aHxRZVTsxB

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Can't believe I ever used to say I was tired. Now I know tired 🤣

[Jocelyn J. Fitzgerald MD @jjfitzgeraldMD]

What if I told you there was a disease that tangles a woman’s organs together but the only money we’ve spent trying to figure out why is because sometimes it means she cant get pregnant

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

@NewcastleCC I've just spoken to someone about a blue badge for my son who was incredibly dismissive. Really not appreciated when talking about something so sensitive!

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Nearly doubled our target 🥹🥹🥹♥️

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Nearly at our target already! Any donations would be hugely appreciated and would help us give back to those who helped us when we needed it most ❤️❤️

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Looking back at photos and JESUS I looked so unwell during the last few months of pregnancy I'm actually baffled nobody picked up on it other than Callum 😂 could barely stay awake for a month

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Literally nothing I love more than a fri night in with nice food, pop, choc, a good series and snugs in bed with my little fam. The gal who used to love gin and nights out does not exist anymore 😂

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

Today I heard from a parent that their son was terribly upset when he got covid, because it would ruin his 100% attendance record. At the end of the year, those with 100% get book tokens & certificates in assembly. She mentioned it in passing, she obviously didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just how school worked, and last year her son had got the award.

Here’s why policies like that should stop.

What’s the problem, you might think, with rewarding those who turn up day after day? Surely it’s just a nice little treat to recognise their commitment? And book tokens! How worthy. What’s the problem with free books for kids who take school seriously enough to make it in every day?

As with all reward systems, however, we don’t think enough about those who don’t get the reward and the effect on them.

Who are these kids? Well, it’s the children with serious illness - the mum then went on to tell me that one girl in his class has leukaemia, for example. Or the disabled child. Or the child with overwhelming anxiety. Or the child who became homeless with their mum due to domestic violence and has to go to the shelter in the night, and then doesn’t make it to school the next day. Or even the child whose dad died and who had a day off to attend the funeral.

It’s the kids who find school most difficult and who have the most challenges who struggle to attend.

What happens to them when everyone else goes up to get their book tokens? They sit in assembly watching, and they are punished. They are punished because the absence of a reward acts as a punishment for them. It’s a public punishment too, everyone knows that they didn’t make the grade. No free books for them. Tough.

Whenever there are rewards, the flip side is punishment. When we reward one person, the others are punished by the absence. When we reward someone one year, and then not the next, that again the absence acts as a punishment. It makes them feel bad.

Of course, we know this. We know that children feel bad when they don’t get something and others do. This is in fact pretty well how rewards are meant to work. They are meant to motivate. The idea is that children will try harder to get the reward.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that 100% attendance isn’t about trying harder. It’s largely about luck, particularly at primary school. Luck not to get ill, luck to have a stable family, luck to be the kind of person who doesn’t find school overwhelmingly stressful. Luck to be the sort of person for whom life is a bit easier, in fact.

Rewards for 100% attendance reward the lucky, and by doing so punish the unlucky. The lucky feel good and the unlucky feel bad. And that has other consequences. Because making those who find school attendance hard feel bad is very unlikely to make them more able to attend. They are already struggling, and now they’re being punished for it.

It contributes to anxiety, because children are aware of the consequences of not getting 100%, and some of them will become really anxious about it. For others, it will contribute to their anger and their feelings that they aren’t valued as much as others.

So yes, the proud children up the front of assembly can’t see a problem, and their parents think it’s ‘just a nice gesture’, but it’s so easy to ignore the effect on the least advantaged. We celebrate the winners and the losers are invisible, shamed into silence. The winners assume that the losers deserved to lose - they say that they worked hard for their awards, and the losers couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed and so why should they get book tokens?

This happens again and again in our education system, and that’s why I keep on banging this drum. Every intervention should be evaluated for its impact on losers as well as winners. It’s not enough to pretend they could all be winners if they just tried hard enough.

Sometimes people tell me that the attendance awards helped them learn that everyone is good at different things, because whilst they didn’t get attendance awards, they did well at other things and got awards for music or creative writing. Which is nice for them, but again, let’s think about the losers. For it’s not true that in a school context everyone is good at something. It’s not true that everyone gets awards somewhere. Some children learn that they aren’t good at anything. Not even turning up.

These reward systems come up often when I talk to young people who are disillusioned and burnt out by school. The significance of book tokens goes beyond the money. That’s why it doesn’t work when parents say they’ll buy the book tokens instead, to try and lessen the pain of not getting the reward. Those book tokens, awarded in public in assembly, signify approval, status, validation - and to those who don’t get them, they signify the opposite

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

Forgot how terrible anxiety is Jesus

[Becky Pruce @BeckyPruce]

People always say life is precious but honestly seeing the things I have in the last few months I can honestly say we take so much for granted. Life and health is truly the most precious thing, those of us who are healthy are the luckiest people in the world. Treasure every day x