Thread by @IrelandsFarmers

Earlier in the week I mentioned grandad’s metalwork skills had jumped a couple of generations. Youngest son has a real talent for steel fabrication. Techniques are different, but he can literally make anything.

This is a bale cradle feeder, he starts with lengths of straight steel & rolls them on a machine he made himself. These are the finished articles off to a customer this week. He has a full time job & does this at night.

At the start of 2020 we refurbished grandad’s workshop. It was semi derelict & full of junk. We replaced half the roof & ram a heavy underground cable for his welding kit.

Here’s the thing though. School didn’t work for him. He has ADHD. When we moved back to the farm he was 13. We enrolled him at a local school & although they claimed they would support him they didn’t. Quickly because he couldn’t concentrate in class, he got labelled a bad boy.

The low point for him & me was when he got excluded for punching a bully, but the bully told a better version of the story. The headmaster told me I was a bad parent & he was the worst pupil they’d ever had. 🙄

Needless to say he didn’t achieve much at 16. But at 18 we got him enrolled on a welding & fabrication course. The guy running it understood him & on the mornings where he was struggling in class, the tutor let him weld.

By the end of the first year he’d made that tutor a trailer for his car & was well on his way to achieving his maths & English. 👍 he got an apprenticeship, but a year in the firm made 30 ppl inc him redundant. But,

him & a friend got on a plane & spent our winter out in Australia on the harvest. The moral of this story is, don’t let anyone write you off at 16, your life has only just begun.

This is him on his wedding day a couple of years ago. In my speech I remind him of that day we came out of the school ‘with our tails between our legs’ & tell everyone how far he’s come. Not a dry eye in the house 😍

Here’s my reason for including this tonight. I was reading a depressing report this week about boys under achieving in school. The bit that made the headlines was about inner city Belfast. Of course it got contaminated by our often toxic politics. 😢

The bit that alarmed me most was actually in the report, the academic author also highlights a big issue with boys from rural backgrounds. Strangely, that never made the news 😳.

These days I spend a lot of my time advocating for kids from troubled backgrounds. This is what I observe. I can’t speak for elsewhere but in the 6 counties that make up NI, education policy is written by well meaning people who have come through our top schools.

They’ve excelled academically & went off to university. They then land a safe job in the public sector. Their diligence means they climb the ranks & become department heads. Their life experience means they haven’t the faintest idea what makes kids from rough estates-

Or the countryside tick. They have crafted an educational system in their own image. It works for most kids, but for many it’s a straight jacket. Such officials get genuinely offended when doffers like me pop up at their consultation events & tell them so.

A heart warming tale to end this thread though. I FaceTimed my daughter & her 3 kids at lunchtime. She was demented as Ruby (4) & me are competing on who can do the loudest wolf howl 😆. Sarah, (2) is pushing in “I want to talk to Hugh” she’s a hoot.

But the best bit is Matthew (6) telling me about the maths challenge in school yesterday. A P7 teacher & the Vice Principal are both dressed up as James Bond. If you get a question right in the maths challenge, you get to shoot the VP with a nerf gun - on his bum. 😆

I’ve seen the pictures. 🤣 I don’t know what appeals to me more, the irreligious nature of it, or the sheer inventiveness of those teachers. Tell you what though I’m guessing there won’t be too many kids on Monday telling their mum they don’t want to go to school 👍