The Children in Front of You

The Children in Front of YouKnowing Children Well, from the Nursery to the Secondary ClassroomThere is a question every child is always, silently, asking: does anyone here actually know me?Not know about me - my reading level, my target grade, the colour of my row on the tracker. Know me: what I am like, what I am frightened of, the thing I can do that nobody has noticed, what I am carrying today that is making everything harder.When the answer is yes, a child will attempt the hard thing, tell you when something is wrong, and let you teach them. When the answer is no, they simply manage - becoming loud enough to be seen, or quiet enough to be left alone, or good enough to be no trouble. And a child who is 'no trouble' can pass through years of school beautifully documented and genuinely unknown.In The Children in Front of You, Laura Masson makes the case that the most important thing the adults in a child’s life can offer is also the thing we now protect least well: the experience of being truly known. Drawing on more than two decades as a teacher, headteacher and director of education, she brings together the two halves of that knowing - the relationship that holds a child steady and the attention that comes to understand them - and shows that they are not early-years ideas at all. The four-year-old who has learned to go invisible becomes the eight-year-old who has decided she is bad at maths, and the fourteen-year-old who has gone quiet at the back of the room. The particulars change. The work does not.Inside the book:• What a child actually needs from us - the science of attachment and attention in a few plain sentences, and why it doesn’t stop mattering at five• The difference between looking at a child and seeing one - and why the second is rarer, and more valuable, than we admit• Being the trusted adult: what it involves, why it makes children easier rather than harder, and how to be it at every age• Beginnings, routines and transitions - from settling a two-year-old to the day an eleven-year-old walks into secondary school unknown• Why the tracker, the photograph and the tick-box can quietly replace the very knowing they were meant to capture• The children hardest to see - the quiet, the masking, the difficult - and how to give fair attention to those who don’t demand it• Watching without interrupting, writing what you’ve seen, and having a real conversation with a child• The child you find hard to like, knowing a whole class, and what to do when what you see worries you• Looking after the adults who do the knowing - and building a school that knows its children by design rather than by luckWritten for anyone who works with children - early years practitioners, primary and secondary teachers, teaching assistants, tutors and leaders - and for the parents who want to understand what it means for their child to be known. It is short, practical, and warm, and it makes one deceptively simple argument, elaborated across everything a busy adult actually does in a day: know the child in front of you. It is the smallest thing we do, and the largest.The Children in Front of You is the fourth book in Laura Masson’s series Advice from the Frontline of Education.