After all if parents can’t thank the teaching profession who will? Certainly not the Government

After all, if parents can’t thank the teaching profession, who will? Certainly not the Government.
Peter Mandelson couldn’t have come up with a better propaganda coup for New Labour than the signing-up of Norman Tebbit to write a column in The Mail on Sunday. It was only at a parent-teacher evening when my daughter’s teacher asked, in a loaded kind of way, if I had filled in my slip, that I realised he expected more than my autograph. He was probably only using diversionary tactics to stop me trying to crane around his hand shielding the leading test results in his book – when will schools realise that parents are really only interested in how other people’s children are doing? But still, it made me think. Teachers spend hours with their thesauruses trying to make you feel your really rather ordinary child is special – the least you can do is compose a few suitably obsequious sentences in return.

Like me, you probably thought you only had to fill this bit in if you violently disagreed with the verdict that your child was a lazy good-for-nothing with psychopathic tendencies (or, in edu-speak, is “struggling with core curriculum areas and has some difficulty relating to his peers”). Annual reports have changed a lot since I was a child and teachers could get away with simply writing “Fair” (a slight euphemism in my case, as far as PE was concerned) in the space provided. These days teachers have to manage a skilful balancing act, ticking off national curriculum attainments while at the same time delivering a recognisable personal portrait of your child. Consequently the meaning can sometimes be difficult to extricate from the tangled semantics – should I be worried or pleased, for example, that my daughter can “empathise with past civilisations”? Is her teacher trying to say as nicely as possible that she is some sort of freak child out of a Stephen King novel or does he just mean that she is good at history?

Readers with children at state primary schools will be aware of the little slip that comes with the end of year report, inviting your comments and requiring your signature. A taxi home, I think, then a bit of telly with a blanket over my knee before a snooze and perhaps a gorgeous dream about glorious boys in short dressing gowns who don’t dart from the room the moment I enter it..

No, it’s time to go because I imagine his girlfriend’s first film was probably Star Wars too and she and Jack might want to discuss it and knowing me I will embarrass myself hideously by whining pathetically: “Are you sure, when you say Star Wars, you don’t mean The Wizard of Oz?” God, I’m so horribly old. He was in his grandmother’s garden when his agent finally phoned to say he’d got it “Cue wild celebrationsActually, I don’t mind This isn’t because Jack isn’t nice or bright or anything He is very much both. I like his living room, too, because there’s an empty, upturned scotch bottle in the wastepaper basket and crumpled fag packets everywhere and lots of John Updike on the bookcase It is very much my sort of living room as it happens I could make myself at home here, I tell him at one point I’d rather you didn’t, his horrified look says. After the sixth time, “I was turning into a complete pest, phoning the production office every hour to ask if there was any news”.

He did do a bit of acting in his first year there, but wasn’t terribly swept away by it. “You think, do I really want to trudge to a church hall outside Norwich to rehearse a scene when I could be doing other things, like going out?” After the small part in Fierce Creatures he thought, yes, I like this acting lark, and got himself an agent, who put him up for This Life He was desperate for the part of Miles, he says He had to audition six times. This was mortifying for his mother, he says, but not especially for him It helped him to grow up, he says. But, still, he was pleased when she met Patrick and he could pass her care over to someone else.

So he felt responsible for her, then? Yes, he says, he always did.After The Dragon School he went to Cheltenham College – “where there were girls in the sixth form, and we all went completely mad … my god, there are people with breasts here” – because his father and father’s father had been there, and then to the University of East Anglia where he studied film and English. Then there was the cocaine business, those charges of importing cocaine which were later dropped. Jack can remember looking at her one day and bursting into tears, because she was so skeletal. Although in terms of going to boarding school, I actually think it was harder for my mother than anyone else She was guilt-racked.” He is extremely close to his mother “She is full of love and really good fun to be with We are very similar at the deepest levels, emotionally. We don’t do any of that `l love you’ and `I love you, too’ stuff because it’s taken as a given.