Tax-fayer punded ejewcayshon

This afternoon I have a rare, thankfully, opportunity to spend time in his pompous company because we have The Parent-Teacher Interview and we're going along together. Here's hoping he's sober. Here's hoping I don't lose my temper and assert that the only thing that will rescue her now is a one-way ticket to Australia and any half decent private school over back home. To do so would antagonise him and guarantee that as well as being pissed he'd be pugnacious by the time I got home from work.

This whole parent interview lark is an utterly pointless exercise, conducted once per school year. Whatever pre-conceptions I might have harboured have long since been slayed by the relentless purposelessness of business. I am weary of the ritual, the lack of constructive dialogue, the lack of evidence that anything positive is ever achieved. Nothing has happened in six years now of these meetings to suggest that even one of the teachers has properly heard a word I've said.

Let me tell you know how I expect this thing to run, and I promise to come back and admit if this year turns out to be any kind of improvement on past bitter experience.

The class teacher, this year a lady we've not met before*, will introduce her, she will invite us to express any concerns we might have and raise any other issues, then she will sit across the desk from us, alternately fidgetting with the list of parents to see and looking at her watch; after a short time she will interupt us to deliver a cursory, glib and useless assessment of the offspring's level of attainment and prospects then asks us more or less politely to leave and make way for the next set of victims.

We will leave with little or no idea of her prospects of passing her 11-plus and getting into a half-decent school. We may find that she's in a class with a teacher who is personally opposed to selection and prepared to be actively obstructive. The lottery doesn't start with applying to schools it starts with the random nature of the mind set of each year's class teacher.

We'll receive no guidance as to the support we can and should be providing to develop our daughter, only facile exhortations to have her complete the set homework: the homework set to be achievable by the hopeless offspring of the feckless welfare addicted and the criminal underclass that send their children to the same local school.

Hearty sigh. I picked a bad week to get back on the wagon.

* actually this isn't quite true. I've had to deal with this woman at work. She's neurotic; convinced that we can clone her debit card via the chip and pin device at the tills. Actually neurotic doesn't do her justice. Very quietly she's as mad as a hatter.