30 year old pupil reported to the home office

An interesting news story caught my eye this week. It concerned a 30 year old man, who had surreptitiously managed to gain admittance to secondary school, and was masquerading as a pupil. The authorities were alerted after students at Stoke High School, Ipswich, began sharing messages on such media such as `how`s there a 30-year-old man in our maths class?`

The school itself has declined to make a statement on this issue, other than to say the matter is now in the hands of the home office, who themselves have said that they do not comment on individual cases. It seems the enthusiastic overaged pupil is an asylum seeker, who joined the school at the start of the new year.

The school issued a statement saying that: `We do not comment on individual cases but we have followed government and local authority policies and guidance, as we do for any asylum admissions matter. This is a matter for the Home Office. They are looking into this after we contacted them.`

There is something slightly nobel, so it seems to me, about someone, potentially fleeing from a war torn country, seeking refuge in a place of learning. I am not for a moment suggesting that anyone, of any age, can just walk into a school enter a classroom, take a seat and join the lesson; but there is something endearing about the fact they sought sanctuary in a school, perhaps attempting to acquire the education that was unavailable to them in their own country.

The story got me thinking though - might it be unfortunate that the majority of our education takes place during our early years, when many of us are not mature enough to decide which path we want to follow, and are perhaps too juvenile to respect the gifts and opportunities that these teachings can give us?

I know that if I was given the chance to go back to full time education now, I would cherish every moment. I would never miss a lesson, and would be the most attentive student in the classroom, ensuring I didn`t miss a thing the teacher said. I would put all my efforts into my studies, getting as much as I could out of every class, while treating each homework assignment as if it were a final dissertation. I would adopt this studious attitude because, only now in mingle age, do I appreciate the true value of education. When I was a student I was lazy, skipped classes, snoozed during lessons, and generally allowed myself to become distracted by a plethora of trivial, fashionable activities, all to the detriment of my studies. I never had any clear focus of what I wanted to become, and allowed myself to drift along without any committed sense of direction.

I suspect this is the story of most people`s academic past. Of course there are always a few singled minded individuals, who from the youngest age are possessed with great focus and industry - pupils who somehow seem to know from their earlier years what they want to become, and are determined to get there. The majority of us however middle along, reserving our greatest intellectual efforts to finishing some piece of coursework, or revision cramming for some impending exam.

How different things might be if our studies and exams - the most important ones at least - were moved to a later period in our lives. How very much more considerate and vigilant would we all be in our work, being in possession of the maturity to know just how important it is.

Of course one of the reasons we enter formal education as children rather than as adults is that, as children we have such great learning potential. This is shown in how a child will learn a language simply by it being spoken in their environment: like a sponge, they will soak up the vocabulary, grammar and syntax with magical ease. Adults can only acquire a second language with great effort, and gaining total fluency may be impossible. This is because of something called `neural plasticity` - prior to the age of about seven or eight, the neurones in the brain of a child have not yet formed their permanent pathways; this is why children can learn so much more readily than adults can. If this `critical window` of education was missed - by deferring our education to our later years - our learning capacity could well be severely compromised.