School Shopping: What Really Helps Your Child
The average planned spend on school supplies has risen to CZK 2,569 this year. Most of that money has nothing to do with your child’s learning.
🎒 The list of requirements handed out by the class teacher for the new school year usually runs to twenty items and reads almost like a provisions list for a small expedition. Three lined exercise books, two squared ones, covers, coloured pencils, poster paints, a cloth, a water pot, gym shoes, indoor shoes, a pencil case, a ruler.
The parent prints it out, does the rounds of the stationers and the hypermarkets, and in the evening lays out everything they managed to find on the kitchen table, finally feeling they have done something for school. That feeling is pleasant. It is also rather expensive.
A survey by the NMS agency shows that planned spending on school supplies has risen this year from 2,445 to 2,569 crowns. According to a survey conducted for Allegro, 38 percent of parents are reckoning on more than three thousand. And for lower-income families this is not an item that can be waved away. Just under a third of such households in the survey said that because of the rising costs associated with school they would have to cut back on other everyday things, meaning food, clothing or their children’s free time.
I went through the data on what actually changes children’s results at school. And I came across something nobody wants to hear in the last week of August. Most of what costs the most money on that list does not appear in the data at all.
The most expensive line on the list
📱 With older children, the most expensive item tends to be electronics. A laptop, a tablet, a phone that will finally handle everything. It is bought on the quiet assumption that we are opening doors for the child. The data are more cautious.
An extensive international comparison by the OECD found that pupils who use computers at school in moderation achieve somewhat better results than those who barely use them at all. Pupils who use them very often, by contrast, do considerably worse, even after accounting for the kind of families they come from. The curve is not a straight line. It has a peak, beyond which it falls.
More recent data from the testing of fifteen-year-olds fills in the picture from the other side. Roughly a third of pupils report being distracted by their own device in most maths lessons or in every one of them. A quarter say they are distracted by their classmates’ devices. And pupils to whom this happens score around fifteen points lower in maths than those to whom it does not. Fifteen points corresponds to about three quarters of a school year.
A device, then, is not an investment in education. It is a tool whose benefit depends entirely on what the child does with it and how much time they spend on it. Buying a phone solves nothing and ruins nothing. What decides the matter is what comes afterwards, and we wrote about that in more detail in the piece How Many Screens Can a Child Take.
Freshly painted
🖍️ What is interesting is that schools follow exactly the same logic. Over the summer holidays the walls get painted, the lighting is replaced, new desks and interactive whiteboards are bought. Meanwhile, hardly anyone works with the teachers and with the way they actually teach.
The British Education Endowment Foundation boils thousands of studies down into a simple unit that anyone can understand. How many months of additional school progress a child gains. Interventions in the building and the physical environment come out at zero in this overview, once the building meets the ordinary standard.
There is one exception, however. Air quality. Classrooms that are not ventilated build up carbon dioxide, and that demonstrably impairs concentration. An open window is free and works better than new lights.
At home the same holds true. A five-thousand-crown school bag carries textbooks just as well as a fifteen-hundred-crown one, last year’s pencil case still works, and scissors do not wear out that much in a year. Before you start buying, first go through what you already have left at home.
And if you are sending a first-year pupil to school, take note of something most parents have no idea about. Under the decree on primary education, a pupil in the first year is entitled to basic school supplies worth 500 crowns free of charge. This is not a gift from the school. It is an obligation imposed on it by law.
The one item that pays off
📚 There is, however, one thing that can be bought and that shows up in the data very clearly. It is not supplies. It is books.
An analysis of data from twenty-seven countries, covering more than seventy thousand people, arrived at a figure that is hard to pass over. Children who grow up in a household with many books get on average three years further in education than children in whose household there are no books.
Three extra years means, in practice, the difference between a vocational certificate and a school-leaving exam, or between a school-leaving exam and university. And this holds regardless of what education and what occupation the parents have. The authors compare that shift to the child having university-educated parents instead of parents with no education at all.
What matters is who benefits from the effect the most. It is children whose parents themselves studied little. Books at home therefore work most powerfully precisely where there tend to be the fewest of them.
At the same time, a hundred books bought all at once and stood in the living room will educate nobody. The data describe a correlation, not magic. What decides the matter is a household where people read, because that does something with a child that no other item in the budget can replace. Vocabulary, imagination, patience with a longer text. It builds up gradually and inconspicuously, and one day it shows in the Czech language entrance exams.
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A bookcase in the living room is therefore only a visible sign. It works according to what is done with it. It is exactly the same with schools, and I wrote about it in the article Choosing a School Purely for Prestige? A Mistake!
What money cannot buy
🍽️ There remains one last and most uncomfortable finding. The thing with the strongest documented influence on learning cannot be bought anywhere.
In the British overview mentioned above, right at the top stands the child’s ability to plan their own learning, to monitor whether the approach they have chosen is working, and to change it accordingly. Seven months of additional school progress. Purchase price zero crowns. No shop stocks it, it is entirely in your hands.
And on top of that, one more finding from the same international testing of fifteen-year-olds, which completes the picture. Better results at school are achieved by children whose family regularly eats the main meal together, talks to them and asks them what happened at school. This is not a soft topic on the margins. It is a variable that behaves in the data comparably to things we are willing to pay thousands for.
Here is a concrete thing you can do straight away from the first of September, and it will not cost you a single crown. At dinner, ask your child two questions in this order. First: what didn’t go well for you at school today? And then, once they have finished: what will you try to do differently tomorrow to sort it out?
The first question allows them to admit a problem without expecting an interrogation over a grade. The second teaches them precisely the skill that stands absolutely highest in the ranking of what works. Being able to find a way through. It takes two minutes and you have to keep doing it with your children even on the days when the answer is “dunno” and “fine”. A child does not need to learn everything at once. It needs to know what to do when something isn’t working.
You do, of course, have to buy the exercise books, the school will want them. Only you need not tell yourself while doing so that this is the main thing you are doing for your child. The main thing comes later, at that kitchen table, when everything is unpacked, tidied away and there is no hurry to be anywhere.
Bon appétit. You’ll manage the rest yourselves.
🎓 You can find the original version of this article on the blog Olymp: Chytré vzdělávání & Giáo dục Thông minh.
Sources used
- Školní pomůcky letos rodiče vyjdou dráž, s nákupem začali dřív než loni (MediaGuru) — Results of a survey by the NMS Market Research agency on Czech parents’ planned spending on school supplies.
- Obchodníci: Ceny školních potřeb jsou podobné jako loni, podražily ale sešity (ČeskéNoviny.cz) — Statements from retail chains on prices, together with data from a survey conducted by the Perfect Crowd agency for Allegro.
- Průzkum: Asi 57 procent rodičů míní, že za školní pomůcky zaplatí víc než loni (ČeskéNoviny.cz) — An Ipsos agency survey on the impact of school-related expenses on low-income households.
- Vyhláška č. 48/2005 Sb., o základním vzdělávání, úplné znění (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports) — Section 6 establishes first-year pupils’ entitlement to free basic school supplies worth 500 crowns.
- Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection (OECD) — An international analysis of the relationship between computer use in schools and pupils’ results.
- PISA 2022 Results, Volume II (OECD) — Data on pupils being distracted by digital devices during lessons and how this relates to their results.
- PISA 2022 Results, Volume I (OECD) — Findings on the relationship between family habits, such as eating together and talking about school, and the results of fifteen-year-olds.
- Teaching and Learning Toolkit relaunched (Education Endowment Foundation) — A summary of the research overview, including the finding on the impact of school buildings and environment on pupils’ results.
- Metacognition and self-regulated learning (Evidence for Learning) — An overview documenting seven months of additional school progress in children who learn to manage their own learning.
- Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility) — A study on the relationship between the number of books in a household and the length of children’s schooling.
- Kolik obrazovek dítě unese | Trẻ chịu được bao nhiêu giờ màn hình (Olymp School) — A piece on how much screen time a child can handle without it affecting sleep and concentration.
- Vybíráte školu jen pro prestiž? Chyba! (Olymp School) — A piece on the difference between the visible signs of a school’s quality and its actual quality.
