“Hands off our church schools!” the bishops have warned the Government. A report, however, will not mean a great deal outside the context of school life; ideally, schools should encourage both parents to visit on open days, or parents’ evenings.Working together, schools and families must find ways of overcoming the stigma that still attaches itself to family break-up. It’s hard to admit to the public world that something has failed and you are having another go.”Homework policies, John Bastiani says, need to be more sensitive to the difficulties encountered by children moving between homes, and homework clubs at school can be a good solution.As for school reports, schools are required by law to make copies available to both parents. Liz Bond says, with hindsight, she would have done better to volunteer information sooner.”The trouble is you feel a bit stigmatised. Most of the difficulties I have with children stem from difficulties in their background. The better we understand the background, the more we can help the child at school, and the better their work will be.”In this situation, schools are only as good as the information they are given, emphasises Lawrence Warburton, at the National Association of Social Workers in Education.

They may feel, understandably, hesitant to intrude or pry into a home background, but for the pupils’ sake, need to find a relaxed way of keeping their records up to date.For parents, much better to let the school know early on, than wait until problems occur and be called into school by a head teacher who knows nothing of what has happened. Some parents don’t realise what a help it would be for their child for us to have this sort of information. “There didn’t seem to be any system of pastoral care at the school – which is something I’m sure all schools would benefit from.”Peter Gibley, head teacher at Nelson First School in Norwich, where more than half the children have been through changes in their family situation, has already altered his school’s admissions procedure, as a result of being on the project’s working party.To ensure the school has the information it needs about each pupil, he now asks more searching questions from the start about the structure of a family, whether an absent parent is actively involved, and what the relationship is between separated parents.”We can ask -even if we’re not always told. The school made no allowance for a child who had just suffered this kind of family disruption.”Judi Rhind’s elder daughter, Amy, was also highly stressed by her parents’ break-up and her mother’s remarriage, but received little support from her school, an independent secondary school in Norwich.”She just immersed herself too much in her work, because she was upset,” says her mother. Years later, when his second son moved town and school, after GCSEs, to enter the new stepfamily, he had a very hard time settling into the sixth form.”He felt very lost, and his work was affected.

I asked her how to say stepdad in German, and she just told me not to write it.”In a PSE (personal and social education) lesson, Ellie found herself the only one to put her hand up when the class was asked who lived in a stepfamily – although she believes there may also be others in her situation.”It left Ellie feeling quite exposed and different,” says her mother.Patrick Bond, Liz’s husband, remembers the open disapproval meted out by the head teacher of his son’s nursery school, when his own first marriage was breaking up. Sophie complained to the teacher that there was nowhere to put her own dad.Ellie, now 12, and at a state school in Sheffield, got an unsympathetic response from her German teacher when she was asked to bring in family photographs and duly brought in pictures of her stepfamily too.”The teacher was weird about me having two dads – she didn’t understand. Too many teachers, in her experience, still talk to their classes about “Mum and Dad”, completely failing to take account of families that have changed or regrouped.This assumption has, on some occasions, been hurtful to her own daughters. Sophie, at the age of eight, was given a family tree to fill in with spaces only for mother, father and children.