She Mastered the School’s Filing System, Then It Changed

Joke van Zijl volunteered in the office of a Dutch primary school: accounts, pupil records and, if she ever got that far, the cupboards. Every office to-do list has a cupboards item. It is where planning turns into hope.

The head, Frank, made her feel she belonged. When she asked how things worked at his school, he corrected her: it was their school. So the paperwork was hers as well.

She took the pupil-records manual home and spent a school holiday mastering the system. It saved time. It saved paper.

Then the school changed systems.

Frank laughed. These changes happened quite often, he explained, which was why he had not spent much time learning the old one.

This is the most useful piece of advice anyone has ever been given in a school office, and it arrived one holiday too late. The new system needed more learning. New accounting codes needed another holiday.

I recognise the cycle. Every school my children have attended has changed its parent app within a year of our arrival. In Madrid I learned one in Spanish. In Copenhagen I learned one in Danish, then its replacement, which was in Danish too, only more so. In Brussels I mastered an app that was retired the following September, and I still get its notifications, which concern a sports day in 2022.

Then there were the birthday children, who came to the office with treats and two friends to carry the pen and card. Joke stocked stickers for them, hunting through shops and markets for things older pupils would actually want: racing cars, motorbikes, musical instruments. One child remembered a yellow car and found it still there after she restocked. His friend wanted reassurance about March.

A school office handles some very long-range planning, mostly about stickers.

One small visitor asked where the gold stickers came from. Joke would not say. By the door, the children went into a huddle, and one of them proposed that there must be a website named after the stickers.

There must be a system. That is the conclusion every child reaches about adults who seem to know exactly what they are doing.

I have been asked the same question about our birthday presents. The youngest believes there is a website for them, run by me, and she has asked for the password. I have told her the system changed.

She says Frank would have told her.