The Parent Portal Weekly

Last year councils in England fined parents nearly half a million times for taking their children on holiday in term time. The odd part is what the government's own research says about whether a week in the sun actually hurts a child's results - and who the fines keep missing.

Almost every seven-year-old in England has already been sorted onto a table, and by Year 7 most are in maths sets. The biggest study yet, out this spring, says the sorting isn't the disaster its critics feared - but nearly a third of children are in the wrong set, and the label has a habit of sticking.

Somewhere in the pitch for your child's music lessons there is usually a claim about maths. When researchers pooled 54 studies and nearly 7,000 children, the claim fell apart - and the way we defended music may be exactly why it is disappearing from state schools.

The row about banning phones in schools carries on as if it were still to be decided. In England, 90 per cent of secondaries and almost every primary already stop phones during the day. The research on what changed afterwards is stranger than either side of the argument would like.

Nearly every parent of an anxious child does it: the extra check, the fourth answer to the same question, the night spent on their bedroom floor. Then a team at Yale ran a trial in which they treated only the parents, and the children never met a therapist at all.

A talking teddy that answers every question sounds like a gift for a busy parent. But a decade of research on toys that do the talking, and a wave of AI bears pulled from shelves this winter, points to something quieter a child loses when the toy holds up its end of the conversation.

Offer a child a reward for something they already love, and something strange happens: they often start to want it less. A famous experiment with felt-tip pens shows why, and it changes how we should think about sticker charts, pocket money for reading, and paying for good marks.

Have one child and the comments arrive on cue: won't they be lonely, spoilt, a bit odd? It turns out that worry has a birthday - 1896 - and a single doctor's name attached to it. Nearly a century of research has been quietly taking it apart.

Every parent knows sugar sends children bouncing off the walls. But when scientists fed children sugar in careful trials, they could not find the effect anywhere - and one experiment suggests the rush was mostly in our own heads.

We hand children worksheets to practise reading comprehension, as if it were a muscle. A famous experiment with a baseball passage suggests we've misunderstood what comprehension actually is - and why some children read every word and still miss the story.