I am shocked. We have had a complaint from a school that the language used in 'A Visit from Florence Nightingale' is too difficult for the children. (This comes in the same week that an urgent request came into the museum that I personally should go back to one school for a third time to deliver this workshop three times in one day.)

The title 'A Visit from Florence Nightingale' ought to give the teachers some hint that this workshop will not be delivered in populist modern slang, but in as near as I can manage to the langiuage of the nineteenth century, although I do quite often add 'In your time . . ." explanations.

If the title were not enough they are also sent an outline of the script with copies of a letter to be 'written' by one of the nurses at the dictation of an injured soldier and a truncated version version of the 23rd Psalm to be read by another nurse to a dying soldier so that they have time to prepare beforehand. If there are no readers sufficiently advanced to do this with preparation, then it is better that the teachers tell me so at the start so that s/he does not have to land children unprepared and unhappy with the readings.

We have had this language problem before with Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's Washday for which some teachers have in all seriousness asked if we could read from the Ladybird rewrites rather than the original Beatrix Potter stories. The answer is NO! If they don't appreciate the language most of the children do, and I am sure most of us can remember latching on to some unfamiliar word and repeating it over and over (usually as an alternative to fab or mega or super) - my own was 'soporific' from The Flopsy Bunnies. Children deal with unfamiliar words - some of those doing Mrs. T-W are only a couple of years from their own first spoken words, and those doing Florence many be not much further, but they have acquired vocabulary like a sponge absorbs water and continue to do so. If we taught them foreign languages at this stage the entire population would be multi-lingual - there is nothing they will not dare.

What worries me me is that it is sometimes the very people who are supposed to be educating them who, with the best possible intentions, lower their expectations and self-esteem.

We never get complaints about things being too difficult from private schools or those in thoroughly middle class areas which really annoys me - not the fact that we don't get complaints, but the fact that teachers' expectations are so much lower when dealing with children from poorer areas. Why do they assume that because the children come from poor backgrounds they must be low achievers? Of course there are some families which are pretty hopeless all round and remain poor generation by generation. However many are poor because of current circumstances and some will come from families new to England - their grasp of English may still a bit limited, but look at the waves of immigrants who escaped the pogroms, the nazis and the break up of the empire: did they remain at the bottom of the heap? Did they heck! Yet it is usually teachers from schools in poor areas who ask for the children to be fed pap rather than the meat of something approaching as near as we can an authentic historic experience. For Heaven's sake, stop being so patronising and encourage the children to grasp what is at the very limit of their reach. Don't work to the lowest common factor, but the highest. Don't try to make life easy for yourself by making life too easy for the children. I'm happy to give explanations of anything a child doesn't understand, and the teachers can always do likewise. It is what we are there for: not to baby-sit, but to educate.

I remember one laundry workshop where a helper first held down the hands of a child with aspergers who wanted to handle everything, and then took him out altogether. Yes, of course he needed protecting from hurting his fingers in the mangle, but if he got his sleeves wet dipping his hands into the tubs of cold water it would all be part of what is designed to be a hands-on experience.

I should add that I am talking about a minority of teachers here. Going into almost any staffroom you will find that the conversation is that of people who love their work and the challenges presented by the children they teach.