Michael Gove did something I like! Turns out one of his dumbass meddlings when he was education secretary now means that twat from the Isle of Wight who took his kid to Disneyville during school time has to pay a fine. Unfortunately it turns out the court costs aren’t going to bankrupt him, but he’s still crying about it like a little baby and it’s really brightened my day.
Also 92% school attendance isn’t really terribly good either is it? I’d get sacked if I turned up to work that often.
I was just watching the news in the canteen at work and they were interviewing this guy outside the High Court. He came across as a dick, quite honestly.
This reminds me of someone I know who goes spare every time the NUT / NASUWT going on strike, verbally spewing all over the place about teachers ruining their kids’ education, the scumbags, and of course verbally spewing all over the place about not being able to take their kids out of school to go to Benidorm for a week in June.
Schools are targeted on their attendance records, there’s massive pressure on them to achieve them - it’s 97.5% at my kids’ school and anyone arriving late is counted as having missed a session.
Relevant to my interests currently as my sister is right now at Disneyworld with my two nieces having taken both of them out of school a week early. She doesn’t care as a) she can afford the fine easily, b) it has saved her literally £Ks off her holiday and c) she just doesn’t give a fuck about stuff (disruption to the kids’ education, disruption to the rest of the class in general).
That said, has always seemed like a bit of a classic shit Tory policy to me - great for those who like our leaders to ‘get tough’ on things, not means tested as we don’t want to actually spend any money on policies obviously, doesn’t impact those that can afford it as a result.
The progressive, long-term solution would be do do away with the outdated asymmetrical school year and break it up into more even chunks with more regular, but shorter holidays.
Yeah that was an argument I heard from some self-appointed parents representative too, that it was a “tax on the poor”, because the rich people could afford the fines. To which the only rational response would be: you’re saying that an aspect of society preferences the rich, let’s hold the front page!
My secondary school introduced a new term system while I was there which was a two-week break every eight weeks and then four weeks off for summer. It was dead good.
I resent the entitled view that somehow taking your kids on expensive holidays is some god given right. We went camping when I was a kid, camping in France was a rare exotic treat. My other half had literally every holiday of her childhood in Wells-next-the-sea. We are not traumatised for life.
It was pretty great, I remember there was one other school in the country doing it as well for some kind of potential widespread change but presumably nothing came of it.
(We also had a 6-day timetable in a 5-day week which was a bit stupid in hindsight)
Like Monday would be day 1 one week and day 6 the following week? Can’t really remember the justification for it tbh, it just seemed to add confusion from what I remember.