100% OT; school holidays

MartinM said:

We had a letter from our head teacher last year saying she would not
sanction any non-term holidays; not that we have the choice anyway,
with all the Baker days we don't have enough leave to cover the
existing hols let alone taking extra ones.

We've had those too.
But the LA also allows 10 days of approved time off per year.

Again it is all to do with the schools trying to 'look good' as the
attendance figures are put into their overall ratings.
It has little to do with education of individual children, which seems
to be slipping further down the list while maintaining/improving dubious
targets grow in importance.

John B

(MartinM) said:

As many of the people on this NG appear to have children of school
age, what does the panel think of proposals by the government to
reduce the cost of taking holidays in school holidays. Can they do it
anyway? Is this the soft option to the £100 fine idea?
Presumably the tour operators will counter by saying it's not school
holiday holidays that are expensive, it's the term time ones that are
cheap.

I think too often those complaining about the cost of holidays in
school hols make it sound as if annual trips to Forn Parts are a basic
human right.
--

email = audmad aaatttt hhhottt mmmaailll dddoottt ccccoommm

On 18/6/04 12:30 pm, in article [email hidden],

audrey said:

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 12:17:05 +0100, Bob Downie

bob_news@downie-geo#n0spam#.co.uk said:

Quoted message said:

>
yes but under Scots Law, your children are required to spend those
weeks At The Berries.

True, but those with English grannies are exempt.

On researching this, it seems you are right. It also seems that the
converse is true ie 'English' children with Scottish grannies (whether
or not that Granny now lives in Scotland) are entitled to be absent
from their English school in order to be present in Scotland during
the berry season. Similar provisions apply for the tattie howkie
season later in the year.

Funnily enough, I am sitting here munching on strawberries gleaned from my
allotment this morning on the way in to the lab..

The flip side of this early summer holiday is that the kids go back to
school in mid August and the cBBC presenters have no clue that life is
different in the real North (rather than the North (BBC style) being halfway
between the South and the South.

There is a two week half term (the potato holiday) at the beginning of
October which is also quite nice. Dundee is a week out of kilter with the
rest of Scotland.

...d

PK" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

If you take your child out, then the child misses some programmed lessons.

True - but, in the grand scheme of things how much difference does it make?
It surely depends on many different factors including what is being covered
at the time, the number of days taken, the time of year, the year that the
child is in, their capacity to catch up using notes from their friends, etc.

Quoted message said:

The school has an obligation to the child and the teacher will inevitably
have to spend time filling in the bits the child missed. and if they don't
and the child performs poorly in sats, you will be the first to complain
that the school has not done it's job

Firstly, the schools obligation to the child is fulfilled by offering the
lessons. It is absolutely not true that 'I' would be the first to complain
about poor performance in SATs. Parents can't complain about failure to
perform in respect of lessons missed through choice. For what it's worth,
my children have both missed days in some school years and have still had
excellent results in their SATs - my elder daughter, for example, scoring
six A* in her GCSEs and a few other A's and B's, and straight A's at A
level. That wasn't due to the effort of teachers spending extra time to see
that she caught up for her late arrivals, days off for various reasons, etc.
and she did go to her local state secondary school. At primary level they
had about two months out one year when we went for a round-world holiday.

Quoted message said:

ie you taking your child out reduces the teaching resources available to

my

Quoted message said:

child and every other child in the class.

I reject that absolutely. Everything depends on the circumstances as above.
It depends on what was missed, and the capacity of the child to make up
themselves for lost time. Ultimately it is the responsibility of the parent
to see that the child catches up.

Quoted message said:

Take a child or two out for a week at the start and end of every term and
the whole class is disrupted and damaged.

No. Firstly nothing was said about 'every' term. Secondly, children will
miss classes anyway for reasons such as sickness, other programs organised
by the school itself affecting individuals or a small group of pupils across
various classes that involve missing lessons (my younger child, for example,
has been missing one maths lesson each week due to individual music
tuition - she isn't great at maths and loves music better, but she still has
the basic skills and expects to achieve a reasonably easy 'B' at GCSE this
year, which she and we will be satisfied with), etc. and the school has to
be flexible enough to accommodate such absences. The fact is simply this:
not all children will be in all lessons all the time.

Quoted message said:

Your choice and actions damage my child.

pk (School governor)

Bollocks to that, basically. I don't accept it for one minute. My wife is a
teacher (currently nursery but has also taught primary) and knows well
enough the impact of a few missed days. None, at nursery level! Nothing of
any significance, at primary level. It never involved her in spending extra
time with an individual child. Nothing noticeable, in our experience of our
children at secondary level. There is no need to be so uptight about it!
Really!

Rich

PK said:

no there are there for schools to use and to inform parents how well
schools ase doing - the purpose of y2/6 sats was and is not primarily
to test the kids there are there to test the schools - which of
course is why teaching unions set their face against them from the
start.

Alternative interpretation: the SATS when introduced were an integral part
of a system apparently designed form the ground up to reinforce the idea
that a selectiove school was better than a non-selective school simply by
virtue of its intake (otherwise it would have made vastly more sense to
start with KS1 tests and follow the cohort up, to provide value-added
measures).

Alternative interpretation: you don't make a pig fatter by weighing it.

Alternative interpretation: SATs were yet another administrative burden on
schools already groaning under the weight.

Alternative interpretation: the Government which introduced SATs had spent
years telling teachers they were useless as a way of avoiding paying them
properly; expecting teachers to believe that SATS were there to support them
rather than provide (yet another) stick with which to beat them was naively
optimistic.

And any other two dozen alternative interpretations you can think of.

--
Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

Graeme <[email hidden]> wrote:

: The overcrowding is largely due to a change in lifestyle, i.e. more
: people living alone (this is also a large factor in house price rises).

Even more OT, but house price rises are down solely to a speculative bubble
now.

Arthur

--
Arthur Clune http://www.clune.org
"Technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect"
- Paulina Borsook

"Gawnsoft" <[email hidden]> wrote in
message news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

And the parents who are not sensible and who do not minimise the time
out?

Are probably the parents of children who will bunk off anyway...

As I said, allowance of up to ten days as a guideline is reasonable. If more
is taken, personally I still would not advocate sanctions such as removal
from the school role. Ultimately it's their education, and their parent's
choice. The school's responsibility is simply to deliver the scheduled
lessons. If they want to get all anxious about the effect of absences on
their percentages of SATs results they've got their priorities wrong.

Rich

Tony Hogarty <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Michael MacClancy said:

It does have something to do with government if the travel companies are
colluding in order to charge 'above market rates' in the peak periods.

Given that the majority of travel companies are in an extremely poor
financial position it seems unlikely that there are charges above the
market rates. Indeed you could reasonably argue that the prices should go
higher still - if the market would support that of course.

I remeber seeing a docu many years ago, a hotel in Spain was cutting
back the number of rooms it offered to a British operator on the
simple basis that it could make more from German and Scandinavian
operators, the British were simply not willing to pay more than a
certain amount for their holidays and as such demand was going up
while supply went down.

Just zis Guy said:

PK said:

no there are there for schools to use and to inform parents how well
schools ase doing - the purpose of y2/6 sats was and is not primarily
to test the kids there are there to test the schools - which of
course is why teaching unions set their face against them from the
start.

Quoted message said:

(otherwise it would have made
vastly more sense to start with KS1 tests and follow the cohort up,
to provide value-added measures).

That WAS always the intention! But you need a run of data to form a
basleline and trend to measure added value against.

We are only just now moving into an aded value regime. If the luddite
teachers' unions had not stood against sats so vehemently, added value
measure would hve been up and running long ago.

Bad schools are afraid of SATS and OFSTED and scare parents and children
about them.

Good schools welcome them.

pk

Richard Goodman said:

The school's responsibility is
simply to deliver the scheduled lessons.

You seem to have a very narrow view of what schools are all about!

pk

PK said:

our year 6 class were observed by head and lea inspector a few weeks
befores sats this year. The lesson ran normally and the 10 minute
"plenary" at the end was a sample SATS question on the topic covered.
the class worked together to see how what they had just done related
to the sats question. A precess that comined consolidation of learing
with SATS preparation.

That is a good example of Sats preparation, if your kids attend a poor
school that has the kids sitting past papers for weesk befre sats, i
suggest you move them to a better one!

Why prepare for SATs at all?

(MartinM) said:

As many of the people on this NG appear to have children of school
age, what does the panel think of proposals by the government to
reduce the cost of taking holidays in school holidays. Can they do it
anyway? Is this the soft option to the £100 fine idea?
Presumably the tour operators will counter by saying it's not school
holiday holidays that are expensive, it's the term time ones that are
cheap.

It was educational listening to interviewed parents last night. Their
justification was consistently along the lines of "it's the only way
we can afford a foreign holiday; we have no choice".

Since when has a foreign holiday been a basic need? My children
(eldest is 8) have never been overseas. Apart lots of business travel
*I* haven't been abroad for a decade. The last time my wife was
overseas (bar a couple of cruises when she went to/from Southampton)
was on our honeymoon, 11 years ago.

This is all about to change as we're going to spend a few weeks in
Montpellier this summer. Eurostar to Lille and a double decker TGV for
the rest of the trip.

Arthur Clune said:

Graeme <[email hidden]> wrote:

: The overcrowding is largely due to a change in lifestyle, i.e. more
: people living alone (this is also a large factor in house price rises).

Even more OT, but house price rises are down solely to a speculative bubble
now.

.... and there I was thinking that historically low interest rates had
something to do with it, silly me 🙂

PK said:

Quoted message said:

it would have made
vastly more sense to start with KS1 tests and follow the cohort up,
to provide value-added measures).

Quoted message said:

That WAS always the intention! But you need a run of data to form a
basleline and trend to measure added value against.

First, if it was genuinely the intention, then it should have been promoted
as such, and the intervening results supplied only to the schools ocncerned
(since absolute league tables with no comparitive data are useless for any
purpose other than reinforcing the view that a good intake makes a good
school).

Second, if you want to form trends and baselines, given that the output of
secondary schools is already well documented through public exams, it would
have made much more sense to start with either KS2 or a separate test on
entry to secondary education.

Quoted message said:

We are only just now moving into an aded value regime. If the luddite
teachers' unions had not stood against sats so vehemently, added value
measure would hve been up and running long ago.

The teachers I know were always in favour of added-value measures; it was
the use of SATs in absolute league tables to which they were always opposed,
for the reasons I've already stated.

Quoted message said:

Bad schools are afraid of SATS and OFSTED and scare parents and
children about them.
Good schools welcome them.

Very few schools "welcome" OFSTED. And there was already an inspection
regime in place, through the old Schools Inspectors. OFSTED was just a way
for the control freaks in Whitehall to sieze yet another piece of devolved
power. Subsidiarity is only appropriate when devolving power from Europe,
not from Westminster, as any fule kno.

--
Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

Doki said:

Why prepare for SATs at all?

Because ignorant newspaper editors with an agenda to promote selective
education use SAT results to "prove" that schools with a good intake are
necessarily good schools? Just guessing...

--
Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

Peter Connolly said:

Surely thats only relevant if you trust the government to continue to
provide those benefits. I don't, so I take precautions so that I'll be able
to provide for myself without any outside help, either from the government
or from anyones children.

So who is going to nurse you in hospital or your nursing home, produce the
food, heating and shelter to house you, make the savings that allow your
pension to be paid out? The problem of the ageing population is not that
people age but that with the ageing baby boomer population bulge followed by
declining birth rates, there are not enough young people entering the
productive economy to support those leaving it through old age. Hence the
talk of retirement at 75 as people have to work till they die absent
sufficient people working to support them in their old age.

Tony

Quoted message said:

...of course, I don't expect to last until retirement, because of all the
extra work I have to do to cover for people who have children.... maternity
leave, christmas, holidays (which *must* be taken at a certain time to suit
the children) etc...

Presumably you would still have to do the work to cover the holiday whenever
they took it so look on the bright side - you get an open run at holidays when
children have to be at school and therefore holidays are cheap ;-)

Tony

PK said:

JohnB said:

As a parent I find the emphasis on SATS and there relevance is
pathetic. IME they have little or no bearing on how a child moves
through the school system and only serve as a means for teachers,
governors and education authorities to gloat about how well they have
done compared to their colleagues.

no there are there for schools to use and to inform parents how well schools
ase doing - the purpose of y2/6 sats was and is not primarily to test the
kids there are there to test the schools - which of course is why teaching
unions set their face against them from the start.

My daughters are at an independant school where testing seems to be a
continuous part of daily life. I mean full on *exams*[1] from age 7
onwards in addition to the weekly round of spelling, maths etc tests.

As far as I can tell the children don't mind at all. I suppose this
shouldn't suprise me; after all when I was at school we had spelling
and tables tests every week.

From my naive position, I'd say the testing re-inforces the learning
and also flags up any problems with either the learning or teaching
process.

[1] These might be SATS, I suppose. I don't actually know what a SAT
paper looks like. I'm not at all sure if they actually do SATS.

Arthur Clune said:

Even more OT, but house price rises are down solely to a speculative bubble
now.

ITYM house price rises are _up_ ;-)

Tony

in message <[email hidden]>, Jules

(') said:

England's not down south!

Errrr... it _is_, you know.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; killing [afghan|iraqi] civilians is not 'justice'

"PK" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Richard Goodman said:

The school's responsibility is
simply to deliver the scheduled lessons.

You seem to have a very narrow view of what schools are all about!

Why? In relation to absences from school due to parental choice, in what
way are they responsible for any loss of educational opportunity for the
child? Since they're not responsible, they're not responsible to make up
the loss either. If they've delivered the lessons on schedule, what else
should they do? Go back and do them again? You don't think that and I
don't either.

On the otherhand, if the school does not deliver scheduled lessons because
of staff absences, recruitment problems and intermitent cover by teachers
unqualified in the subject whose is responsible for that? My daughter might
have been quite happy in her first secondary school if the school had only
delivered its scheduled lessons! As it is, she put up with two years of
misery before we could get a place elsewhere, where she is fortunately very
happy.

Rich