100% OT; school holidays

JohnB <[email hidden]> wrote in news:[email hidden]:

Quoted message said:

My 10 year old daughter has just brought in her report.
Under more than one subject it says:
"Some entries may be missing or incomplete due to unavailability of
staff".

Might that not be just that parts of the report are incomplete rather than
parts of your daughter's education?

Graeme

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

Quoted message said:

PK said:

"Sorry head we are taking jonny out to go for 3 weeks skiing" could quite
rightly be met with a "Don't bother coming back" response.

What's wrong with two weeks learning a new activity, experiencing a foreign
culture and most likely being able to put into practice the French or German
they've been learning at school (I doubt many take three weeks and most will
take one). Quite a few schools seem to think it perfectly OK to organise a
school ski trip in term time.

Tony

Absolutely; the 10 days should be used for rare occasions where it is
not practical to take them out during holiday time (eg 2 weeks to NZ,
Safari etc), but for many parents it seems to be a routine occurrence
just to take advantage of off peak pricing. Our secondary school takes
its skiing trip over February half term.

"[Not Responding]" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

(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".

Irrelevant, the same price differential applies to holidays in the UK, in
fact its often more expensive to go on holiday in the UK than abroad.

--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

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

Quoted message said:

Tumbleweed said:

Then every chid who is ever ill (and thus away from school)
'damages' your child as well? And every child that needs extra
tuition because its not as bright as yours 'damages' your child as
well? (Or maybe vice-versa, perhaps if your child is stupid you
should take it out of class to do all the others a favour?)

no, because funding/budgets/school organisation is designed to cope with
these things

A child who is off sick and then needs extra support will be funded by
drawing monies form reserves or some other budget head.

School funding takes into account the needs of the SEN kids

never mind SEN kids, its plain wrong to believe that children who arent SEN
all learn at the same rate. Self evidently, they dont. If you have more than
one child, havent you noticed that they didnt learn at exactly the same rate
and dont have the same capabilities in all subjects? How do you think the
teachers coped with that?

Quoted message said:

The issue is parents deliberately removing kids from school in term time.
not unavoidable absence.

pk

Perhaps I didnt explain clearly enough.

The teacher is *already* teaching a class of children with a wide range of
abilities to comprehend and do the work. That difference in abilities is due
to many factors, only one of which will be that a particular child was
absent due to a holiday.

At various times, other children will have been absent due to illness, other
children will have been present but have difficulty understanding, and so
on. Removing one of these causes of difference (absence through holiday)
will make a trivial or no difference to the already existing span of
differential abilities of children. Therefore, the teacher must be able to
cope with a large range of abilities amongst the children, because otherwise
all lessons are doomed to failure (if you assume that all children are doing
the same thing in all lessons in some kind of bizzarre lock-step rote
learning).

To give an example, when my daughter started school at 5ish, she had the
reading age of an 8 or 9 year old. Others in the class had no ability at all
to read. The teacher already had to cope with a wide range of abilities in
the class when teaching reading. If my daughter missed a week occasionally
over her primary years (which she did), the wide range of abilities in the
classes remained, its not as if all the kids in the class were all at the
same page in the book, which appears to be your assumption. When we took
her out for a week or two in junior school, she gained far more from the
experience than she would have got in that particular week in the classroom,
but even if she didnt, the wide range of ability (differing between
subjects) amongst her peers in the classroom, remained.

You appear to be assuming that everyone in the class is of equal ability,
intelligence, equally interested and well behaved, and all on the same page
in every lesson at all times, and the only factor that disrupts this is
absence through holidays.

You have children.....didnt you notice when they were starting to read that
that werent on the same stage as their peers at all times? And now, they
arent on the same page for other subjects?

Even when my kids were doing GCSEs and A's, not all their peers were doing
the same things at all times, classrooms dont work like that, they cant,
because sometimes it takes one child longer (or never) to comprehend
something than others.

--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

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

Quoted message said:

PK said:

JohnB wrote:
.>> It is about delivering education. it is about partneship between

Quoted message said:

> schools, teachers, parents and pupils each repecting each other and
> the rules of the school. Part of those rules are : holidays in
> holday time, school in school time.

Of course it is.
My 10 year old daughter has just brought in her report.
Under more than one subject it says:
"Some entries may be missing or incomplete due to unavailability of
staff".

move to a better school.

We already have.

Perhaps you could suggest how I can send my chldren to school 15 miles
away when there is no PT.

John B

Perhaps they could cycle :-)

--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

Tumbleweed wrote:
..

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Perhaps you could suggest how I can send my chldren to school 15 miles
away when there is no PT.

Perhaps they could cycle :-)

I think a 30 mile trip *every* day might just be a little too much,
although my eldest daughter quite often does the 18 mile round trip to
her school.

And perhaps if they didn't have to carry half the library with them it
would be easier too.

Before you suggest it, no I'm not buying another trailer ;-)

John B

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

Quoted message said:

PK said:

"Sorry head we are taking jonny out to go for 3 weeks skiing" could

quite

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

rightly be met with a "Don't bother coming back" response.

What's wrong with two weeks learning a new activity, experiencing a

foreign

Quoted message said:

culture and most likely being able to put into practice the French or

German

Quoted message said:

they've been learning at school (I doubt many take three weeks and most

will

Quoted message said:

take one). Quite a few schools seem to think it perfectly OK to organise

a

Quoted message said:

school ski trip in term time.

Tony

Thats a good point. Wish I thought of it a few years back when we had a
nastygram from the head complaining we were taking our daughter out for a
week.

--
Tumbleweed

Remove my socks for email address

"PK" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
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Quoted message said:

Arthur Clune said:

Just zis Guy said:

And we lost top spot in the league tables one year because two
children were removed without permission during SATs for family
holidays - children thus removed score zero on the SAT and bring the
average for the entire school down (so much for league tables!).

If I had kids I think I'd try and take them out of school on SAT days
as a policy.....

Ah, i see you have fallen for the anti sats spin of the teacher union
activists!

Sats (both ks1/2 and voluntary sats in the in-between years) are an
essential part of how our school operates. most of the kids don'tknow they
are taking them as it is just another lesson.

Bad school scare kids about sats because they fear what sats might reveal.
Good school use them as one of the tools in a battery of assessment
techniques.

pk

This was a party political broadcast on behalf of New Labour (or one of

the other conservative parties)

Cliff

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 23:23:46 +0100, "Just zis Guy, you know?"
<[email hidden]> ([email hidden])

Quoted message said:

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 10:22:58 +1200, Whingin' Pom
<[email hidden]> wrote in message
<[email hidden]>:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

> England's not down south!
Errrr... it _is_, you know.

Nah. It's well North. :-)

Hmph! At least it's the right way up...

Why do you think we have mandatory helmet laws? Cycling upside down
*hurts*.
--
Matt K
Dunedin, NZ