Truancy penalties - should they be tougher?

anagram, its not so much about being 'granted a licence to teach' as finding enough bodies willing to stand in front of a mob of baying yobs five days a week. the current theory is that if you take high-fliers straight from uni and put them into inner city schools to learn on the job, they'll inspire the children. some of them do. others stand there frozen in horror, as creatures unlike anything they have ever seen before rampage around them.

uniform - sorry no time to check who raised this issue - is a matter of corporate image. if you work in a bank or other service industry, you will have a uniform or dress code. schools set dress codes for staff, as well as for pupils. uk people love school uniform. parents know the uniform before the child starts at the school and should fully support uniform (and behaviour) policies. it is the parents who let the system down, not the teachers!

schooling isn't about education. the two are entirely different. read ivan illich. take some studies in history and structure of british education. schooling is about keeping the children of the poor off the streets so they don't run riot while their parents go to work. schools can deal with schooling . education cannot be fully accomplished in schools - it is the responsibility of families.

schooling isn't about academic achievement, either. it is about socialisation in the narrowest sense, as children are 'socialised' for the workplace. this is true to the original aims of mass education in the uk, so we should not be surprised by it. slowly, schooling adapts to try to provide a workforce appropriate to the needs of the economy. currently we are aiming to churn out self-starters - great for the middle classes who are born into an achievement-based environment, a bit of a shock to the offspring of benefit claimants, who believe the state will always be there to provide for them.

must go... got to get back to my little claimants. true to its original aim, today school will keep the children of the poor off the streets... mostly...

I agree with joan that learning (ha! beginning to learn in a very small way!) a foreign language helps kids understand how grammar works. So if primary schools have the means to start teaching it, well and good. My eldest child is thirty-one and my youngest is eleven. They have all had good teachers at bog standard state schools. I get so tired of people slamming teahcers and schools. Schools are a reflection of society; schools do not lead. So if educational standards are really falling (and that's arguable) it is not the fault of the schools. How children learn has more to do with their home life and their parents' attitudes to educatioin than what happens at school. Obviously good teaching at school will spur them on but the motivation to learn comes from home.

I think too much fuss is made about both truanting and absences for holidays and such like. You can bet your bottom dollar that kids who are truanting are not getting much out of being at school anyway, so getting them there is not going to make much difference to the kids. The difference it makes is to the school's tick boxes (i.e. superficial public persona). As jess says, all this public hooey is just political window-dressing. Best ignored.

Just to pick up your point about literacy levels when pupils leave primary school Banana (and others). Since the introduction of the literacy strategy the proportion of children reaching Level 4 has risen by 20% and is now over 80%. The pupils reaching Level 3 are not illiterate, for example you only need a Level 3 in reading to read the Sun. This is what many journalists and politicians fail to understand (they also frequently refer to 20% as a quarter).
For those who don't know the levels, this is a Level 4 in writing.
Level 4
"Pupils' writing in a range of forms is lively and thoughtful. Ideas are often sustained and developed in interesting ways and organised appropriately for the purpose of the reader. Vocabulary choices are often adventurous and words are used for effect. Pupils are beginning to use grammatically complex sentences, extending meaning. Spelling, including that of polysyllabic words that conform to regular patterns, is generally accurate. Full stops, capital letters and question marks are used correctly, and pupils are beginning to use punctuation within the sentence. Handwriting style is fluent, joined and legible."

A bit more than a basic level of literacy, I think and we are talking about eleven year olds here..

There has been a very good modern language initiative in primary schools in recent years, but it is a victim of funding cuts.

There is an interesting article in the Guardian today..
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/apr/16/truancy-crackdown-include-children-aged-four
Astonishing that the report talks about children arriving in school not knowing their own names....
Maybe that helps put the scale of the task faced by some schools into perspective for the "I blame the teachers" brigade?

Or the article could be bullshit. Just off to read it and will retract the previous sentence if it isn't.

Maybe Bagitha, but I tend to trust the Headteacher of a Special School more than many government "education advisers".

I just don't believe that children of five don't at least know their first names.

Also granbunny can't be helpful in a difficult classroom situation if a teacher thinks of the class as 'a mob of baying youths'.

Probably wise, mamie, but is henbiassed by his special school entrants? I quote from the article:
""There are kids arriving from nursery who don't know their own name, literally don't know their own name, so the school has a fundamental job to do. Nursery education is every bit as essential as the weeks before GCSEs."

Currently there is no nationally collected data on children's attendance in nursery and reception, before school is mandatory."

Where is his evidence for this? What proprtion of children start school not knowing their own name? Are they children from immigrant families whose parents perhaps pronounce the name differently? There are lots more questions.

Also, school is NOT mandatory. Education is mandatory. As pointed out in the thread above, by gbun if I remember correctly, schooling and education are not the same thing.

The article worries me because it reads as if schools are like prisons, not the welcoming and flexible places they should be and which, in my experience, they have been.

I pity inner city kids if this is the kind of attitude they have to put up with from their schools. I pity their parents too, being bossed and regimented as if they had no say, no thoughts and no needs other than to put their kids through school factories. The whole approach stinks.

I also find the statement that more than a very few five year olds don't know their names very difficult to believe. Those who don't are likely to have severe learning difficulties and they, thankfully, will be a tiny proportion.

I agree with nanbunny that education for the poor is often about social control as much as anything else. Or at least the surrounding policies which Government put in place are.

Hi Joan, you were up late last night! I don't want to give the impression that I am in anyway against learning a second language, in fact I think it is very important that foreign languages aren't dropped from the curriculum. When my older son went through our local comprehensive either French or German was mandatory. Not so when my younger son 4 years later was considering his options, these could be dropped, but we insisted he continued with French which he did pass at GCSE, although I don't know how because I speak more French than him and believe me I was sooooooooo bad at it at school. I just think English should be paramount, I remember my younger son had a friend, between the age of 10 and 13 who came from a very disadvantaged background and struggled a lot with reading and writing. One morning when he dropped in to walk to school with my son and was waiting in our kitchen he said to me laughingly "they are trying to teach me French at school, I don't know why because I can't speak English properly yet!"

Speaking is a different skill from reading and writing.

baNana, I agree that English skills are paramount. I feel that if a child is not reading and writing fluently by age 8, remedial action is needed. I guess I'm thinking of myself: at 11 at a grammar school I struggled with English grammar, then we started French, and a year later Latin. These languages made me understand how my own language worked, far better than if English had stood alone.

I know that children absorb foreign languages pre-puberty, if they are given a large amount of total immersion, I don't think there is the money or the time to do this in the UK or here in Australia, but it is a great shame. The Canadians are excellent at this, with their French/English teaching.

There is also the fact that if you can think in two or more languages, your brain can function better generally. Being bi-lingual can help ward off Alzheimers too.

I would love to see foreign language immersion taking place in junior schools, but I guess it is a pipe dream.

Anagram I was trying to make a point yesterday that school is not easy to cope with. Most teenagers manage to conform but it is not easy for many and schools are not particularly flexible. If you parachuted adults into a teenagers body and made them go to school for a week - i wonder how many would last out without truanting.

Recent government reports say that a large proportion of state schools are well below standard and failing our children, not only not bringing out their best but having an overall detrimental effect on their development.

What an unhappy state of affairs.

JessM I did take your point. Mine was just that teenagers have already spent several years in educational establishments of one sort or another, so they're used to 'conforming' (or not!). An adult would have left that stage behind and moved on - so of course they wouldn't like being expected to toe the line again.

Well that would be a sad state of affairs if it true petallus, but it isn't. I can't imagine what "reports" you are talking about, frankly. The total lack of understanding about Level 3/4 at the end of Key Stage 2 is one example of how people misunderstand and distort the evidence; there are many others. The misuse of historic PISA data is another example.

They keep moving the goalposts petallus. As governor of a secondary school that has been improving steadily (better results each year) but never yet quite getting ahead of the line that is currently deemed to be the borderline between ok and not ok, this is close to my heart. Maybe this year...

Jess - you mentioned (and reiterated) something regarding kids learning about emotional health, and sorry but I can't remember which exact thread it was, but I just want to say that this is an issue (close to my heart) that is frequently overlooked.

I'm not a teacher, nor have any educational qualification in this field, but I have always though that if this issue was addressed as an equal to that of academic subjects then the whole educational system might find a way forward that encompasses the whole of the child, so that intellectual and emotional intelligence can become as one.

As I wrote that I though dream on.

Bagitha I take your point that speaking is different from reading and writing, but the boy I referred to struggled with the reading and writing and actually left school at 16 pretty much illiterate so I would say that the school had failed him miserably. Incidentally, their comprehensive wasn't a sink school, far from it, it performs above the national average, and is in what would be termed as a leafy west London suburb and four of that same year group got to Oxbridge. Joan I know my husband would agree with you as far as Latin is concerned, he too went to a grammar and did Latin which he said gave him a much greater understanding of not only English but particularly the Latin based southern European languages. I have a number of friends where one parent is non English, including a couple where the mum is Japanese, and she wisely made the kids learn both languages which given the fact that these children had to learn the complexities of Japanese writing and language was no mean feat and I'm sure they are grateful to her now for doggedly pursuing this because they did moan a lot about it when they were younger. My late mum took up German as a young woman and kept it going on and off all her adult life, she was still going to her German circle well into her eighties where they used to read German books and converse in German and she would proudly tell me that she was the only one there who didn't have a degree, but never felt she had any problem keeping up with the rest. As for myself, I can never get over just how abysmal I was at French at my convent school, but when my younger son was preparing for his GCSE it occurred to me that I wasn't as bad as I thought I was, because I actually knew more French than him, and still do, in spite of the fact that he has a GCSE in it. There is no way my school would have considered entering me for French O level because they knew I wouldn't pass. Finally, Mamie you can read as many reports as you like and come to the conclusion they are skewed one way or the other, but frankly I have drawn my conclusions from my kids' peer groups, some of whom have gone on from their state schools to top universities and some who frankly struggle to read and write after 12 years in the system.

Banana I draw my conclusions from the written evidence but also from 35 years as a teacher, adviser and inspector of schools. I can look at the evidence from my children and grandchildren's schools, but observing and judging hundreds of lessons has given me a much bigger picture. As someone who has worked in school improvement, I know how much progress has been made in schools and how much there is still to do. JessM writes about this too and she is directly involved in school improvement. Yes there are far too many children failing to achieve their potential, but to simplify the reasons by misuse of the evidence for political point-scoring or newspaper headlines is unhelpful and misleading.

Going back onto the truancy thread. I was brought up in a rural area where my father was Headteacher of the local secondary school. At harvest time especially a large number of the pupils [I call them 'pupils'; 'students' attend college or university ] went missing to help in the fields and markets. They may not be up there as high fliers in corporate organisations but they had to know their maths [weight, costs etc] and have a basic grasp of English at the market! Perhaps we ought to be thinking more about educating for the real world as they used to do in secondary and technical schools.

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I think it would be a good idea to allow children of between 5 and 10 years old to have a 10 day leave of tuition. It is obvious all children studying for exams need to be in school and would need the permission of the Head to take a holiday.

The old days of the country having a 'works fortnight' has long gone.It is very easy to forget some parents have great difficulty obtaining leave during the summer months and spreading the leave dates not only affords people to book holidays at an affordable cost but helps spread the problem of leave for employers. It would also stop the problem of the government stopping some of the benefit money. Everyone would be dealt with the same, we would all know where we stand and if more than the 10 days were taken without permission then finds could be made, irrespective of whether you are on benefits or not.