Truancy penalties - should they be tougher?

I am another GNer who has many years of experience of schools from class teacher class teacher to OFSTED inspector and all sorts in between! I worked
mostly in urban schools.
I have worked with many brilliant teachers and a few who should not have been teaching. In my experience most schools/teachers are doing a good job with kids who generally want to learn. Sadly nelliedean seems to have experienced a particularly insensitive and thoughtless school. I am shocked & saddened to hear her story.
But politicians and newspapers use data /statistics for their own ends, eg '1 in 10 children fail to learn to read' rather than '9 out of 10 children reach or exceed expected reading levels'.
There was always at least one kid in my class when I was a kid at school in the 50's who found learning hard! Now more children than ever with SEN attend mainstream schools and they are all part of the statistics that are used in headlines with little proper research by journalists in the reality behind th data.
As a Head I found absence tricky! I knew some kids would benefit from a family hoiday (which was cheaper in the term time) or the trip to Pakistan to see grandma was not worth it for two weeks. BUT my school was being 'judged' if I did not meet government targets for attendance and attendance contributes to the way OFSTED has to grade a school. a rock and a hard place!

Why can't training days be held in the school holidays? Or do teachers really need far more holidays than everyone else? I certainly don't remember teachers having extra days off when I was at school for 'training'.

And what about strikes, granbunny? I notice no teachers have posted to justify those yet.

POGS - no teacher days!????
no training? 8 may is my next teacher day.school is closed and staff are all taking part in training on how to assist pupils on the autistic spectrum. the day is part of an ongoing programme of training in this area.
teacher days are vital if you want pupils to receive appropriate support.

butternut, you are right about emotional health. it has been at the heart of school improvement for years - the labour government loved it. check out the primary and secondary SEAL.

let me share with you some moments. yesterday, first day of term - former student, now 17, came in to see his old teachers - i was on the phone so this beautiful and intelligent young Muslim man blew me a kiss and said he'd speak to me next time he was in. not long afterwards, at the bus stop, i met two more former pupils - one is back in school to do mentoring of younger pupils, had a lovely chat with them both. today, a man who left school five years ago came in to see me for ten minutes at the end of the day - he lives in london now, but had been on holiday in wales and visited manchester on the way home to see old friends. these people come back to school because they know they matter to us. pupils' emotional health is not overlooked.

petallus - it was yobs, not youths! what can i say? until you've seen them, you won't believe them. it doesn't matter what the teacher thinks, says, or does. they do what they want.
sometimes they want to co-operate.

No need to stand corrected POGS, I was just trying to say that it may not be practical and could work against the children, especially those with difficulties.

As said before, where I live parents wouldn't even think of taking kids out of school during term-time, unless in extreme circumstances, and it is accepted by all- apart from all the ex-pats from the UK who find it difficult to adhere to, which does create some problems. Those parents have been fined heavily, and are complaining bitterly as they are used to a different system.

Fair enough,maybe I stand corrected. The problem is this is happening so the conclusion then is absolutely school time must be adhered to. I hope that goes for all staff, no strikes and teachers days. If that is the case, then at least we know where we stand. Compliance is set for everyone to abide by and I would accept that.

In which case, how do you propose to help the children catch up in all the subjects they've missed during the 2 weeks? For some very bright children, they might take it in their stride. For some, it can be a total nightmare, and almost impossible to do. As a teacher I often spent my lunches, breaks and after school helping children who missed time due to illness or an accident, or a big family trauma. It takes a lot of time and effort, and I always did it with the greatest of pleasure. But should teachers be expected to do this for everything child who has missed time to a holiday? Can you imagine the extra workload to do this. As a secondary teacher I would teach about 300 children in a year- and at 2 weeks each, it would just not be possible, I can assure you.

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.

home

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Speaking is a different skill from reading and writing.

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!"

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.

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.

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.