SCHOOL’S OUT

27-02-2008

We’re in the middle of term time, but plenty of kids aren’t getting taught – and it’s got nothing to do with wagging it. As Ros Dodd reports, her daughter has been off for three weeks.

My young daughter last attended school on Thursday, February 7 and isn’t due to return until today. She hasn’t been sick and I’ve not been keeping her away from the classroom.

The reasons for this prolonged absence are these: On February 8 there was a teachers’ “training day”, then there was a week of half-term.

On the Monday following the holiday my husband took her in to find that there had been a flooding problem over the previous weekend and her part of the school was closed. We were informed later that day it would remain closed for the rest of the week.

Last Thursday we had a call to say her classroom wouldn’t reopen until Tuesday. On Friday, when he went into school to collect some “work” to keep her occupied, my husband was informed she couldn’t return until Wednesday as another bout of council industrial action was scheduled for Tuesday (even though this was subsequently called off, the remedial work still wasn’t finished).

This situation would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. It’s not the missed lessons that gall me – my daughter is too young for that to matter – it’s the inconvenience it has caused many parents.

My husband and I are lucky, we work from home, but imagine office worker parents who took a week’s leave to cover half-term (plus a day for the teacher “training”) and then found themselves, en route to work the following Monday, discovering that they couldn’t go back to the office after all unless they could find instant child care.

Imagine, too, the pressure on affected employers.

In an age when education is deemed so important and when the government is falling over itself to persuade stay-at-home mothers to return to work, I find it incomprehensible that a child has to stay off school for so long.

Couldn’t something have been arranged, such as the hall being turned into a makeshift classroom? My husband recalls that when his school all but burnt down many eons ago, it was “business as usual” barely two days later.

Similarly, I remember the days when schools battled on even when snow lay thick on the ground. Now, it seems, even a few snowflakes sends them scurrying to the phone to call Radio WM and announce that lessons are cancelled for the day.

What, inadvertently, are we teaching our children?

HAVE SCHOOLS GONE SOFT? ARE CHILDREN OUT OF SCHOOL MORE OFTEN THESE DAYS? LEAVE A COMMENT ON THE STIRRER FORUM.