taking children out of school for holidays in term time

Fly_Baby

loftus wrote: »

I think this is true of the 99.9% of parents who post here but in my experience there is a significant minority of parents who see school as a 9-3.30 child minding service and whose interaction with their child's education goes as far as dropping them off and picking them up.

I've never met such parents but you may be right.

Fly_Baby

jiblets1 wrote: »

Here is the national curriculum online for any parents who feel qualified enough to implement it. And good luck to those of you who find a text book to teach it all.

I'm pretty sure any parent is qualified enough to implement at the very least the primary school curriculum.

And it IS a shame that there are no text books. My son is in Year 2 only but I cannot help wondering how on earth he is going to cope when his school programme gets more and more challenging. Don't kids do any revision then if there are no text books? They DO have set books for each course at Universities so why not in schools?

msb5262

"I'm pretty sure any parent is qualified enough to implement at the very least the primary school curriculum."quote from Fly Baby post #96.

This is an extraordinary claim!

As a primary school teacher who trained for 4 years at an excellent university and who now has 20 years' experience, I've often had to research a new topic within the National Curriculum when I'm about to teach it.

Last year I was teaching Year 4 and of the 12 parents who attended parents' evening (out of 27), 4 or 5 told me that their partners were illiterate. These 12 parents were more concerned for their children's wellbeing than the 15 families where nobody attended, yet according to you ALL those parents would be qualified enough to implement the primary school curriculum.

Please can you explain? I don't understand (must be dim as I'm only a teacher).

MsB

NEH

I may be about to start a whole new ball game here but i honestly think that parents these days have got too picky about what consitutes a holiday. My parents used to take us camping when we were younger in the school holidays, we would occasionally moan about it but looking back now as adults we wouldn't have changed the whole experience for the world. When we did get go abroad there wasn't the money to go on a plane to somewhere (bear in mind no cheap flights or airlines then) so my mum and dad bundled us in the car and we were driven to France, Italy, Germany etc...sometimes staying in caravans, soemtimes self catering rooms, sometimes we had to stay in a hotel but the 3 of us children shared a room and we made do with less sulubrious accomodation sometimes.

Now adays for someone to have a holiday, it seems to be that they have to go on a plane to somewhere that has to be hot beyond belief.....or has the added attraction of some much loved cartoon character/theme park.

I think it is a shame that a lot of kids these days have no experience of camping or caravanning or even exploring the country they live in. They are missing out on so much.

If we couldn't afford a holiday with the school holiday prices we just made do. It isn't a right and even as adults if you can't afford a holiday you make do. Interrupting a child's education just to save a few bucks just seems wrong, to me it seems to say that educaiton can go hang as long we save a bit of monye for our exclusive holiday. Education should be a privilege and should be treated with respect, it's not something that should so easily be thrown away.

Fly_Baby

msb5262 wrote: »

"I'm pretty sure any parent is qualified enough to implement at the very least the primary school curriculum."quote from Fly Baby post #96.

This is an extraordinary claim!

As a primary school teacher who trained for 4 years at an excellent university and who now has 20 years' experience, I've often had to research a new topic within the National Curriculum when I'm about to teach it.

Last year I was teaching Year 4 and of the 12 parents who attended parents' evening (out of 27), 4 or 5 told me that their partners were illiterate. These 12 parents were more concerned for their children's wellbeing than the 15 families where nobody attended, yet according to you ALL those parents would be qualified enough to implement the primary school curriculum.

Please can you explain? I don't understand (must be dim as I'm only a teacher).

MsB

I don't know how those partners were illiterate - isn't school education compulsory by law? And it's not really my problem why those grpwn-up people couldn't read in the 21st century in the West-European country.

I am concerned about my child's well-being but school is for them to be educated, not to be happy and have fun. Yes, I have a different background in education, and I do believe in text books and I cannot comprehend how can a child absorb any material without reading about it as well listening to his classteacher in school.

I do know though, that whenever I was ill and missed school because of it, my mother had no problem following the school programme for those 1-2 weeks on that textbook with me and explaining me whatever was unclear. And she didn't have a University degree.

True, I usually didn't need a lot of explaining - I didn't exactly miss the whole school year, and all topics are interconnected so I was able to work it out from the point where I left it at school. And doing the same tasks at home as other children did during my illness helped me catch up without creating a big drama.

Nobody needs to be a teacher to help a child read a couple of chapters in a book if they missed a few days at school - if there is a book and if the teacher isn't the sole "key keeper".

loftus

I'm not a teacher and my kids are both at uni so their years of primary education were a few years ago. I'm guessing that yours were probably a few years further back than that.
Things have changed so much from when I was at primary school and moved on further since my kids were. When I was at school it was blackboards and books and those copier machines that used ink stencils and whose name I can't remember.
Nowadays there are computers and interactive whiteboards and individual worksheets so the whole class can move along at a pace suited to their ability - which at primary level can be quite a wide range.
I'm sure as they get older there is still an important place for textbooks and the printed word in general. At primary level I don't think it is as crucial as the material they work from can be made quite individual.

loftus

Just to add that if your children go to a school where there are no parents who have educational difficulties of their own and where they are all fully engaged with their children's education then you are very fortunate.

Lifeisbutadream

NEH wrote: »

I may be about to start a whole new ball game here but i honestly think that parents these days have got too picky about what consitutes a holiday. My parents used to take us camping when we were younger in the school holidays, we would occasionally moan about it but looking back now as adults we wouldn't have changed the whole experience for the world. When we did get go abroad there wasn't the money to go on a plane to somewhere (bear in mind no cheap flights or airlines then) so my mum and dad bundled us in the car and we were driven to France, Italy, Germany etc...sometimes staying in caravans, soemtimes self catering rooms, sometimes we had to stay in a hotel but the 3 of us children shared a room and we made do with less sulubrious accomodation sometimes.

Now adays for someone to have a holiday, it seems to be that they have to go on a plane to somewhere that has to be hot beyond belief.....or has the added attraction of some much loved cartoon character/theme park.

I think it is a shame that a lot of kids these days have no experience of camping or caravanning or even exploring the country they live in. They are missing out on so much.

If we couldn't afford a holiday with the school holiday prices we just made do. It isn't a right and even as adults if you can't afford a holiday you make do. Interrupting a child's education just to save a few bucks just seems wrong, to me it seems to say that educaiton can go hang as long we save a bit of monye for our exclusive holiday. Education should be a privilege and should be treated with respect, it's not something that should so easily be thrown away.

We are one of the 'picky' parents that you are talking about.

We have spent a fortune on a timeshare, because frankly we were fed up of paying out good money for crap holidays. We now spend up to 4 weeks a year in a 5* hotel, which we all absolutely love - we dont waste any time or money looking for things to do because it is all there and it is all paid for.

We once spent a week in a caravan in wales - what an awful week that was! it cost over £2K by the time you took into account travelling, food and entertainment - and the caravan was horrible!

I think what you probably meant to say was that different people like different types of holidays. Nobody is right or wrong, but we are all free to decide for ourselves what sort of holiday is right for us.

Silaqui

I'm a secondary school teacher, and at the moment we are in the final stages of completing coursework which is worth 60% of the GSCE grade. Since Christmas, I have had at least 3 or 4 students who have had time off for various holidays, and of course have missed out on a lot of time. I've been running afterschool drop in sessions since before the half term, but NONE of the students who have had the time off have bothered to attend. However, these are the same students who, when told that they have work missing that needs to be done, reply "Yeah I know Miss, I've been on holiday though so I haven't had as much time," - yes love - but do you think the examiner cares about that???

I know about the difficulties and expense in going on holiday outside of term time. I'm currently trying to clear my debts and so have little spare money, but even if I was debt free my partner is on a low wage and I couldn't pay for both of us at the most expensive time of year, let alone a whole family. Because we don't have kids, his company won't allow him to take leave in holiday time anyway, first dibs goes to the parents who work there, so we wouldn't be able to go together anyway!

x

Fluffi

Fluffi wrote: »

.... If I was a parent I'd definately want access to a detailed curriculum and learning objectives so that I could check on my child's progress and make sure the school didn't miss anything!

Thanks for the replies Dizziblonde and Milliebear but I'm not a parent so I don't get school letters or reports!

That said its good to know that you can purchase the National Curriculum though and good schools will be forthcoming with what they are teaching via newsletters and their website. I appreciate that teachers go through many years of training but you get bad teachers as well as good. I wouldn't to blindly trust the teachers say-so and then find later at a later date (e.g at SATs time or on transfer to another school) that there were huge gaps in my child's knowledge.

Home education would give me more control although I probably wouldn't because I think children benefit from being a social environment and interacting with their peers. However I could consider supplementing my child's learning in the evenings/weekends if necessary if they were starting to fall behind in school or I felt that the teacher wasn't helping my child reach its full potential. Hence textbooks or someway of accessing what my child is meant to be learning comes in useful!

And as someone else pointed out textbooks makes it easy for the child to catch up if they've been off sick or away too! Personally I liked working my way though the maths textbooks at school - I was normally ahead of most of the class and saw it as a competition!