Term time holiday court fine help please?

jmhgibson123

the school my son attends has had 2 school holiday trips..one skiing in france...where a lot of the kids got a sickness bug, then there is a trip to disneyland paris. now as a single parent cant afford the prices they want for this...now how is this different to a family holiday? oh and how about all the times its the end of term week..60 kids in a classroom watching frozen...not sure thats educational only my opinion but some schools seem to waste a lot of time not teaching kids. i am taking my son out for a week in spain..budget holiday and he will be learning spanish and the maths for working out prices in euros so i think there is a bit of education in there...oh and he can practice swimming in the pools :-)

Idiophreak

sourcrates wrote: »

the main problem here is cost, holidays are much more expensive during school holidays as the travel companies know they have a captive market, some kind of regulation in this area is what's required, not the penalising of parents for simply wanting an affordable family holiday.

Oh go on then, you've got my interest...

What exactly do you imagine the government doing that would make it better? How would you imagine they'd impose it on the rest of the world, even if they did manage to regulate the UK?

And would your regulations stops at holidays?

Shouldn't anything that has "peak" and "off peak" be regulated in the same way?

Personally, I'm tired of being a "captive market" when I go to the cinema and pay more because it's the evening...when I go climbing ...when I play golf...go swimming...use my phone...get train tickets ...ride the bus...miss happy hour...go bowling...when I miss the "lunchtime special" at the chippy...All of these businesses are taking advantage of the fact there are more people want to buy their stuff at peak times. How would you stop this from happening, exactly?

PenguinJim

Simple! I would abolish that ridiculous outdated "9-5" working day, and form three new eight-hour working days: 4-12, 12-20 and 20-4. This would annihilate existing "rush hours" (people going to a 4am start, for example, would not conflict with people leaving after their 4am finish). Physical shops would become 24-hour, to match their digital counterparts. Jobs would be created to cover our now-24-hour services. Traffic would be spread through the day. Electricity generation peaks would lower. "On-peak" as we know it would fade away. Yes, it would be painful at first, but we could double, nay TRIPLE our GDP, and we would revolutionise the HUMAN RACE!!!

OK, my tongue's halfway into my cheek with that suggestion, but I do think that a lot of today's scheduling is simply tradition and is not efficient. The problem is, converting to a new method would be painful and expensive for the first few months/years. We would be in a much stronger position if a UK government had had the courage to fully move us across to metric, for example, but they would have been remembered for the difficulties and lost power. We'll never have the big changes that we need.

So I guess we'll just continue along in our barely-working situation.

(Slightly more on-topic, I agree with the idea of punishing parents for taking their kids out of schools, but instead of "fines", couldn't the schools simply charge "fees" of the same amount that would be payable directly to the school and therefore benefit the school more directly?)

duchy

Not very child friendly working hours those 4am starts - would mean dropping kids off to a nursery or childminder at 3am or 9pm pick up on a noon start and lets not even bother with the night shift It can work and I've seen it work-on Kibbutzim in Israel however to make it work children (from babies upwards) lived in separate homes to the parents to facilitate both parents working......... I can't see that going down too well here in Britain though !!

We don't appear to have demand for the industries we do have though -if demand was there then working patterns would naturally evolve to facilitate the business need.

My standard working day is 2pm-11pm -I work in an industry where customer demand drives higher need for staffing afternoon and evenings. No-one needed the government to do it - the business (10 million customers in the UK) did it themselves because they needed to.

The only way to resolve the supply and demand issue for holidays would be to move to year round school so the demand for holiday dates would dilute. This however would be strongly resisted by the teaching unions and any parents either working in education themselves or with children at more than one school. There would also be childcare issues to address as some holiday clubs/after school clubs are only viable because they serve more than one school population.

I don't personally believe taking kids out of school will do lasting damage before the age of thirteen - I'd like to see it fineable after year 8 as that's the start of GCSE courses and also at key times like the beginning of the school year and at exam/assessment time for all age groups. I wouldn't penalize parents (for example) for taking kids out for the last few days of term when it isn't uncommon for classes to be watching videos etc rather than normal classes (something I can remember happening on the last day of term from my own school days but now seems to be the norm for the last week in many schools .

duchy

heartbreak_star wrote: »

Funny, you know - my parents, and some of my friends' parents, refused to take us away during term-time when I was in school. They reasoned that our education would suffer.

We all now have good careers.

Some of the kids in my school had 2-3 holidays/long weekends a year, and they don't have good careers.

Admittedly, possibly coincidental correlation...but food for thought.

HBS x

Was that more to do with your parents attitude that education was a priority rather than the actual lack of absences though ?
I can think of kids who lost substantial school time through illness but still did well.
If parents think education is important - kids grow up with a positive attitude and approach and will probably have better resources and more encouragement at home than kids whose parents think school isn't so important. The advantages of that positive reinforcement means that those children probably can sustain and achieve even without 100% attendance (regardless of reason for absence)

PenguinJim

duchy wrote: »

Not very child friendly working hours those 4am starts - would mean dropping kids off to a nursery or childminder at 3am or 9pm pick up on a noon start and lets not even bother with the night shift It can work and I've seen it work-on Kibbutzim in Israel however to make it work children (from babies upwards) lived in separate homes to the parents to facilitate both parents working......... I can't see that going down too well here in Britain though !!

I think you're missing the point of my manifesto. Why wouldn't those working hours be child-friendly? Schools would be 4-12, 12-8 and 8-4 as well. EVERYTHING would change!

A "night shift" wouldn't exist. We've conquered the night already, using our miraculous new technologies such as "clothes" and "torches". You're thinking I mean just change office work from 9-5 to three 8-hour shifts? Nope. I mean change EVERYTHING.

I've spent nearly ten minutes thinking about it, so please give my idea the respect it deserves.

Edit: Yup, you definitely have!

duchy

Ah yes the suspension of the body clock -once we can conquer the rising and setting of the sun it'll work very nicely...... those new fangled electric lights and torches haven't overcome the issues of night workers have substantially poorer health than day workers ........but nothing a tinker with human biology won't cure in the long run

I am indeedi giving your idea the respect it deserves and place higher value on it than you imagine-it's definitely worth more than the paper it is written on.......... oh um wait a minute .........

Not sure the farmers are on board yet though ! Cows with clothes and torches ?

PenguinJim

Considering that we use an unnatural sleeping pattern already (eight hours of sleep from 11pm to 7am isn't natural! I had thought that was common knowledge, as there seems to be a "new" article about it every few months!), that isn't any more of a problem than our current system.

(I can think of a few genuine problems - give it six or seven minutes and you'll come up with some, too! )

Edit: not wanting to post another off-topic post, but I quite agree with your next post, duchy!

duchy

Obviously not natural to you or I since we were both posting before 7am .....now enough hijacking of this thread (but it was fun )

BillJones

sourcrates wrote: »

What a sarcastic, pompous, and downright unhelpful post !!
where you the school swot by any chance ?

Wow, there are still people who think hard study is a bad thing?

Remarkable...