School Holiday Fines

Spendless

maman wrote: »

The law does have flexibility for exceptional circumstances like family illness or bereavements but different headteachers seem to apply it in different ways. Maybe further guidance is needed.

It certainly is. I've said it before, different LAs shouldn't be able to have different rules on what is classed as 'exceptional circummstances'.

foxster99

The thing is that it is hard for the government to be prescriptive on exceptional circumstances. You'd have to write a book on it to cover all the circumstances that might or might not be appropriate to be an authorised absence.

Take something as seemingly simple as attending a funeral. Surely that should always be authorised, right?

What if it is the funeral of a friend of one the parents who the child didn't know, it's in Ireland and they will miss three days of school? What if it's the fourth funeral attended in a year? What if the funeral is in India and the family want two weeks off to arrange it? What if one divorced parent wants the child the go but the other doesn't?

I've had those requests at our school and loads more for all the other circumstances. Making the regulations not too prescriptive is so that someone in the school can make a valued judgement call on whether it is exceptional circumstances. I do believe there would be even more problems if it was over-regulated. Of course, it is dependant on someone making a good judgement.

As for attendance awards...

What I do is reward those with close to 100%, having missed no more than 0.5 of a day. Plus ask each form tutor to nominate two students from their form as "unsung heroes" i.e. two students who missed out because of circumstances beyond their control. This means rewarding about 125-150 out of 650 students, which seems a fair number in terms of making it something special and still including the near-misses.

If students have regular dental appointments (e.g. a course of non-referral orthodontic treatment) in the school day or they regularly have odd days sick for minor things or they had a term-time holiday, etc then they miss out, which seems fair enough to me and let's those who drag themselves into school every day no matter what stand out and be rewarded.

Some things like music exams, taking part in sporting events, etc can be coded so that it is not an absence as per the national attendance regulations, perhaps because of their intrinsic worth. Some things, like going to a funeral, cannot be and are instead recorded as an authorised absence. This being an example of where the regulations are somewhat prescriptive and the inflexibility is sometimes helpful and other times not.

maman

foxster99 wrote: »

If students have regular dental appointments (e.g. a course of non-referral orthodontic treatment) in the school day or they regularly have odd days sick for minor things or they had a term-time holiday, etc then they miss out, which seems fair enough to me and lets those who drag themselves into school every day no matter what stand out and be rewarded.

Completely agree.


I think it's rewarding students for a quality that employers will welcome in the future which is all part of learning and preparing for the adult world.


We wouldn't want them to turn out like the guy who climbed Kilimanjaro on disability benefit or the policeman sacked for being at the races when he was too sick to work.;)

FBaby

Totally agree with this too. I couldn't bieve it when I heard a mum saying she agreed for her DS in year 8 to stay home on a Monday because he was suffering from generalised musscle pain following his football game on the Sunday!

Spendless

foxster99 wrote: »

The thing is that it is hard for the government to be prescriptive on exceptional circumstances. You'd have to write a book on it to cover all the circumstances that might or might not be appropriate to be an authorised absence.

Take something as seemingly simple as attending a funeral. Surely that should always be authorised, right?

What if it is the funeral of a friend of one the parents who the child didn't know, it's in Ireland and they will miss three days of school? What if it's the fourth funeral attended in a year? What if the funeral is in India and the family want two weeks off to arrange it? What if one divorced parent wants the child the go but the other doesn't?



I've had those requests at our school and loads more for all the other circumstances. Making the regulations not too prescriptive is so that someone in the school can make a valued judgement call on whether it is exceptional circumstances. I do believe there would be even more problems if it was over-regulated. Of course, it is dependant on someone making a good judgement

What if the parent/s have no one to leave their child/ren with whilst they attend a funeral abroad? What if the 4 funerals in a year, include parents, grandparents and siblings? I have both my parents alive, plus my mil and fil and both my Grandmothers. All 6 have health problems and I'm very lucky I didn't lose both parents within 3 weeks of each other around Chrismastime last year. I could very well be looking at funerals for several of them within a short space of time, considering their ages and health issues.

The rules don't need over regulating. They need to returning to what they were prior to September 2013. Before everyone had to guess at what exceptional circumstances meant and when the HT, who actually knew something of the child and their family and circs could make the decision.

Spendless

foxster99 wrote: »

What I do is reward those with close to 100%, having missed no more than 0.5 of a day. Plus ask each form tutor to nominate two students from their form as "unsung heroes" i.e. two students who missed out because of circumstances beyond their control. This means rewarding about 125-150 out of 650 students, which seems a fair number in terms of making it something special and still including the near-misses.

If students have regular dental appointments (e.g. a course of non-referral orthodontic treatment) in the school day or they regularly have odd days sick for minor things or they had a term-time holiday, etc then they miss out, which seems fair enough to me and let's those who drag themselves into school every day no matter what stand out and be rewarded.

maman wrote: »

Completely agree.


I think it's rewarding students for a quality that employers will welcome in the future which is all part of learning and preparing for the adult world.


We wouldn't want them to turn out like the guy who climbed Kilimanjaro on disability benefit or the policeman sacked for being at the races when he was too sick to work.;)

I believe that schools themselves impose a rule about how long students are off for if they vomit. I think it's 24-48 hours?

Unknown to me until recently because it hadn't cropped up in the year I've been there, my own workplace imposes a ban if you are actually sick, because they store food.

sulphate

The attendance awards don't sit right with me either. I don't see why a system needs to reward kids who don't get sick when being sick is a perfectly valid reason to miss school/work. Also, you don't get a reward for 100% attendance at work. If you aren't sick you don't call in sick - that's just an expectation, not something you get a special pat on the back for.

maman

sulphate wrote: »

The attendance awards don't sit right with me either. I don't see why a system needs to reward kids who don't get sick when being sick is a perfectly valid reason to miss school/work. Also, you don't get a reward for 100% attendance at work. If you aren't sick you don't call in sick - that's just an expectation, not something you get a special pat on the back for.

If only that were true.
No, maybe as an adult you wouldn't get a pat on the back but children need to be taught how to behave in later life and the rewards for good behaviour are a way of encouraging them.

foxster99

Spendless wrote: »

What if the parent/s have no one to leave their child/ren with whilst they attend a funeral abroad? What if the 4 funerals in a year, include parents, grandparents and siblings? I have both my parents alive, plus my mil and fil and both my Grandmothers. All 6 have health problems and I'm very lucky I didn't lose both parents within 3 weeks of each other around Chrismastime last year. I could very well be looking at funerals for several of them within a short space of time, considering their ages and health issues.

I wasn't saying that the circumstances I mentioned would or would not be authorised. I was pointing out how complicated even something as apparently simple as authorising time off for a funeral can be. It was a way of saying that it would be very difficult and likely counterproductive for the government to give detailed guidance to schools on what should and should not be authorised. IMHO it being only practical to continue to leave it up to the school.

The rules don't need over regulating. They need to returning to what they were prior to September 2013. Before everyone had to guess at what exceptional circumstances meant and when the HT, who actually knew something of the child and their family and circs could make the decision.

It has always been and continues to be the headteacher's (or their delegate's) decision.

It was actually less clear pre-2013 because one school would authorise term-time holidays and the school down the road did not. At least it is slightly more clear and consistent now.

svain

foxster99 wrote: »

Actually - no.

Working in a school, I have firsthand experience of this kind of thing and can tell you that those that do well by the time they finish are those with parents who recognise the worth of a full education and who shove their children out the door and off to school no matter what.

The students with a don't-give-a-damn attitude and/or who don't achieve as well as they could are those whose parents show their children that school is not a priority.

Now, I get that some parents genuinely don't prioritise school. Maybe they had a bad experience there themselves, or just aren't too smart, or enjoy a laid-back lifestyle, or whatever. But that will have consequences and their children are statistically less likely to achieve the academic results of other students, which again might not seem important to some parents but it does pre-guess that this low-aspiration lifestyle is what their children want to have too when they are older.

Absolute tosh!! ... Some of the most successful people in the country are/were not academically strong. Passing a few exams is just a very small cog in a much bigger wheel of life and far from insurmountable if grades not achieved at school. School and exams are nothing more than a tick box exercise for the authorities