Nice People Thread No. 15, a Cyber Summer

ivyleaf

vivatifosi wrote: »

I was wound up by the arbitrariness of it all. The guy who didn't have enough money to buy his kids Christmas presents but spent £40 a week on fags and booze really annoyed me, though I could see his wife probably was too unwell to work. I was annoyed for the gran who had done the right thing and taken her daughters kids, but because the laws are devised for younger families meant she was expected to work to 75.

And as foul mouthed and objectionable as the blonde woman was, not helping her to furnish a house that she'd been given meant that she faced eviction and her kids were in expensive care, which is just plain ridiculous. She couldn't get money without her kids living there, but equally her kids couldn't live there because the house did nothavebeds and basic furniture in. Yet the council was paying a fortune to keep the kids in care when all that was needed was a couple of hundred pounds worth of second hand furniture, probably way less than the cost of caring for her kids for a few days. Bonkers.

After reading your reply as well as threads on DT and elsewhere, I'm sure I would have thrown several bricks :mad:

Pyxis

I must admit, my heart bled for the Gran. She was at the end of her tether.:(
I didn't see all of her story, but what I did see was very sad.

Pyxis

PasturesNew wrote: »

I didn't watch it. I meant to, I missed it. I don't have any form of catchup TV.

If you just put Panorama in your address bar, it will come up. Click on the episode for 5April.

I just did that, and I watched the earlier section about the Gran that I had missed on the night.

I am now very confused.
She cannot pay all the rent due to the benefits cap. Yet, she gets a Special Allowance of £29,000 for the 4 boys, to be spent on the boys. She does spend it on the boys, but she feels that some of it shouldn't be used to pay the rent and hence put a roof over the heads.

I don't understand. Have I missed something else? Surely the rent should be given priority over some of their extra-curricular activities?

I don't understand.

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

I didn't watch it. I meant to, I missed it. I don't have any form of catchup TV.

You have an internet connection and a PC, so I'm puzzled what the problem is.

vivatifosi

Pyxis wrote: »

If you just put Panorama in your address bar, it will come up. Click on the episode for 5April.

I just did that, and I watched the earlier section about the Gran that I had missed on the night.

I am now very confused.
She cannot pay all the rent due to the benefits cap. Yet, she gets a Special Allowance of £29,000 for the 4 boys, to be spent on the boys. She does spend it on the boys, but she feels that some of it shouldn't be used to pay the rent and hence put a roof over the heads.

I don't understand. Have I missed something else? Surely the rent should be given priority over some of their extra-curricular activities?

I don't understand.

My understanding of her specific situation is that the money is supposed to be spent solely on the boys... All £29k of it, or a bit over £7k per child. That is to pay for all their food, clothes, clubs, school trips, holidays, etc. If those children were in care proper, the cost would be even higher. I think when my brother was fostering it was something like £15k per child. And he ddid have a social worker round to check that things were as they are supposed to be. So she may have people ensuring that she as their legal guardian was not taking their money and frittering it away on things like keeping a roof over their head.

IMO she was an outlier, caught up in a situation that was not designed for her circumstances. There was a case on TV this week regarding not being able to take your kids out of school on holiday. The family were fined for taking their child out of school when the child had a life limiting form of cystic fibrosis, and needed for the doctor to say "your child is finally well enough to be taken on holiday" before they could take them. They were saying that there has to be some flexibility, because their situation was not the same as that of people who randomly took their kids out of school, yet they fell foul of the same rules.

Pyxis

vivatifosi wrote: »

My understanding of her specific situation is that the money is supposed to be spent solely on the boys... All £29k of it, or a bit over £7k per child. That is to pay for all their food, clothes, clubs, school trips, holidays, etc. If those children were in care proper, the cost would be even higher. I think when my brother was fostering it was something like £15k per child. And he ddid have a social worker round to check that things were as they are supposed to be. So she may have people ensuring that she as their legal guardian was not taking their money and frittering it away on things like keeping a roof over their head.

IMO she was an outlier, caught up in a situation that was not designed for her circumstances. There was a case on TV this week regarding not being able to take your kids out of school on holiday. The family were fined for taking their child out of school when the child had a life limiting form of cystic fibrosis, and needed for the doctor to say "your child is finally well enough to be taken on holiday" before they could take them. They were saying that there has to be some flexibility, because their situation was not the same as that of people who randomly took their kids out of school, yet they fell foul of the same rules.

I see. So she is not allowed to spend it on rent? Yet she hasn't enough money of her own to pay the rent because it has been capped?

I see.
Crumbs.



I wonder if she was allocated a larger house so that she could have the boys. If that were the case, then the higher rent for that larger house would have been incurred solely for their benefit, so I would have thought that the 'extra' rent could come out of their allowances.

michaels

vivatifosi wrote: »

My understanding of her specific situation is that the money is supposed to be spent solely on the boys... All £29k of it, or a bit over £7k per child. That is to pay for all their food, clothes, clubs, school trips, holidays, etc. If those children were in care proper, the cost would be even higher. I think when my brother was fostering it was something like £15k per child. And he ddid have a social worker round to check that things were as they are supposed to be. So she may have people ensuring that she as their legal guardian was not taking their money and frittering it away on things like keeping a roof over their head.

IMO she was an outlier, caught up in a situation that was not designed for her circumstances. There was a case on TV this week regarding not being able to take your kids out of school on holiday. The family were fined for taking their child out of school when the child had a life limiting form of cystic fibrosis, and needed for the doctor to say "your child is finally well enough to be taken on holiday" before they could take them. They were saying that there has to be some flexibility, because their situation was not the same as that of people who randomly took their kids out of school, yet they fell foul of the same rules.

The schools do have discretion to allow holiday in term time if the headteacher thinks it is appropriate.

I suspect the majority of families in the UK can not afford to spend 7k exclusively on each child - I know we couldn't.

Our per child spend:
Food 1k
School Dinners 600
Clubs/activities 1k
Clothes 600
School trips 300
Birthday 300
Xmas 150

Total about 4k
Summer Hols 100

vivatifosi

I think, but don't know, that it depends on the skill of the head or social worker, or whoever, to take black and white rules and interpret them as shades of grey. The cystic fibrosis family were reported by the school, even though they had a special letter from the doctor.

Of course there are also people who game the system.

As someone who works with the public and have to follow the rules, sometimes it is really hard, and I don't even have to deal with particularly difficult stuff.

DH for a while between jobs worked for the benefits office. He'd get on one hand taxi drivers brazenly parking outside, chucking their signage in the boot then swanning in to sign on; then on the other hand be dealing with a young mum with cancer in very real hardship who didn't meet his set criteria to get help.

That was a while ago and support for different groups has changed. However the problems and cases are still difficult. I'm glad Im not a social worker...that has to be a really tough job.

PasturesNew

GDB2222 wrote: »

You have an internet connection and a PC, so I'm puzzled what the problem is.

A slow broadband and an old PC. Even if/when anything works it just buffers before the PC gives up the ghost.

LydiaJ

michaels wrote: »

Employment has to change at the start of the month rather than being strictly aligned to the tax year. I told the tax credits people the changes started on Monday 3rd April, no doubt they will try and do something complicated for the two days....

Ah! I see now. Thanks for explaining. Hope working 70% goes well for you. Which days are you going to work?

LydiaJ wrote: »

Good news in the J household.

As some of you may know, DS's school couldn't fit his preferred GCSE options into their blocking system, so he has been doing one subject through a combination of home schooling and self study, with all his other subjects at school in the usual way (and one extra self-studied maths qualification - the FSMQ - just because he wanted to do it on top of everything else). Today, he has just shown me a grid of the timetable blocks for A level subjects for his school from September, and the subjects he wants to do fit nicely. I knew they would, really, because he's chosen an entirely reasonable selection of compatible subjects that you would expect any sane timetable blocking system to be able to accommodate, but all the same, it's nice to know. Particularly nice to know ahead of his "interview" on Tuesday, when he'll be asked questions about why he's picked the subjects he's picked, and told officially whether he can go ahead with them.

Thanks for the supportive replies to this post. The interview was very undemanding. They just told him his mock results and GCSE predictions were fine, and his choices fit the blocks, so everything was OK and did he have any questions? So no need for him to have worried about what to say. :rotfl:
He's now had a letter officially offering him a 6th form place, conditional on GCSEs. The basic conditions for getting into 6th form are:
5 GCSEs including English & maths, with at least 2 of them at grade B/6 or above and the other 3 at grade C/5 or above
(This summer, English & maths GCSE grades have numbers and the others all still have letters. Next year they'll all have numbers.)
His particular subjects have additional conditions:
7 or above in maths
B in additional science (he already has A in core science)
B in computing

His predictions say he should get all of that. It all feels a lot more stressful from the parental perspective than it does when I'm the teacher, though!

Meanwhile, DD made cheesecake in food tech yesterday. She does not like cheesecake. All the more for me!