Truancy Penalties Fail ….Really?

A report by Ming Zhang who works for the local education department in Kingston upon Thames shows that the on-the-spot fines and threats of prison are not improving the level of truancy in the UK.  No big surprise there.  Did any educated person ever really believe that they would?  Of course they didn’t work!  How can they?  Do schools plan to set up watch-and-wait areas outside their gates so that parents can see if their children decide to bunk off for the afternoon?

Despite comments in the report about “poor parenting” and “poverty”, this is more to do with unrealistic expectations by those who made the demands in the first place! As a parent you take your child to school, it’s then up to the school to keep them there!  As a parent I don’t want my child wandering around the city, a target for anyone looking for a victim!  I want to know my child is at school.  There’s only so much I’m able to do to keep them there – unless of course I camp outside the >  But, hey, wait a minute, isn’t that what the teachers are supposed to do?   If they lose kids between >

It’s oh so easy to blame the parents, and yes I’m sure that there are some parents who don’t care whether their child is at school or not, but most of us care deeply!  Whether they accept it or not, our children are potentially in danger when they leave school unaccompanied – does the Government think that this is what we want?  It’s not as if we live in a safe society – some lame ministers didn’t even have the courage to vote in Megan’s Law to help us protect our kids in their local environment – we don’t WANT our kids walking the streets.  We want them in safe >  It’s almost impossible to explain this to a pre-teen bored to tears with an uninspired history teacher, but surely University educated ministers can understand the simple facts that kids who have the means and opportunity to escape from boredom will do so unless the school comes up with a way to prevent it. 

Of course, if the Government wants to fund these watch-and-wait areas outside every UK school, plus the necessary financial compensation for parents giving up their jobs in order to police their own children every school day, I’m sure that more parents would find this more realistic in terms of what they can actually do to help the situation!

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