100% OT; school holidays

Arthur Clune wrote:
Just zis Guy, you know? wrote:

And we lost top spot in the league tables one year because two
children were removed without permission during SATs for family
holidays - children thus removed score zero on the SAT and bring the
average for the entire school down (so much for league tables!).

If I had kids I think I'd try and take them out of school on SAT days
as a policy.....


Ah, i see you have fallen for the anti sats spin of the teacher union
activists!

Sats (both ks1/2 and voluntary sats in the in-between years) are an
essential part of how our school operates. most of the kids don'tknow they
are taking them as it is just another lesson.

Bad school scare kids about sats because they fear what sats might reveal.
Good school use them as one of the tools in a battery of assessment
techniques.

pk

Just zis Guy, you know? wrote:

And we lost top spot in the league tables one year because two children were
removed without permission during SATs for family holidays - children thus
removed score zero on the SAT and bring the average for the entire school
down (so much for league tables!).


We remove our children from school for the duration of the SATs. SATs have
become a pernicious exam pressure on the kids. They were introduced to test
the teaching and ensure the teachers were doing an adequate job of teaching
the curriculum. That has been successfully palmed off into testing of the
children with all the unnecessary pressure on them to do well in the SATs. We
have told the school we will be quite happy for the children to take part once
it reverts to being treated as a test of the teaching and not the children.

Tony

PK wrote:

Sats (both ks1/2 and voluntary sats in the in-between years) are an
essential part of how our school operates. most of the kids don'tknow they
are taking them as it is just another lesson.

Bad school scare kids about sats because they fear what sats might reveal.
Good school use them as one of the tools in a battery of assessment
techniques.


I'd suggest. based on my experience, that your school is a very rare school.
Most would classify as bad schools by your criteria. If our school adopted
your schools approach, we would be happy for our kids to take them.

Tony

in message pan.2004.06.18.06.56.16.526488@tjhpropertygarbage .co.uk,
Tony Hogarty ') wrote:

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 23:52:50 -0700, MartinM wrote:

As many of the people on this NG appear to have children of school
age, what does the panel think of proposals by the government to
reduce the cost of taking holidays in school holidays. Can they do it
anyway? Is this the soft option to the £100 fine idea?
Presumably the tour operators will counter by saying it's not school
holiday holidays that are expensive, it's the term time ones that are
cheap.

Looks to me like a classic supply and demand issue. High demand out
of term time means the suppliers can charge a higher rate but lower
demand in
term time means lower prices. I don't see what it has to do with the
government in all honesty, unless we are moving to a society where we
have to subsidise parents for their choices?

We already do heavily subsidise parents for their choices. I pay just as
much for your children's education as you do, despite not having
children myself. I also pay towards your family allowance, or whatever
it's called these days, and pay more income tax because I don't get
family tax credit.

Actually I think it is generally appropriate for wealth in society to be
redistributed from the relatively well off to those who are through no
fault of their own less well off, but I don't see any particular reason
on an overcrowded island of an overpopulated planet to subsidise
procreation.

However, re holidays, it's just the same as rush hours. It's completely
barmy that every school takes its holidays at the same time so that
everyone with children wants to go on holiday at the same time, just as
it's completely barmy for every workplace to start at the same time and
end at the same time to dump commuters onto the transport
infrastructure at the same time - and don't get me onto artificially
tinkering with the clocks so that people can go to work at the same
time by the clock irrespective of the fact that we live on a planet
with a tilted axis of rotation... these are not rational policies for a
rational world.

In a rational world - in a rational world there would actually be a lot
less work to do, but I digress. In a rational world different people at
different workplaces would start work at different times, spreading the
load on the transport infrastructure (and many more people would work
from home). In a rational world different schools would take their
holidays at different times (probably by area, so that the secondary
schools in Aberdeen took theirs at a different time from those in
Edinburgh) to spread the load on the holiday infrastructure. Mind you,
in a rational world people wouldn't do the sort of appalling jobs in
appalling places that make them feel the need to go away on holiday - I
haven't been away on holiday since 1988. When you look at what's on my
doorstep, you'll understand.

--
(Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; MS Windows: A thirty-two bit extension ... to a sixteen bit
;; patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a
;; four bit microprocessor and sold by a two-bit company that
;; can't stand one bit of competition -- anonymous

PK wrote:

Ah, i see you have fallen for the anti sats spin of the teacher union
activists!

Er, up to a point, Lord Copper. Plenty of people have profound reservations
about the whole idea which are nothing to do with either the reasonable or
the unreasonable concerns of the teaching unions.

Sats (both ks1/2 and voluntary sats in the in-between years) are an
essential part of how our school operates. most of the kids don'tknow
they are taking them as it is just another lesson.

Not the case at any school I've come across, and certainly not the case at
the one where I'm a governor (and that is not a bad school, in my view).

Bad school scare kids about sats because they fear what sats might
reveal. Good school use them as one of the tools in a battery of
assessment techniques.

Bad schools may even tell parents their children will be in trouble if their
children don't have extra coaching to get the next level up in SATs
(happened to someone I know). Good schools adopt a low-key approach and try
to get something meaningful from the detailed results, like measuring the
performance of a cohort as it moves up the school inna value-added stylee.

Value added is the only useful thing you can measure with SATs in my view
(what is the point of a table which ranks schools according to their
admissions policy and catchment area?). Amazingly, it was pretty much the
last thing to be done. Why might that have been, I wonder? What would have
been the point of introducing a system which makes selective schools look
good mainly because they are selective? Surely not a political agenda...

--
Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

MartinM wrote:
As many of the people on this NG appear to have children of school
age, what does the panel think of proposals by the government to
reduce the cost of taking holidays in school holidays. Can they do it
anyway? Is this the soft option to the £100 fine idea?
Presumably the tour operators will counter by saying it's not school
holiday holidays that are expensive, it's the term time ones that are
cheap.

We call them Blair Breaks. As you may recall, early in the present
government's last term parents were berated for taking their children out in
term time simultaneous with our esteemed leader taking his kids out of school
during term time to go on holiday. Following that furore it all went quiet.
Now his children have left school I guess he feels safe to put this "do as I
say, not as I do" topic back on the agenda but subtlely repacked as the fault
of the holiday operators. Cynic moi?

The educational experiences our kids have had from term time breaks has far
outweighed their loss of education at school and has not disrupted their
classes or their educational achievement one iota. To the contrary geography,
history, cultures, languages and religion have all been brought vividly to
life by the trips we've taken and enabled them to extract far more from their
formal education and share that with their class colleagues.

Tony

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 09:05:03 +0000, Simon Brooke wrote:

We already do heavily subsidise parents for their choices. I pay just as
much for your children's education as you do, despite not having
children myself. I also pay towards your family allowance, or whatever
it's called these days, and pay more income tax because I don't get
family tax credit.

Actually I think it is generally appropriate for wealth in society to be
redistributed from the relatively well off to those who are through no
fault of their own less well off, but I don't see any particular reason
on an overcrowded island of an overpopulated planet to subsidise
procreation.

Simon

You're preaching to the converted here. I'm childless and happy to be so,
but beginning to get really disturbed by the level of subsidy we are
expected to put into those who choose to have children.

--
Regards

Tony Hogarty
(Take out the garbage to reply)

Tony Hogarty wrote:

You're preaching to the converted here. I'm childless and happy to be so,
but beginning to get really disturbed by the level of subsidy we are
expected to put into those who choose to have children.

When you retire with no family to support you, you will rely much more on
society being able to support you with healthcare, social services, pensions
etc etc . That is only possible if there is a new generation of economically
active people to provide that support. I have children, who will form that
new generation, that cost me way beyond anything I receive in subsidy so I
guess for now you are subsidising my children at a modest level and I am
subsidising your future old age at a far higher level.

Tony

Tony Raven wrote:

When you retire with no family to support you, you will rely much
more on society being able to support you with healthcare, social
services, pensions etc etc . That is only possible if there is a new
generation of economically active people to provide that support. I
have children, who will form that new generation, that cost me way
beyond anything I receive in subsidy so I guess for now you are
subsidising my children at a modest level and I am subsidising your
future old age at a far higher level.

Correct motorcycle.

In article ,
Simon Brooke wrote:
We already do heavily subsidise parents for their choices. I pay just as
much for your children's education as you do, despite not having

You might care to look at it as paying, retrospectively, for your own
education.

ian