ChatterBank2 mins ago
Head teachers
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Until the government stop measuring a school's success in this way parents will always be treated with disdain if they threaten to affect SATs performance. This applies to all schools so being RC is actually irrelevant.
That is ludricrous...Your child is in year 2 and 7 years old. Its a crazy kind of madness.
At my son's school (which is private - don't know if that makes any difference) the children take their SATS in year 2 but the parents are merely informed that the exams are for the benefit of monitoring the standard within the school and against the country as a whole. It is all kept very low key ...I actually didn't know anything about it until his end of year report, which contained his grades and the overall grades of the school as a whole.
Since this, I have found out that in other schools, the SATS are a quite an ordeal, with parents having sleepless night and worring about grades etc!!
One thing that does concern me with this latest correspondence is the eagerness for Catholics to blatantly lie. Being a vague Christian type without any firm indoctrination I am shocked that so many people advocate lying whilst claiming the whole episode is because of their firm religious convictions. Is this what the RC church teaches and endorses?
If it was me, I would write to the Chairman of the board of governors. Fair enough if it wa SATS WEEK or if your son was 15!! But a little 7 year old? My sister kept her 7 year old off school last week for 2 days because he was just exhausted on the Wednesday, and tearful! Because he is SO LITTLE!
This man is clearly an idiot. Write to the governors and insist that this absence is changed to an authorised one.
Schools should not have the authority to grant absence for holidays and events that can be held outside of term time. The people organising the baptism should have considered whether they wanted school age children to attend the ceremony and if so, arranged it to take place either at the weekend or during a school holiday. Most schools benefit from around 14 weeks holiday per year and never go more than about six weeks without a break, so it should not take too much trouble to arrange it.
One day off may not effect one child very much. But a number of them having time off during term time means that the entire class loses out by their absences as the teacher has to coach each of them individually to catch up.
In addition, the government is keen to reduce truancy. Children who may be thinking of playing truant will not be discouraged from doing so when they see their classmates taking time off. They will not appreciate the niceties of “authorised” absences. They will simply see their friends as absent and will be keen to have some of the same so that they can hang around the shopping centre.