OT - School closures

[John]

It strikes me that schools must have really poor maintenance if they are not prepared for winter. A few simple measures during the summer should prevent the daft regular closures.

[Andy Cap]

I doubt it's anything to do with maintenance.

Teachers now live miles away and so supervision becomes a problem, added to which H&S rears it's ugly head, in that should little Johnny fall and break his arm, the parents will sue, whereas in my day, it would have been looked upon as an act of God.

Getting to school on snowy days, were the kind of day you rememebered, but now it's all been turned into a big problem.

[Robin]

Not just H&S. I recall as a sixth former taking classes to cover for teachers who could not get in. I'm told that's not allowed now unless the pupils have been CRB checked etc.

Risk-aversion rules? (Except the collective risk of turning out illiterate, innumerate, dependants on the welfare state?)

[Steven Campbell]

Its not so much the schools but the roads in surrounding areas. Teachers can't get to work and neither can the kids. Don't know if you have any kids at school but on a normal day it is absolute mayhem at opening and closing time with all those parents in their cars. Can only imagine what it would be like with snow added in. I'm glad my kids travel by a school bus but then it won't belong before they say it is to dangerous to travel to our village to collect them, like they do most years when its snowing.

[Ronald Raygun]

The answer is to have sensible catchment areas, to require all pupils to live within walking distance of the school. The same requirement should apply to teachers and other essential staff.

Closing a school is not as cheap as you think, because it has knock-on effects. If children need to stay at home because the school is closed, then there arises a babysitting problem which may mean a parent who would otherwise have been able to get to work, now can't.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I went to school in Aberdeen in the '50s and early '60s. The school was rather too far away to walk to since most went home for lunch in those days. I can't remember it ever being closed due to snow. And at least one of my teachers lived in another town and came by bus.

They would - very occasionally - mark a 'double attendance' if it rained heavily and unexpectedly in the morning and kids would get soaked going home for lunch.

After a heavy snow fall, just about every council owned truck - including dustcarts - would be out with a snowplough attached clearing roads. They also employed local haulage firms to do this. Salt and grit is useless in heavy snow.

[pete]

Add to which the issue about what happens if the little darlings get snowed in while _at_ school - or worse: the teachers get snowed in. You can bet your mortgage that if that happened there'd be a gaggle of tabloid reporters trying to dig up some blame for someone, somewhere.

It's much cheaper to close a school for a day, or a week, than to prepare for an event of unknown intensity that may not even happen.

[John MacLeod]

The contract school bus has appeared here two of the last four schooldays but the driver has refused to take any of the school pupils so the bus, which is under a multi-user contract also allowing the public to travel on it, has run empty. The Council website and BBC indicate that the school is open, but the local radio website indicate that it's closed except for town pupils.

All I can say is that in an era of Council cutbacks, if the local authority can't arrange things better than that, a few redundancies in the IT department couldn't possibly make things worse. And exactly why schools can't update their own websites to show whether they're open or shut beats me -- it isn't exactly rocket science.

[Dave Liquorice]

The *pupils* CRB checked? Mind you knowing the right toe rags you have in some schools that is probably not a bad idea to protect the

6th former...

rememebered,

Certainly do, I well remember walking to junior school through 12" of snow and then not being allowed in until the bell went. We just built excellent slides on the play ground. B-)

It's the legal requirement to have x staff for y pupils that force many closures as the staff live too far from the school and "can't get in".

3rd snow day on the trot for our schools today, mind you there is 3" of snow on the roads and they have been ploughed, twice, since 0700 this morning.

[Tim Watts]

Yes - most of the ills today are due to the fact that less people live near their work.

But I bet most teachers live near a school - thus they could in principle report for duty at their nearest one.

Even if all they could do was "creche" the kids for a day rather than run formal lessons, it would be a help to parents would otherwise have to take a day off.

It was a standard Civil Service procedure in the 90's and earlier.

[Tim Watts]

Utterly rediculous considering said pupil has access to his peers all day anyway.

[Tim Watts]

Just the sort of "we can fix this" attitude that no longer exists.

[Dave Liquorice]

There speaks a townie... You might get away with that in towns and urban areas but not rural ones.

[Mike Clarke]

Yes, but it's not a cost to the education authority and therefore not a problem.

[Tim Watts]

But they've closed loads of town schools too.

[Ronald Raygun]

I don't see why not. Actually that's not true, I do. It's the result of misguided efficiency measures, of merging rural schools until they become as large as town schools, with the attendant increase in commuting distances in areas of low population density. This "solution" was predicated on cheap transport, but with energy (fuel) costs on the up, it may be time for a re-think on this, and to return to small "village" schools, possibly even down to the level of having only one teacher, taking a class of pupils of mixed age.

What do they do these days in small remote communities like, for example, the isle of Eigg? Do they have a mixed-age primary school and then send the kids to the mainland for secondary school on a boarding basis, with a weekly instead of daily commute?

[Ronald Raygun]

They can stay at home then. In my day we walked to school on our own.

[Frank Erskine]

Or get the parents to "home school" their kids during the bad weather.

[stuart noble]

Being interfered with by a 6th former is all part of the fun

And children who never experience the joy of a slide

[ARWadsworth]

Walk? You must be joking. The parents will never walk their kids to school.