Taking a Holiday With Your Kids May Turn Them Into An Underclass Or A Young Offender

Michael Gove - that champion of 'Free' Schools and releasing local authority schools from state interference - wants to legislate to prevent parents from taking their children out of school for a family holiday.

Supposedly, the reason behind this is concern about rising truancy rates, which the government believes is resulting in the creation of an underclass and an increase in the number of young offenders.

What a load of rubbish!

Headmasters and schools already have the discretion as to whether to allow families to take children out of school for a holiday and it is something that is discouraged wherever possible.

Clearly there are multiple opportnities for parents to arrange holidays outside of school terms and most responsible parents do this whenever they can.

Sometimes though, families simply can't afford the premium rates that are charged by tourist industries during school holidays, and there is quite often a choice of going in term time or not having a holiday at all.

Gove's proposed legislation is just an attempt to grab headlines and make the Tories appear to be tough on improving truancy rates. The truth is that it will have no effect except to take yet more power from schools and centralise it at Westminster.

Why do I say this? I think it's fairly obvious that, while it isn't good for a child's education, going on holiday during term time isn't the same thing as the sort of truancy that creates the social problems that the government say they want to tackle.

Headmasters should be allowed to continue to take individual circumstances into consideration and judge each case on its merits.

Azook!

The Cornish word 'azook' is used by the pilot of a gig when he wants his crew to pull hard together.

It is something that Cornish nationalists need to learn to do.

Today I spent a glorious couple of hours in the company of Claire White of Azook CIC.

"Azook is a UK based not for profit Community Interest Company, dedicated to strengthening cultural confidence and social cohesion across communities." A major part of Azook's work is providing learning resources for schools across Cornwall.

Claire, who was previously a teacher, became frustrated with the way that educational resources seemed to take children away from their Cornish communities in order to learn. She believes that children need to learn about the world in a way that also teaches them about their roots and where they live.

Claire and Azook have developed a unique way of providing learning resources that cover the whole of the national curriculum. Azook is a shining example of traditional Cornish innovation being applied in a modern and forward looking way. Their work is steadily providing a massive online source of resources for teachers. 'A Sense of Place' is "a flagship project in Cornwall delivered by Azook CIC in partnership with Cornwall Council. It enables teachers in primary and secondary settings to deliver the curriculum with distinctiveness and diversity."

Cornwall deserves a network of well-funded, high-quality primary and secondary schools, under
local authority control that all provide a consistently high standard of education. Teachers should be allowed to teach and students to study in ways that ensure that our young people are properly equipped for their adult lives.

The marketisation and fragmentation of the education system through the creation of academies and free schools has to be stopped before it does irreparable damage.

As Public services spokesman for Mebyon Kernow I am helping to develop our policy on education and I hope to be able to follow Azook's example in creating a vision of education that has it's feet set firmly in Cornwall while giving children a chance to embrace the whole world.

The Importance of Teaching - but only what we tell you to teach

In December 2010 the Department for Education released its White Paper – ‘The Importance of Teaching’. Part of the Executive Summary states: “In England, what is needed most of all is decisive action to free our teachers from constraint ……. rather than ceaselessly directing them to follow centralised Government initiatives.” Amongst other things, the White Paper goes on to discuss how the coalition wants to ‘de-bureaucratise’ the system and to get away from schools becoming good at achieving government targets at the expense of being able to do what is best for the pupils

Michael Gove’s method to ‘de-bureaucratise and allow teachers to do what is best for the pupils’ is to constrain teachers in what subjects they can offer children by forcing them to follow a centralised Government initiative – the English Baccalaureate.

The English Baccalaureate will be a new qualification, achieved by obtaining a GSCE grade A to C in English, Maths, a science, a modern language and a humanity.

Schools are going to be caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand the Government is telling them they will be free to teach in a way best suited to accommodate individual pupils’ requirements. However, schools are now going to be judged not on how well they teach the core subjects but also on subjects which some pupils might not even take.

Governors across the country will be facing hard decisions. They may be forced to decide to reduce the range of options available to pupils and insist that they complete subjects that will add up to an English Baccalaureate. Schools where less than 35% gain the new qualification will be placed into special measures and branded as failing.

It will be a brave school indeed that decides to look holistically at individual children’s needs to allow them to take subjects that they are best suited to. The risk for the school is that not enough children will even take all five of the subjects required for the Ebacc and that will mean that, despite generally all round excellent results, the school will be labelled as a failure and be placed in special measures.

The English Baccalaureate also highlights the dichotomy between academic and vocational qualifications. Through this legislation the Government is placing a far greater emphasis on academic qualifications and achievement. However, this means that if the Ebacc takes off then those children who study vocational subjects could be stigmatised because of their ‘lack of academic prowess’.