So here's the thing, High Court judges ........

A father has won an appeal in the High Court against a fine for taking his children out of school during term time.  Let's forget the chaos caused to education if the 30 parents of children in one class take the children out of school at different times in addition to generous holiday dates.  Let's forget the arrant nonsense of school holidays being  controlled by the old 'harvest time' and remember these are kids and a full year at school is too much for a young mind.  Let's forget the stupidity of assuming that teachers are lazy and want long holidays.  Only the intellectually moribund would not recognise that teachers work far more hours in a week than most of the parents, and are confined to the tourist industries greed in overcharging for school holidays themselves.

For once let's look at the facts.

Children are required by law to attend school 190 days of the year.  Teachers, laughingly, are required to work 195 days of the year which is a nonsense since teachers work through the holidays.

The child had a 90% attendance before being taken out of school, so has attended for 171 days.  Let's be generous and say that the child was only out of school for 5 days to go on the term-time trip.  That means the child's attendance is now 166 days which is 87.368%.  This does not take into account any future genuine absences such as for medical or family bereavement.

In my days as a manager in industry, the schools provided the first employment reference for the school-leaver including attendance record.  Would I employ a school-leaver who only turns up for 87% of the time? No of course not, there are too many available students with a 90-100% attendance record.  Would I employ a school-leaver who has a D in maths because the individual missed the start of new topics all through the school year?  No of course not, there are too many available students with GCSEs at A* to C.

The chaos of politics in education.

The events of today are a real conundrum for me.  I oppose children being taken out of school during the school term, to the extent that I would not strike to prevent a child from accessing education even for one day. However, parents seem to be keeping their children off school today in protest at the upcoming SATs tests and various campaign groups have chipped in with their two penny worth.  My view is that the parents have a point and that SATs are all about political point scoring.  It is alleged by ministers that SATs show progress and improvement.  But in fact, it makes no measurable difference to the individual child.  After all, where is the empirical evidence that an individual child has benefited in any way from being tested at the age of six?

Education Minister Nick Gibb says that tests improve standards.  How? The other Nicky, Morgan, says that raising standards will improve  creativity.  How? The fact is so much pressure is put on schools to produce 'results' and show improvement year after year that teaching creatively is abandoned to teaching to tests.  No wonder children are actually saying that they can't cope.  Even Chris McGivern of the Campaign for Real Education has jumped on the bandwagon by saying that British children are three years behind the Chinese at the age of fifteen.  My question to the Campaign for Real Education is "So what?".

The important question is how British children succeed compared with Chinese students after that time.  We do not produce drones that follow party policy but innovative individuals.  The British have and continue to develop inspiring technological and cultural creativity, as opposed to cloning other people's ideas.

It is the time that teachers be allowed to use their judgement and personal knowledge of the child to determine where that child should be set upon the transition from primary to secondary education, and secondary teachers should be more proactive in moving those children between sets as required.

Perhaps the answer is to get the politicians and think-tanks out of education.