Following on from the previous post, it is worth noting a recent news item which has revealed that, on average, in England and Wales a parent is sent to jail every two weeks for their child's truancy. There were 10,000 prosecutions in England alone in 2007.

This is all part of New Labour's target, launched in 1998, to cut truancy, which includes pouring millions of pounds, (over £800m), into the initiative, giving the police new powers to drag kids back to school, hefty fines and imprisonment for parents, paging and text messaging of parents, electronic tagging of parents, withdrawal of child benefit for truants' parents, spiked security fences tipped with paint which marks pupils' uniforms if they try to climb in or out, swipecards for pupils, fingertip scanning of pupils, informing travel agents to warn parents of the dangers of term-time holidays, and so on.

Does it work?

In 2008 truancy rates in England reached their highest level since 1997.

If school days are the best days of your life, go and see a psychiatrist!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 8:58 and is filed under Culture/Politics.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.