Perhaps in a proactive move to head off mounting consumer resistance to the implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence, Edinburgh City Council is taking draconian action against parents of serial truants.
Three sets of parents are up before Justice of the Peace beaks for failing to ensure their offspring enjoy the best days of their lives. If found guilty of begetting school-refuseniks, The Edinburgh Three face a fine of up to £1,000 or an extended minibreak at one of the more functional properties in Her Majesty’s property portfolio.
Many will find it heavy irony that Edinburgh council is throwing the book at people who are, in all probability, functionally illiterate. In my experience, kids who steadfastly absent themselves from school tend to come from households where a half-term skiing holiday to Val D’Isere is not the norm. The less than artful school dodgers are often the children of mums and dads who harbour bitter memories of school life.
Sticking feckless parents in the pokey reeks of rough justice and is ultimately counterproductive. If a single mum is locked up in Cornton Vale, her child will need to be fostered or taken into care. Okay, it’s only speculation but my best guess is that a kid whose mother is banged up in Scotland’s version of Cell Block H may not be fully focused on his school studies.
Of course, if these uneducated parents possessed an ounce of common sense they could avoid jail time by claiming they were home schooling their children. For the ruse to be successful, father would have to grow a Salvador Dali-like moustache and mum would have to become a fervent adherent of a New Age religion; announcing to the school board that “All meat is murder!” is usually enough to clinch the right to home school.
Thankfully, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council agrees it is wrong to punish the father for the sins of his Huck Finn child. It calls for better support systems to assist families but, given the dire financial state of local government, this is as likely as Michelle Mone taking a vow of silence. Today, most councils have dispensed with attendance officers, that army of unsmiling men and women who, in terms of parental popularity, sat neatly between the nit nurse and the janitor with heightened anger management issues. The officers zealously patrolled a school’s catchment area on the lookout for boys and girls to drag back to school. Armed with intelligence gathered from teacher snitches, these unsung heroes would also swoop on the homes of those who dared to challenge the authority of the state by bunking off school. In rundown housing schemes, a loud knock on the door heralding a dawn raid by the TV licensing people was greeted with great relief by quivering parents, thankful they were not being doorstepped by the Attendance Gestapo.
Edinburgh’s overly robust reaction to school-phobic children is in stark contrast to the attitude of the Children’s Hearing system. I’ve heard from guidance teachers – and even serving panel members – that due to the overwhelming caseload, a blind eye is turned to persistent truants in S3 and S4 providing they are not offending in the community. This is an understandable pragmatic response to the fact that the child is making the choice not to attend and that he/she is frequently outwith parental control.
The attempts by other local authorities to go down the legal route have resulted in the kind of “progress” one normally associates with the Scotland football team. For example, of the 74 parents taken to court by North Lanarkshire Council, only three have been convicted. One can make an argument that an unsuccessful prosecution rate of 96 per cent is in the public interest as it helps to alleviate the penury of lawyers but I would suggest that initiating criminal proceedings is perhaps not the optimum use of taxpayers’ money.
Rather than whack the vulnerable with a large stick, some schools have offered big carrots, such as granting kids the opportunity to drop so-called core subjects (such as maths) and replace them with courses of their choice (for example, extra periods of PE, art, drama or conversational Spanish). Many forward-thinking schools now liaise closely with local colleges to offer potentially disaffected teenagers the possibility of vocational training.
In my opinion, it requires a stretch of the imagination to think that imprisoning parents is an appropriate solution to prolonged pupil absence.