Are schools now businesses rather than education establishments?

By : Forum Moderator
Published 19th November 2014 |
Read latest comment - 19th November 2014

My daughter has started reception year at her school and I'm shocked at how much money, time, sweets and other associated things the school have asked for, not including book fairs, cake baking, walking here and there with the kids etc. I have no doubt that this will get worse as time goes on.

Now maybe it's my age but I don't remember it being like that when I was at school and I don't feel I missed out...well maybe not being picked to be an angel... that's another story. If you couldn't afford to go on a trip you didn't go, you stayed at school, you didn't subsidise other kids to go.

I do however feel sorry for the teachers, they are asked to collect the forms for all of this other stuff, the Christmas pudding sale!... I'm not joking.Christmas cards and mugs, sweets as forfeits for things, this confuses me as you seem to pay the forfeit to come dressed up and down. Then we had a book fair which people who went were charged the RRP the school got 60% of the sales! I didn't go , however because parents came and took their children I got it in the neck from my daughter as I didn't take her.

When did school become sooo complicated, when did this change happen?

 

Rant over, thanks for listening!


Angela
My views & opinions are my own
Comments

As a Governor of a local school to me this is one of the biggest bug bears from parents.

Your hand is always in your pocket for one Charity or another - yes there are some serious atrocities in the world but we have our own issues in the UK.

I dont recall my folks paying out all the time either and yep if you didn't want to or couldnt afford the school trip you did extra lessons as Higgers said.

All schools budgets are tight but what really really gets to me is the inequality in the way the devolved formula capital is distributed - why does an inner city school have greater funding than a green leaf suburban Town? ( i believe that an inner city school in Birmingham would get almost double per child to what our kids get in Redditch!)

Schools & the NHS are desperately in need of greater funding - lets stop the Tourist benefits culture and medical tourists, lets stop sending millions of pounds to the latest crisis in the world and concentrate on our own country - lets get Great Britain back to being Great - once we have achieved that then we can start up donating money offshore !


Clive

When I was a kid at school during the 70s we use to collect waste paper / cardboard from the local neighbourhood and flog it to be recycled at the local paper mill. This paid for trips abroad, school mini buses and new sports equipment. The only cost element was for the adults giving up some time to supervise and a bit of space to store the paper. It worked a treat. With everyone having to recycle nowadays into seperate waste bins it would be an absolute doddle collecting waste paper and when mills are paying around nearly £100 per ton of newspapers and around £80 for cardboard there's money to be made.... Although you'd probably need a waste carriers licence nowadays....


Thanks,
Barney

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