School to start charging parents £120 if their child is often late
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/school-start-charging-parents-120-32619532
Posted by StGuthlac2025
School to start charging parents £120 if their child is often late
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/school-start-charging-parents-120-32619532
Posted by StGuthlac2025
26 Comments
This will affect single parents as well as parents of children with learning difficulties disproportionally and, frankly, is a totally insane proposal. I also highly doubt it can be enforced.
Either bring your child to school on time or your family can’t eat that week! That’ll show em!
/s obviously
The problem parents won’t pay and trying to drag them to court won’t make any difference.
the reality is that there is a large portion of parents who just don’t give enough of a shitabout their kids being on time and drop them off whenever is convenient for them. this distrupts everyone else and creates a culture where being on time doesn’t matter. Those kids then do the same when they get their minimum wage jobs and simply get asked to not come back after 2 weeks of lateness and lame excuses. everyone is always quick to jump to the edge cases like autism and panic attacks, but the reality is that vast majority of persistent latecomers are NOT edge cases with special needs. They, and their parents just don’t care enough to show up on time. They drop them off when it suits because it’s just daycare in their eyes.
So glad I left the UK not that my kids are often late, but if they are anything like I was when I hit my teens they would bankrupt me. Absolute insanity.
The school/local authority admin must have a lot of time on their hands, I think if the school my wife works at suggested this to the local authority they would be laughed out of the building. They can barely get the persistent absence fines that already exist approved (it has to be issued within 6 months of being submitted so half the time the school sends the paperwork off, the LA sits on it for 6 months and then sends it back saying “sorry this evidence is now out of date so we can’t issue a fine”).
My kids secondary school doesn’t care in the slightest if the kids are on time. You try and reinforce the idea the kids need to be at school in good time for their registration/form class and the teachers say “*it doesn’t matter as long as they’ve themselves know by the end of form class*” so now all the kids time it to arrive just as form class is ending.
Another example of how while living standards decline we get more fines and control
31% of children in the UK are in poverty by the way
Why aren’t you able to just go on a holiday with your kids? As long as you can show you’re hitting the curriculum
Need to stop cutting bus services and transportation links. My landlord sold & our only option was to move to the next town over (rent for a 2 bed flat went from £600pcm to £1000+ very quickly). Within a month the bus service was cut from multiple buses an hour every day of the week to one bus an hour M-F. No buses at the weekend and if the week day school bus was cancelled, tough shit. It was cancelled a lot. No train station and I can’t drive (seizures).
Dedicated school buses, road improvements for the amount of traffic we now have & road works done more efficiently to avoid major traffic clogs.
It seems like a lot of things now are specifically designed for certain people to fail, and fines are *always* the punishment. I wonder why that is.
What about giving the parents £120 a day every time the teachers go on strike?
My personal view is that if you want a state education, then you should be held to the standards of the school, being on time included.
Also, the fine needs a zero adding to it.
i know it’s a little less likely at primary school, but are we seriously going to be fining families because the bus was late once every few weeks?
i was absolutely late multiple times a term because the bus was either way too early and i missed it, or because it was 30 minutes late
Put this in a response to another comment but here for more visibility.
Why are people so against getting to school on time and making excuses for being late?
I have a 9 month old and a 3 year old and managed to get the 3 year on into nursery every day for 8.15am whilst doing the mornings myself. I have to be organised, get up earlier than I’d really like but being on time for preschool is important.
How many people are going to choose to be on benefits instead of working if they apply this rule. £120 is alot of money if someone earns NMW!
I guarantee I know what the outcome will be:
an increase in kids missing the whole day being “ill”
“I know, let’s just punish people who already have problems, to give them more problems, it’s a working solution”
Hope the parents are pedantic and start charging the school if their children are out late.
This will surely help end the cycle of poverty that is the reason many kids are late in the first place.
Yet another reason for me to get sterilised by the sounds of it.
Seems like attendance is the #1 kpi for schools in England. It doesn’t actually matter if the child performs well or not.
The main things appears to be to just get the kid back to school and parent back to work…
My brother’s kid was sick a lot and the school sent him a letter of what qualifies as “too sick to go to school” apparently as long as temperature is below 38.5C the child should go to school.
Government: Let’s encourage more people to have children!
Also Government: Let’s add a brand new cost to childcare!
This comes shortly after the Big Issue reported a poll stating almost half of respondents worried that an unexpected £100 bill would push them into rent or mortgage arrears!
I immediately thought that parents will just keep their kids at home if they are going to be late and call them in as sick so they don’t have to pay a fine so it works in the complete opposite way
Can I start charging them when I’m stood in the rain and they’re 10 minutes late out?
This is already a thing. If they aren’t present for morning registration, it’s marked as an unauthorised absence. 10 of those in a ten-week period (or whatever it is) and it meets the threshold for fines. Or fewer, of course, if they have other absences as well.