Sweet (and sour)

Sweets first - been and done some Christmas shopping tonight (after doing a significant proportion of it online this afternoon). Went to a local Garden Centre which does all sorts of other stuff - has a fabulous food hall where you can get all sorts of magical stuff (some of which I cannot possibly tell, because its for my Dads Christmas present and he reads this journal - can't give the game away! Sorry Dad!). They also do bags of proper sweeties which had to be my blip tonight.

I've treated the photo to the misty eyed, rose tint as a nod to a sense of nostalgia - as these little babies reminded me of trekking down to our local post office on a Saturday morning after getting pocket money, and buying 2 ounces of Sherbert lemons, 2 ounces of cherry lips and a copy of the Beano. Days long gone, but remembered fondly.

Sour next - this is a rant coming on - grab a coffee and brace yourselves!

I have had to stay at home today - not because the weather was bad near me, but because a significant proportion of our staff live in areas where they DID get a lot of snow overnight and therefore driving to school was not possible or was going to be extremely treacherous. Unlike a number of schools, we didn't make this decision until this morning. But, like all schools, it was not a decision that was taken lightly. We know we have a job to do, but we do have to make appropriate decisions for both the kids AND the staff too.

So imagine my dismay when watching our local TV channel (on the BBC - supposedly UNBIASED) who focussed a significant proportion of their news coverage this evening on the closure of 200 schools in the Northwest due to the bad weather. Questions such as "Why did the schools close when the weather wasn't that bad?" were posed. Fair question initially - if you give the headteachers a chance to respond. But in the quest for fairness, lets not bother asking the people who run the schools and teach the kids, lets ask....

the parents....

and which parents did they choose to ask. Well if I quote one of the comments made to camera then you might get an idea

"They should have made the decision this morning because I have wasted my day having to look after my kids" Bloody hell - how inconvenient to have to look after YOUR OWN CHILDREN FOR A DAY

Other gems went along the lines of
"When I were a lad, we used to trudge for miles in a foot of snow to get to school." Aye, and when you were a lad, the teachers probably lived local to the school and also trudged in with you on foot.


Aha

I get it.

We haven't had a pop at teachers in at least a week - so lets do it now.

So for those of you who might still be interested, let me cite the case for the defence.

On Tuesday morning, there was serious chaos in the Northwest following a mere 2 inches of snow falling. The chaos was largely due to a number of roads not being adequately treated and so places like our school were completely inaccessible due to cars being dumped (you could try of course, after you had sat in traffic for 2 hours and if you really wanted to try kamikaze car ice skating - a risk personally I am glad I didn't have to take).

Our school, like many others, had to close on Tuesday, partly because routes in were inaccessible, but also because many staff simply couldn't get off their own driveways or out of their estates because of the snow. Somewhat bizarrely, many teachers now choose to drive in from miles away from the schools that they work at - a significant proportion of our teachers are not local but drive an hour each way to school every day - perhaps a reflection that teachers are no longer the respected citizens within the community that they were "back in the day" and so choose not to take the risk of kids and parents being less than pleasant when they see them locally. Cynical. Moi. Nooooooooooooo!

So, on Wednesday, many schools were told to close by their local authorities. Our local authority sent out copies of the Met Office severe weather reports to schools that predicted originally a 60% chance of the severe snow/weather, and as the day progressed, this increased to an 80% chance. We established a 'point of contact' process for if the decision needed to be made.

But what people seem to have misunderstood about the closures is this - it wasn't necessarily to do with the conditions of the weather and the roads in the immediate vicinity of the schools - it was to do with whether the teachers and support staff could get there - because without them, we cannot provide the 'babysitting' duties that clearly so many people expect us to provide. And to be fair, not even the best teachers can baby sit 600 kids for 6 hours if theres only 10 staff there!

Additionally, to turn this on its head - had we not planned, and it had turned pear shaped, and we had sent children home from the closed gates at 9 in the morning, after parents had left for work (in some cases) then we still would have been the bad guys - "you knew about the weather reports, why didn't you make the decision earlier" - and potentially we would have put many thousands of children across the Northwest of England at risk by them not being able to get into their homes etc etc.

Oh, I could go on and on. Oh, indeed, I have already.

We need a reality check here - the teachers were not the bad guys in all of this. And neither were the weather forecasters either - it just happened that bizarrely, the weather affected some, and not others - and maybe some people just need to see the bigger picture and have some respect for the decisions that people make - because, hand on heart, the decisions were made for the right reasons - not just so that teachers could have a day off (and yes, some of us did spend the day working at home!)

Sorry - I love my job and I get pig sick when teachers are hung out to dry in the media. Particularly by biased reporting and parents who see their own children as a downright inconvenience.

Just rude.