Pinch! Punch! as a friend of mine is in the habit of posting on social media at the start of every month. Apparently there is some kind of tradition of saying this and punching the arm of the person you say it to. It’s all about being the first to say it! It all sounds a bit barbaric and unnecessarily violent to me but there it is.
And here we are at the start of September! Already!
The friends who are young enough to still be teaching are back at work today. In some cases their pupils don’t return until Wednesday but for the teachers summer is officially over.
And it’s raining!
I think summer is also over for MPs. Are they back in Westminster today? I am still trying to work out why government needs to close down for the summer. It’s not as if MPs need to dash off to their estates to oversee the harvest these days. Neither is it the case that the world stops turning and everything comes to a standstill. Here is a link to an article by Frances Ryan where she questions the wisdom of letting Nigel Farage set the agenda for the summer. My thoughts exactly!
I read a couple of articles this morning about the inequality of life in this country. One of them discussed the 30 hours of free childcare for children from 9 months old to school age, a benefit to which working parents are entitled. However it seems that because of the need to be working a certain number of hours a week, parents who work shorter hours are not entitled to it and consequently children, usually the ones who are already disadvantaged, will be further disadvantaged from the educational side. Here’s a link to that article.
The other article concerned pupils from low-income families being unable to take certain subjects for GCSE because of extra costs involved. Here’s a link to that article.
School subjects that fall into that category include geography (field trips), modern foreign languages (visits to the country whose language is being studied) music (instrument lessons), food and nutrition, aka home economics (ingredients) and PE (extra kit and equipment).
Oddly enough I managed to study two foreign languages to O-Level (an ancient precursor of today’s GCSE) and A-Level without visiting France until I was in sixth form or Spain until I was at university. My school organised yearly visits to Paris but they were well outside my family’s budget. Shortly before we sat the A-Level examinations, a friend and I managed to organise ourselves to travel to Paris and Normandy to stay with her brother’s French wife’s family. I suspect we spoke more French than we might have done on a school coach trip to Paris.
Similarly I had friends who took Music O-Level without instrument lessons. I suspect A-Level might have been more prohibitive as I later discovered that you really need to be proficient in more than one musical instrument. I can’t really speak for the other subjects mentioned. Certainly PE was not even an option when I was a teenager. Life was a lot simpler then though.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
