To think that secondary schools should not make children do desk duty

[ReallyTired]

My son's school gets each child to spend a day on the front desk on reception doing errands. They miss a whole day of lessons to do the job that frankly should be done by paid staff. I feel its wrong that parents get fined for taking their children out of school, but schools are allowed to waste children's time doing cr*p.

I would have loved a day off faffing around running errands.
Do the children enjoy it?

If they don't get given work to do for each lesson they are missing, YANBU.
But, it does get recorded as school service in some way IME, and most students would feel they have missed out if they don't get to do it.

My gob is smacked.
How can they possibly justify this ?

I did that in last year at middle school and first year at high school and loved it. I'm surprised they get away with it these days though given the pressure on schools to produce results.

KS3 at my DC's school do this and they gain a huge amount of good, the confidence, organisation and communication skills are very worthwhile. As long as no child does it too often it's a good thing in my opinion.

Ds1 did this in year 6 - manning the phones at lunchtime and running errands - I phoned up that day at lunchtime for a spurious reason to find he was busily pretending it was a takeaway and did I want chips?

So how many days a year does each individual child spend doing desk duty?

I think it's a good scheme.

I agree. I was in a state school last week on a visit and two little Y7 chaps were sitting at reception on duty. They were drinking pop and playfighting with each other as the reception staff dealt with us.

Not good and a complete waste of time. Those people in favour might like them to do loo cleaning next? Or serving lunch? Just think of all the 'skills' they could learn....

I agree! I'm a teacher and get really cross at kids being told to drag themselves in when they're ill but can waste a day or two on this. I take on board what others have said about it being productive and educational in their schools, but in mine, trust me, it isn't.

I did this at secondary school( well over 30 years ago) and my childrens school also did it. We all loved it.

when I was in year 6, many many years ago (early 80s), me and another good mathematician had to collect all the registers in on a Friday afternoon and work out all the % attendances for each pupil and each class, and then, go out of school on our own to post the figures off to county!

I seem to remember thinking of it as an "afternoon off" but looking back, that was lots of work and slave labour!
We both loved having the responsibility. It felt important, not sure our parents were ever asked to consent to the off site bit though! Then again, we did cross country off site, all round the village and rec field, in Y6 too.

Need a like button so I can like Coolas post!

My dd did it once during Year 8. Cannot see a problem with it. Why did Coolas reply warrant a "what a load of old tosh" from fizzy??

Slow typer (and watching tv) Coolas 1st post

fizzymittens what a startlingly arrogant and dismissive response to an obviously well-informed post .

As a teacher, who is in a position of seeing the impact of schemes like this over the long-term, rather than someone who has seen a mere snapshot, I agree with Coolas.

My yr8 DS has just done it for half a day. He enjoyed it as it got him out of lessons for the morning. He missed food tech, so I was pleased as well until he came home and said he still had to make the dish but at home and take s photo in as proof!
I don't know if it is beneficial or not but I don't think missing half a day in ur 8 is going to ruin his whole school career.

It teaches pupils confidence, organisation and they have to talk to teachers in other classes . These are good life skills.

Because I think it is a load of old tosh! I am a teacher and have seen this system used in a couple of the schools I taught in and yes they loved it as they were missing a day's teaching.

Coolas talks about the skills they are learning from doing this 'job' and I was merely pointing out that they could be developing their cleaning or cooking skills too. Why stop at developing their 'office skills'?