To think school shouldn’t be charging for this?

[Indella]

Our school has a habit of expecting parental contributions for everything possible but the latest 2 things we’ve had letters about I don’t think falls under what a school can charge for.

The first one is my child has now started the compulsory school swimming lessons. These are part of the curriculum and so can’t be charged for. However parents have to pay £3 per child, per week for the transport to the swimming lessons. Is this not the school’s responsibility to fund as the swimming lessons are compulsory?

The second one is an “art and crafts day”. Letter says children will be spending the day, still in school, doing Christmas themed arts and crafts. They have asked for £12 per child for the materials. This is being held at school, in school hours and is instead of the normal lessons. I legally have to send my child to school so it’s compulsory. Letter doesn’t say voluntary contribution so I assume again we have no choice but to pay but surely the school can do arts and crafts with the children that don’t cost so much. 28 children in the class so £336 of art supplies! Sounds like they are using parents to re-stock supplies for the year.

I know they are not huge amounts but add that to the fact we paid £3 each entry to the school Christmas fair (including having to pay for the accompanying parent) and £10 each for tickets to watch the Christmas performance. Plus the never ending non-uniform days it’s really starting to add up and it feels like the school are simply using parental contributions to fund what should be covered by the school.

AIBU to think these things shouldn’t be charged for?

I think the contribution to the swimming transport is ok.

But the craft day is not ok. £12 is quite a lot!

And £10 for the school play? I live in a pretty affluent area (and therefore particularly underfunded schools) and I don't think any school asked for more than £6 a head.

Paying coach fees is normal, but £10 for a school play seems a lot.

Did they provide the costumes? We paid £2 to attend the play, but I had to provide an Ebeneezer Scrooge outfit which cost more than that.

There are loads of parents who feel the same as you about this OP. The difference is that they refuse to pay. The school charges extra to help make up the difference so in effect you are paying a contribution towards someone else's child.

What should really happen is all the parents refuse to pay and then the government will have to decide whether they want to close schools or fund them properly.

As long as parents like you keep stepping in where the government falls shorts, they will let you continue to pay.

We all understand why schools need extra cash for certain things and I think most parents suck up the cost of transport to swimming etc

But £10 for the play is ridiculous

And £12 for a craft day is actually not even being honest as we all know they won’t use that amount of craft stuff so it’s just a way to get extra for other things

Some parents can easily afford it but many can’t and especially at this time of the year it causes unnecessary stress.
To many parents who have two kids at a school that additional £34 (2xcraft and a set of play tickets) will be the difference between heating or not.

When mine were at primary the school laid out very clearly at the start of the school year how much extra they needed and asked for a contribution of X amount but please pay more if you can at all afford it and don’t pay if you genuinely can’t. It was about £50 iirc.

Even the voluntary ones like the PTA discos can be difficult to avoid if the kids feel left out but at least parents can choose to go to one and make excuses to the kids to avoid the others.

Stuff done during the school day is much harder to opt out of

Sadly school aren’t the only victims of austerity

I think the “joke” is that in affluent areas schools wouldn’t dream of charging parents so much

Our school doesn’t charge for anything - even the PE kit has been provided free of charge for all children for the past two years. We’re in a deprived area and the pupil premium is well over average.

I’d say those schools in more affluent areas are in that ‘squeezed middle’ situation where they can’t fund everything themselves so have to rely on generous parental contributions.

(After school cooking club, swimming lessons - just two examples of what runs in our school that is completely funded. We have to pay £1 per child for end of term parties and Santa’s grotto, stuff like that)

Maybe by asking parents for contributions the problem of underfunding won’t be masked and the parents may vote for a government that will properly fund the education system. If schools and individual teachers keep making up the shortfall there really isn’t much incentive for parents to actually realise that their children are the ones who will suffer as it all becomes totally unsustainable.

@NailsNeedDoing

But the school are deliberately choosing to spend their limited budget on non-essential things and then expecting parents to fund this.

They have chosen to have 7 classes when they only have enough children for 6. Merging the classes would be fine.

They have chosen to have an expensive arts day when the children would have as much fun and learn as much from junk modelling.

They have chosen to hire a coach to take them to swimming lessons and back when they pool is 0.4 miles away and IMO walking distance for year 3 children.

I agree the budget isn’t enough but they are choosing to waste the little they get and expect parents to make up the difference.

We live in a fairly deprived area (by mn standards) and are constantly being asked for donations for xyz. We have teacher gifts to get, ta gifts to get, support staff gifts etc both Xmas and end of year. We have present drives for the local community too. Book fairs, summer and Christmas fairs, movie nights etc

While non of the gift giving is compulsory there is definitely a pressure to contribute and with two dc in the school I’m feeling the pinch, never mind when I have three there.

Oh and despite the economy of the area the school uniform has to be purchased from a special shop too. It’s crazy and don’t get me started on bloody Christmas jumper days

Parents contributing towards coach for swimming is standard round here, for those schools that are not walking distance from the pool anyway.

The rest is for too much though. By all means ask parents for cardboard and other things which could be used for crafts, but £12 is ridiculous!

Can your child swim? If not then it is a necessary activity. At our school however in yr 5 and 6 if you can swim 25m you stay in class and do fun projects. If you can't then you have lessons until you can swim 25m. Once you can swim the place is offered to the next on the list. They walk 20 mins to the pool. It is at the end of the day so parents collect from the pool. The swimming teachers prefer it, said they wished all schools did it that way as they can just focus on teaching them to swim rather than getting Tarquin the county breaststroke champion to stop showing off. Even my dc who experienced both (under different policies) said it was better as they were bored in the mixed classes and each class only went for half a term a year so no one really learnt to swim. We still had to supplement school lessons with private ones.

Sorry but £10 for a school play is a rip off I’ve payed less for a ticket for a show by performing arts students. The arts and crafts day is excessive too. The school won’t have happily gone down this route but until parents take a stand and tell them the voluntary contributions are too much they will continue.
Our school has a high number of children on pupil premium, so parents couldn’t afford those prices and our school understand this. We pay for our ticket for the school play with a donation for the food bank.

£12 for a craft day each??? Wow, yes your dcs are funding the arts and crafts department for quite a few months on that!

Have you considered joining the PTA or becoming a parent governor? If you don't want to pay for the extras - which are indeed endless - you need to start getting the school to raise money in other ways - some schools / heads seem very good at drumming up local sponsorship, or businesses donating to the school, or discretionary funds that the government always seems to have for some things. Others just don't have the same knack. But if it's a decent school, I think you should suck it up; you can ask for a reduction in the contributions if they are too much for you to manage, but having your kids safe and happy and learning is priceless, really.

when my kids were at primary about 15 years ago we had to pay for them to go to swimming lessons. the school then stopped doing them altogether as they said it took too long to get their and back. so i had to organise lessons for my kids myself out of school

Have they got someone coming in to deliver the art/craft day? That would explain the cost.

Schools can charge for brought in services like workshops etc even if in the school day. But it is an optional charge and one you can not make a profit on or charge more to some parents to make up for non payers. School are free to decide to pay any shortfall or cancel the event. It is up to you as the parent to contribute or not.

There's a line at which it just looks like greedy opportunism... 12 quid a head for craft is dreadful.

£10 is too much to watch a Christmas performance. As a TA, myself and other members of staff that I work with, quite often find ourselves funding things that we really shouldn’t be. The school budget is not enough!!

Rubbish for parents but I think it says a lot about the sad state of our education system and how underfunded they are. I’m sure the school wouldn’t ask for contributions unless they were absolutely necessary. My school is currently under funded by £162,578 per year! You can check your local schools Here: schoolcuts.org.uk/

The arts and crafts day and play tickets seem very steep! I'd be pretty shocked if I was charged this! My daughter's play is free and their Christmas craft morning is too. The PTA fund in different ways.

I don't think the argument of not getting Pupil Premium adds up, though. If there were children getting Pupil Premium it would be spent on those children ie. funding their school trips or their craft day. There wouldn't be lots of extra money to spend on general resources. But I agree of course that schools are chronically underfunded.

@isnappedandsharted It basically says sorry were charging for tickets but our classes are too small, we shouldn’t have 7 classes as we only have enough children for 6 but we think 7 is better and so have to fund this ourselves. Then says because they have very few children on free school meals they get less funding than other schools and now all the equipment is old, broken and needs replacing hence they are charging parents to find this.

Really and truely, you are paying for the school to have an extra teacher. They can't charge you for that, so they are recouping the money through a different route.

According to research, nothing makes more difference to learning than the amount of direct contact a child has with a qualified teacher (a main theme of the DISS report). I suppose it's up to you whether you think it's worth coughing up to improve the teacher:pupil ratio.

Maybe they don’t want to have to make a teacher redundant. Maybe there are quite a few children with SN that means merging classes would be difficult.

Tbh, I agree with them that mixed year group classes aren’t ideal, although they aren’t that terrible either. Not sure why you think Y1 and reception would be the classes to merge though, that would be one of the most difficult options!

Honestly, in your position, I’d be glad that they were sticking to single year group classes and would willingly pay for the extras that enable it.

IMO the coach is something the school I’ve to pay for; and having booked one for an event once I couldn’t believe the cost. It would be a huge outlay for them.

£12 is a huge amount for arts and crafts. Even being generous and assuming 24 kids per class, that’s nearly £300. I’m partial to the baker Ross website for playgroup supplies. But even I couldn’t/wouldn’t spend that much. Unless they are getting a professional in to run an activity then that is massively unreasonable.

I do appreciate that schools are underfunded. But excessive arts and craft activities are not a necessity.

*have to pay for

This year our school has had too many in children in Yr2 to run one class but not enough to justify the cost of another teacher to run a second class. So they have merged Yr2 and 3 in order to be paying for 3 teachers instead of 4.

We have not reached the compulsory swimming lesson stage yet, I think they do it Yr4 here, so not got any experience on costs for that. My DD has had a mix of group lessons at the local pool and private lessons, and he dad takes her swimming regularly on a weekend.

We have regular non uniform days costing £1 to raise funds for school or national charity events such as Comic Relief etc.

The only voluntary contributions I have had to make which were unreasonable was £3 for a half term of baking. Over the half term my DD brought home a rich tea biscuit covered in icing and some jelly sweets. The other was £3 for gardening gloves for forest school which would be her own personal gloves. It's been 2 years and I've yet to set eyes on them.

£12 for a craft session: I'd be expecting something spectacular!