To think 10/11 year olds should be given an actual book?

[DinDjarin]

DD(10)'s homework this week is to read up to page 10 in the book they are reading in class. The teacher has scanned (badly, so there's an inch or two of black around the wonky page) every single page of the book and uploaded it as a pdf on google drive. DD says they don't have a copy of the book in class.

I think they should be reading from a book at this age.

YABU - this is fine
YANBU - they should be given a copy of the book

PS is it even legal to scan and distribute a book like that?

We pay our taxes and funding should be in place. I do not want schools to have to rely on parent volunteers, that’s disgraceful.

we need to sort out the inequality of our country and rebalance things so that public services get the money they need.

The Tories keep employing a feast (well crumbs)/famine approach and it is a disaster.

Welcom to a decade of underfunded schools, OP.

• Welcome!

(They're so underfunded I can't even spell)

*I understand that is is experience that tells you that books will be damaged.
But it is so wrong that 10/11 yos can't be trusted to look after a book properly.

You say you can't charge for educational items - even if a child willfully damages something belonging to the school? That's back to front isn't it, if you are saying schools now can't provide books because if a 10yo fails to look after it they can't be charged for it?*

It's not always the children damaging things and it's not always wilful. Could be a toddler sibling or it gets left at a non-resident parent never to be seen again or at swimming lessons, The book is still damaged however it happens. I've been a teacher since 1997 and I've never come across a school that charged a parent when something was damaged.

Schools do have money. They just don't spend it right.
They keep acting like social support to lazy feckless parents who can't be bothered to care for their own children.

Buy her the book then !.

it is a shame the school cant use an e book/kindle type system, and the students too.
no paper required at all

Who pays for it?

"School spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms between 2009–10 and 2019–20, the largest cut in over 40 years."

"There were over 10.6 million students attending schools in the United Kingdom in 2021/22, compared with 10.5 million in the previous year and 9.65 million in 2010/11"

1 million extra students and a 9% real term funding cut between 2010 - 2022. There is less money and more students. This isn't a mismanagement of funds, this is schools having less and less funding for more and more students.

I do agree that schools should not have to act as social support - perhaps if the social services budget along with the mental health and care in the community budgets weren't also cut, there would be less of a reliance on schools to help children who would previously have been assisted by other organisations.

Exactly!! No bloody money for anything & to be honest, when we do send books home, half of them never come back or get wrecked! The important issue is that the kids READ!

Please don't complain to the school about such a ridiculous non-issue.

We pay our taxes and funding should be in place. I do not want schools to have to rely on parent volunteers, that’s disgraceful.

agree but we aren't at the "schools are fully funded" stage. I agree that teachers are already overstretched so when push comes to shove they have to do what they have to do. Presumably someone scanned the book, it's unfortunate that OP thinks the quality isn't good enough (maybe it is).

As a parent in this situation? I'd offer to scan the book myself if it meant the teacher could do more teaching or just have half an hour off instead of unpaid overtime.

Please don't complain to the school about such a ridiculous non-issue.

if the scan is unreadable it's not a non-issue. If it's just a complaint that it's on google docs instead of being a book? vote appropriately in the next election

there are less people working now, so less taxes being paid!

This isn't the daily mail comments section, dear.

Others have commented with detail on reductions to school funding.

Remember when the Tories come seeking your vote next year. And please vote, don't leave it to others.

The teacher would prefer 30 copies of the book too as it takes so long to scan/photocopy. It's a struggle for me to get the finance manager at school to give me the £7.99 to buy one copy for me to photocopy. In my first few years I bought them with my own money. No way would I ever be allowed to have 30 copies but I can understand why. I had a book club one year with 10 children and I only got half of the books back.

BusyMum47 · Today 10:00

Please don't complain to the school about such a ridiculous non-issue.

Please don’t be rude to a parent who wants their child to have a good education.
It may not be the school’s fault but it is entirely wrong that a parent isn’t supposed to ever complain.

I think a lot of people are missing the point slightly. Of course children should have a proper book to read.

People seem to accept that lots of books wouldn’t be returned/would get damaged if we lent them out. Why are we accepting of that as a society? A child might have an accident or something and the book might not be returnable, but half a class? It’s not acceptable. When something is “free”, a lot of people don’t value it. Perhaps charging for lost books might change this attitude (with exceptions given for genuine reasons). Perhaps a hard copy of a book could be kept, and used, at school by each child.

Aside from that, real term spending on education may have decreased over the last few years, but it’s still far higher than decades ago, but the standard of education is arguably worse. We can’t just keep throwing money at the problem without accountability for how it’s spent. The wastage in the public sector is huge.

Yep. Or go the library and see if they have it.
I can't read properly on a screen, so I have sympathy. And I do think children should "experience" books- eg turning pages and physically feeling it (sad as that sounds!) but if there is no money, there is no money.

Thank you @Another76543 for your very informative comments on levels of spending over the years.
I had in mind the way a teacher's time is consumed 'today' compared with 1960s
Then a teacher's job was to teach and most of the time they did that.
Do remember this issue when we come to the Gen Election. Will Labour use their Magic Money Tree for finance regardless of performance.
Who Will Pay?

Instead of complaining OP could talk to the teacher and tell her it is quite difficult to read some of the text and is there anything she or other parents could do to help.

I'm genuinely interested in this as I have worked in the private and public sector. Genuinely, I can't see what is wasted at my school. After the kids leave, we turn the lights off and walk around in the dark. Many lessons with resources involve me bringing in my children's toys (e.g. When we investigated sound, I brought it a violin, xylophones, recorders etc. We don't have these as a school). We are so short staffed that I have to answer the front door and take deliveries whilst no other adult is in my classroom (the only other adults in the building are also teaching). For school Christmas Dinner, we work through out paid lunch hour, sit and eat with the kids AND ARE CHARGED £3.14 FOR THE PRIVELEGE! The waste is not happening at school level. When I worked for a well known PLC, it was a different world and plenty of waste.

And to be clear to some pps, children do get sent home with physical books for reading at home every week. What we don't have is class sets. As I've already stated, this isn't actually a great issue in the grand scheme of things. Basing all English teaching around the same book for a half term probably isn't actually good practice.

That’s my point. Some of the problems with the education system aren’t necessarily to do with a lack of funding. Of course a teacher should be able to spend most of their time actually teaching. We can’t just throw money at it and expect it to fix the problems.

children do get sent home with physical books for reading at home every week.

Mine don't. They are allowed to take books home from the library if they want to but there is no sending home of books. Never has been. The only must is they must have a book, either from home or from the library, in their desk to read if they finish work early.

I’m not disputing that individual schools don’t have the necessary funding. What I’m saying is that, surely, there needs to be someone asking where the funding is actually going. Since the late 70s/early 80s, real terms education spending has roughly doubled. Is the standard of education children are getting twice as good? I’m not convinced it is.