What is the importance/significance of 3 weeks of pissing around in Sept for new starters?

[dissle]

I just dont get it, its so stressful.

Week 1: 9.30~10.30 Tues ~Fri

Week 2 8.50~ 11 Mon ~ Fri

Week 3 8.50~ 1.30

week 4 full time.

im absolutely struggling to match work hours up with this and dont understand the benefits as they havent been explained.

Thankyou, another one who agrees that it is "PISSING ABOUT"
Thankyou!!!

Our school lets reception kids do as much or as little as the parents want until the term after he/she is 5. It is bloody marvellous and recognises that parents know their child and what they can cope with best and takes into account that different families will have differing abilities to do part time hours. All they ask is that you keep the hours the same until each half term unless what you've chosen really isn't working. So ds1 did 5 mornings and just 1 afternoon. Ds2 did 5 mornings + lunch and 2 afternoons. Both gradually worked up to full time over the course of two terms and everyone was happy. If I wanted they could have done full time straight away. I would have hated all the chopping and changing of doing different hours on different days/weeks - sounds very unsettling actually.

I agree, too, that it is totally unecessary to inflict this on all children. Whatever happened to 'every child matters'.

My dcs would have beeen thoroughly bored to start school mornings only for several weeks haivng both been at full time nursery.

dd2 goes only till 12pm until half term

then some are selected to stay full time

usually the governors kids

In our school they are split Sept-Feb birthdays and Mar-Aug birthdays. this year the older ones are doing 6 mornings then f/t. the younger ones are doing four afternoons then 5 weeks & a day of mornings (last two days staying over lunch). I can see why they would do afternoons (didn't last year with DS), but DD goes to nursery in the morning and they are taking her over for the afternoon, so hardly easing her in as she'll do four long days first! We are lucky in that DD's nursery is on the school campus and they are going to pick dd up from school for those five weeks, so i can pick her up at her usual time. We didn't even think to ask to do this with DS last year and we were running round like headless chickens for weeks. It is 'pissing about' imo. Roll on 2nd half term!

It is strange that all schools seem to do it differently, and this suggests to me that there is no evidence base for it, which is why the OP was not given any satisfying reasons for the decision. We are lucky in our borough that we still have Sept and Easter starts, which means that the younger children don't have to start school at all until they are a little older. Apart from that they just staggered the start over a couple of weeks, so that the children started in little groups. For once they actually gave us a decent amount of notice of the arrangements, so it wasn't a problem to keep our childcare options going for a couple of extra days. I think that schools in general are very poor at giving reasons why they do things, and very poor at giving sensible periods of notice. I don't know any families (working or not) who are happy with last minute arrangements, and I can't believe it helps with the parent-school relationship.