Is it OK for DS school to finish at 1:15pm on last day of term & require me to pick him up?!

[ChemiseBleu]

I am so pissed off with DS's school. I thought that this year they would stop their nonsense of finishing just after lunch on the last day of each term and registering them in for the afternoon but requiring you to pick them up early.

In previous years they did this on the last day of every term and I assumed that the new "tightening" up of rules re taking DC out of school would mean they wouldn't dare do it this year...

They mention earlier in the year on the calendar a picnic at 12 noon that parents are welcome too and then start gradually drip feeding into the newsletters that you are welcome to take them home after the picnic and then BOOM today - dates for July:

Wednesday 23rd Picnic 12 noon BREAK UP 1:15pm

This means extra time off work for me.

--This from the school who wrote to me before the end of the first half term with a calculation of DS's attendance after he had had 3 days off with a bug (M-W) and then been sent home at lunch time on a F after being sick in his lunch. Considering the attendance was matched against 2 half weeks and about 4 full weeks then yes it did come out at

Our school always have teacher training on what should be the last day of term. Normal finish time on the day before. Ours always finish at normal time no early finishes ever.

Oh, and I really hate the 'school isn't childcare' argument. It's ludicrous to expect parents to have childcare ready and waiting on the off chance that the school will do one of its next-to-no-notice announcements.

This happens here too, completely normal - Scotland, if it makes any difference. Has done, in both primary and secondary, since I was in school...many hundreds of years ago. Only at the start of the summer holidays, not Easter, October or Christmas.

also Scotland and school has always finished at 1pm at the end of term before the summer holidays. Our leavers ceremony/prize giving was on the day before the last day

" It's ludicrous to expect parents to have childcare ready and waiting on the off chance that the school will do one of its next-to-no-notice announcements."

DD's 2 pm finish on the last day, to be fair, has been publcised for the last 15 months (as we get an academic calendar before the end of the previious summerr term, and it has the 2 pm finish on it)

I agree that it is wrong if there is no notice.

I didn't assume that at all. In fact all of those things I would have included under 'lessons' or 'educationally relevant activities'. And all shared experiences that the OP's DS would miss out on if he wasn't in school and the rest of the class were. And it doesn't change the fact that it is not a comparable situation to the entire class not being in school because no-one is missing anything at that point because all educational activities have been planned round it.

The schools I went to finished early at the end of each half term. My senior school used to have random half days each term-one was always on my birthday which was mid term.

DS1s school doesn't have half days but u found this odd!

Yes it is a pain when you are a working parent but sorry I sit in the "school is not childcare" camp.

Although I do agree that the way in which your school have gone about it is unreasonable. Term timetables should be set out clearly well in advance for working parents to organise time off/other arrangements.

The half day of school on the last day before the summer holidays was always great fun, let children have some happy memories of school amid all the box ticking and targets for heavens sake!

"Oh, and I really hate the 'school isn't childcare' argument."

You can hate it all you like, but it isn't childcare. And I'm sure it's fairly standard practice that those schools that close early at end-of-term, would give plenty of notice on their list of dates, so not really a "next-to-no-notice" arrangement.

Coldtea It's not that the OP's school have suddenly sprung this early closure on her. She intimates that it happens regularly, but that she "assumed" that it would stop this year. It's not clear why she should think this though. I presume the picnic notification letter was just a reminder of the times.

I hate the 'school isn't childcare' line too. Your child is in an institutional setting with a number of adults responsible for their welfare. The country would grind to a halt if working parents didn't go off to work with the knowledge that their child is in this setting for a particular number of hours/days/weeks per year, and so they are able to plan their lives around these hours.

We broke up last week and the schools finished between 1030 and 1145am.

Goodness! I think we must all be a bit more relaxed about these things in NI as no-one ever moans about half days at end of terms etc. lots of parents dont send dcs in for the half days and they get marked in anyway. Also nowhere near as much grief over taking DCs out of school for holidays or sickness absence.

I just can't see the point of it. The children are about to have 6 weeks off school, why do they need an extra half day?

"in NI as no-one ever moans about half days at end of terms"

Well, I've rarely come across anyone over here complaining about it either. Only on MN!

Our school finishes at 12.30 every Friday and 12 at the end of term . Kids love it!!

It's not so much the "schools aren't childcare" line, but there are a fair few parents on here particularly, who often complain about schools not considering working parents. With respect to working parents (and remember, a huge proportion of teachers are parents too), that's not their main concern. The priority has to be the direct benefit to the children.

The responsibility is to provide education and look after the welfare of children during that time. NOT to make life more convenient for working parents. If we were to go down that road, all children would be in school from 8 to 6.

Hi, old teacher here. It is all to do with hours not sessions. For example lots of schools do, say, 5 minutes longer each day than the legal minimum for a particular age group. So they can legally finish earlier at the end of term as they have accrued "spare minutes" over the course of a term or a year.

I think schools need to seriously reconsider shutting early, especially given parents would be fined for taking their child out early on a Friday because it's more convenient to leave for a trip a few hours earlier.

You really can't have it both ways. If you're fining parents if their children miss school (and teachers/ HTs are supporting this initiative) it doesn't seem fair to arbitrarily decide yourselves to have a half-day (but one presumes charge the tax payer for the full-day).

I also think that the government is going to have to review what schools who are polling stations do. Our school never has scheduled a teacher training day on an election day - therefore they get their 5 teacher training days + 1 or 2 election days off a year. Again given parents are fined for taking children out of school - I think schools need to review how they use election days - and mandatorily make these teacher training days. Yes, it may mean schools are going to have to be organised and plan training sessions well ahead - but it isn't like elections aren't particularly well signalled.

The hype about schools fining parents has caused an air of pettiness from both sides I feel and understandably so. Bring back the old days when it was pretty normal to have a weeks holiday in term time and no one was bothered by schools shutting early for the summer holidays, it happened and everyone dealt with it.

To me, school is a form of childcare: children are educated and cared for there. Parents are able to work a core number of hours and a core number of weeks in the year without the stress and expense of arranging childcare because their children have to be somewhere else in those hours - school.

If all parents didn't work on the offchance that their child wouldn't be at school that day then we'd be stuffed.

Our primary school finishes at 1:30 at the end of every term and it never occurred to me that it's not normal. Annoying for working parents, yes. But it's only 3 half-days a year, hardly impossible to organise logistically.

my dd's primary school have half days at the end of every term and the last day before every half term (although thats only the first two terms, there is no half term in the summer term), and half days the entire week of the parent teacher interviews (again, those only occur in the first two terms). Also the first two days back to school in the new school year are half days, and the summer holidays are eight weeks long. But the half days never seem to bother anyone - the working parents aren't there for school pick up at 2pm anyway, so getting out at 12.15 makes no difference to them, it just means that granny/childminder/friend picks them up a bit earlier.

DD's primary in Oxfordshire does this at Easter, Summer and Xmas.

Her previous Infant school in Shropshire didn't!