Annoyed at parents thinking missed work can just be sent home

[Macaroni46]

Work in an independent school where term time holidays are sort of tolerated.
Parents asking for work missed due to their essential term time holiday (goodness knows the holidays for pupils are long enough) to be sent home.
Irritates me cos they're wanting their cake and eat it plus they're thinking all I do is set work. No recognition of the fact I teach!! If only all I did was set work!
Child in question is key stage 1 so very much dependent on teacher input.
Head is supportive and saying no but it's made me grumpy

Exactly. It’s not about what they learn but how they learn that makes KS1 interesting.

"when you look at the child emotional well being this well help them just as much as week in education."
Lots of people seem to believe this type of thing. Where is it coming from?

A week or two quality time with parents/family away from usual home life where routine chores and housework are absent. Experiencing something new. Food, culture, language. Heat (!). I would have thought this link to emotional well being was obvious @StealthPolarBear

It may seem obvious but what's he impact of missing school work? Social events? Time with friends? Is there anything to actually back this up?

A week or two quality time with parents/family away from usual home life where routine chores and housework are absent.

But - at the risk of making this circular - that's what the school holidays are for, surely? My kids are at private school and they get 19 weeks of holiday a year (and I think that's pretty standard). I therefore look at it the other way round: they are always on holiday, hence it's particularly important that they are in school when they are supposed to be.

Yes exactly

Yeah it’s all glitter and glue in KS1, the parents could do just as good a job themselves if only they had a worksheet.

(Total respect for KS1 teachers).

State school children have a different holiday schedule and this is when prices to travel away are often over double. So many children who go to state school would have no opportunity to experience this due to cost. I appreciate privately educated children have the opportunity to holiday outside of usual state school dates and therefore taking them out in addition to their long holidays would seem strange. Especially as you're already paying!

I also think that the impact of missing a week at school would need to be based on what stage they are at, the child themselves etc.

Must be so irritating. Its like the people who can afford holiday and then have a go at NHS staff because vaccines aren't free. But back to you op, I'm sure those same parents will be saying in a few years time "I took my kids out of school. Never did them any harm".

Works both ways. Ds is going to onto hospital for a couple of days, then needs 2 weeks of school. When I informed the school they confirmed they can put together 3 weeks work for him. You can imagine how impressed he was!

Thanks for all the replies.
Term time holidays are tolerated because ultimately we don't have any sanctions to say no and the parents are paying the fees so if their child misses school it's their money they're losing.
The absence is for a family party.
If a child is ill for a prolonged period of course we provide work but as some payers have realised, the reason I'm irritated is due to the presumption that I am just a setter of work. I do so much more than that and the actual "work" is often the least significant part of the lesson or learning.
Anyway, the head sorted it saying that the child should enjoy the time off and not worry about catching up and that work wouldn't be set.

Not payers!! Previous posters

Glad that your head sorted it.

In my school when this happens I just send an email saying "we covered 2D shapes, 10x tables etc etc". The parents can sort it out from there. Oddly enough I find that when the workload is put on the parent (as it should be if they've chosen to be away I'm) they don't bother.

Surely all your schemes of work and lesson plans are accessible from the school website via a cloud or VLE? Parents do not need to ask for work to be sent home. Job done.

My gosh. This is one of the most depressing threads I’ve ever read. Just send the worksheet home? Surely it’s all on the VLE? Etc

Do those of you saying that actually teach, or have you strayed into the staffroom by mistake? And if you’re not teachers, is that what you think we do? Just hand out worksheets that could just as easily be accessed online. Wow.

MsJaneAusten I have taught for over 30 years. I thought it would be safe to be sarcastic in 'the staffroom', I also added a so that nobody would take me seriously, but a number of years ago that's what SLT were pushing for, IIRC.

Sorry Elephant - in my outrage at some of the other posts, I missed the sarcasm in yours. As you were...

MsJaneAusten 'It's a truth universally acknowledged' that teachers get tired and cranky at this end of the year. I KNOW I AM. Oh sorry I think that' a different thread.

I don't understand. If you can send work home for a child who is ill, why can't you send the work home for a child who has missed school? I understand that you think there is a lack of moral imperative in the latter, but really, does everyone tell the truth about why they gone away or pulled their child out of school for a week or two. Perhaps it's worth just giving them the benefit of the doubt. Yes, maybe some families will take the piss, but what about the families who don't. I know that when my ds had a very severe suicide attempt and dd took a week off of school, she was not comfortable telling all her teachers (or staff) the reason why and in fact told a few that she had been on holiday. Again, it's not everyone's situation, but I struggled so hard when my dc's were in elementary school, having to battle the teachers who were sure that my son's missed school was entirely my/his lazy fault (and not the 6 week long migraine at 8 years old that it actually was...including one teacher who threw the neurologists letter in the bin) and refused not only to give make up work, but even to give me a list of the topics covered (particularly in math) so that I could make sure that Ds got caught up eventually. Ds has huge holes in his core education because of this.

Ravenwings - I would have been grateful if even one of ds' teachers had given that much information about what he missed.

@SofiaAmes With all due respect this is an entirely different situation

I feel your pain - we have the kids who go home a day or two early because it's more convenient for parents to pick them up then/no later flights, etc.

I always tell them that it is their responsibility to catch up with what they missed from a friend in the set, but they are secondary so slightly different.

It’s not a moral judgment though Sofia. It’s hard to send work home for children who are off through illness too. If it’s a day or so, I would expect them to catch up by reading peers’ notes/making photocopies etc, but if it’s long term sickness I tend to send completely different work home to what is actually taught in my lessons (so a Macbeth work pack or revision guide rather than the detail of my lesson, for example).

I am very sorry about your son though, and I hope he’s much better now.

If parents choose to take their children out of school for a term-time holiday, I'm going to make the assumption that they don't care sufficiently about their education to make it worth my while going out of my way setting work for them (which they probably wouldn't complete anyway).