Education matters

The most dreadful time of the year is upon us. The weather has changed so children and parents are much more susceptible to illness and the end-of-term exams have started. As I said, a truly dreadful time of the year.

The dreadfulness of this combination is often exacerbated by the irresponsibility of some parents who treat school as some kind of health centre and send children to school no matter what their state of health because it inconveniences them so much to stay at home with their offspring. 

Such parents put exam attendance above and beyond the health and wellbeing of their child or anyone else’s for that matter.

So, a scenario for you:

Little Ali in Grade 2 wakes up one morning and vomits. He is pale and tired and obviously just needs to go back to bed and get better. But, and for his parents this is very important, he has an end-of-term English examination and so rather than send him back to bed, they send him to school to sit his exam, besides, staying at home with him would be very inconvenient. 

Ali sits in his class, starts the exam and vomits again, all over his desk, the floor and his exam paper. 

The classroom has to be cleared of children and cleaned, affecting the other children who are sitting the exam.

 Ali, who has walked around breathing his germs and touching door handles and desks and all of the things that all of his classmates will touch throughout the day, goes to the nurse’s clinic where his parents are called. 

Ali doesn’t end up sitting the test but in coming to school has increased the likelihood that his classmates and teachers will catch the virus that has made him ill.

They do.

The next day three children and the school nurse are absent from school because they have been vomiting. 

Ali’s parents care not a jot about this; they are, however, very upset when the school does not allow Ali to resit the exam when he is better because he ‘studied very hard’. They make a big fuss. The head teacher advises the parents that he will be given an average score at the end of year that will go towards his GPA and overall score in English. Presuming that he scores well in his next exams, his GPA will not be affected.  The parents are still not happy but have to concede because one of the parents is not very well and has had to take a few days off work …

At the end of the year the school gives Ali an average mark for his exam as promised. Ali’s overall score is consistent so if he had stayed at home and got better rather than coming to school and spreading his infection, he would have scored exactly the same. The parents are very happy with Ali’s GPA and conveniently forget about all the problems they caused by not acting responsibly in the first place.

This scenario is not as uncommon as it may sound at this time of the year and many teachers and heads find themselves insisting that parents take their children home rather than putting them through an exam when they are sick and potentially affecting other students and sometimes staff. 

When a teacher has to take time off, the knock-on effects for all of the children in the class and for teaching colleagues are enormous yet, very often, teacher absence can be avoided if parents act responsibly in the first place.

Germs and viruses are impossible to stop completely in schools but parents can prevent them causing catastrophic problems by thinking of others and using a little bit of common-sense.