More than 120,000 school pupils in England were reported as persistently absent during the last school year, with Covid and other illnesses the biggest contributors to soaring classroom absence rates compared with pre-pandemic years. Analysis of attendance rates at more than 7,000 state schools in England has found that 14 and 15 year-olds – pupils in years 9 (the year I am in) and 10 – have been worst affected, closely followed by those in year 11.
A sharp drop in school attendance should concern us all. Going to school is directly linked to improved exam performance which in turn leads to further learning opportunities and better job prospects. Going to school helps young people to develop social skills, friendships, cooperative working, career pathways and life skills.
It comes after two years of on and off unnecessary and enforced absence. Even one of the architects of the school closures in Scotland, Dr. Jason Leitch, now admits this may have been a mistake.
Schools temporarily closed in March 2020 and did not reopen fully until April 2021, which led to over a year’s worth of sub-standard education for many pupils. Despite the best efforts of teachers, online learning was especially damaging for children from poorer backgrounds. I was a school student during this time and the closures and disruptions had a huge impact on my learning, which I have already written about in the Daily Sceptic. I was in Year 6 when this started. My SATs were just around the corner, which would determine my attainment level for secondary education, and I was not able to sit them. Instead, I had to sit at home reflecting on how pointless all the revision I had put in was.
When the schools reopened properly, I was starting secondary school and I was initially placed in a class that was well below my abilities. If the schools had not closed and the exams ben cancelled, I would have been placed in the correct class to get the education that I needed. Now in year 9, two years later, I have finally been put in the right group; however, due to being wrongly placed in the previous years, I have knowledge gaps relative to some of my classmates, and I am not the only one.
Our education was further affected by all the regulations that we now know were unnecessary. For example, if somebody in a classroom – which were referred to as ’bubbles’ – tested positive for Covid, the whole class had to evacuate the building and self-isolate for 14 days. There were over 20 pupils in a class and if one person tested positive for Covid, the chances were that many of the other students would test positive. This meant that when we returned from the first two weeks of isolation, we would have to immediately return home for another two weeks. We did have online lessons, but they were a poor substitute for classroom education. Finding out that Matt Hancock rejected advice to cut self-isolation to five days instead of 14 simply to avoid being viewed as having made a mistake was galling. Rather than preventing children from missing school and family members from seeing each other, he wanted to save face and avoid staining his reputation.
Another rule that had a profound impact on my and my classmates’ education when we were permitted to attend school was mask-wearing – enforced even when walking in corridors. Any pupils who failed to meet the expectations were punished and put in isolation where they spent many hours doing nothing. It turns out that the mask mandate in schools was nothing to do with evidence that they worked. Partly, the education trade unions insisted, but also the Westminster Government did not want to be out of step with Scotland where Nicola Sturgeon had imposed them in schools.
People are saying that we are back to normal in schools now; however, we are a long way from it. Pupils use Covid as an excuse to be off school, even though you can still attend if you have it, and many have become accustomed to missing school and staying at home, as shown by the figures quoted above. This is what is really happening, and I hope nothing like it will ever happen again.
Jack Watson is a 14 year-old Hull City fan. You can subscribe to his Substack newsletter, Ten Foot Tigers, here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Well at least one good thing may come out of this – Torode may realise that the BBC is our enemy. I suppose others following this story may also come to this realization.
Here is a tip. Turn off ALL msm, stop reading msm, stop listening to it on the radio. It serves NO PURPOSE. Your welcome.
Yes I have little contact with it these days.
Already done.
Screw the BBC. It pains me to say it, I was brought up on BBC Radio 4, but I’ll say it again – screw the BBC, it’s rotten through and through, a basket case, a government mouthpiece.
I’m off to listen to a recording of a BBC Radio 4 drama I made on cassette tape in the early 1990s, when the BBC did good radio drama. Death and The Dancing Footman, by Ngaio Marsh. This was from a time when the drama was of excellent quality, and when the plays were chosen because they were excellent, not because they were written by a woman, or a man, or by someone from an ethnic minority, or someone who has decided they identify as a cauliflower.
Downvoter is Tim Davie, I presume… Because I recorded a live broadcast 🤣
My son was in a similar position to Torode. He was in the passenger seat of his pal’s car. His friend was playing some rap song which my son knew to which they were both enthusiastically singing along. He also knew that the ‘n’ word was coming up.
The friend is mixed race, so he’s allowed to sing along, my son isn’t so isn’t.
He was in a dilemma, what to do? In the end he mumbled. Nothing was said, it’s never been mentioned.
Now my question. Megan Markle, what, 1/16th black, can she sing along? Ros Barkley, maybe 1/32nd black, can he sing along? Cole Palmer, about 1/64th black, what about him?
The % is probably meaningless in those cases.
Apparently we all come from Africa, so therefore we’re all entitled to say nigger.
Can Australians still call us Limeys?
I thought that was the Yanks who called us Limeys (Limies)? Aussies call us Poms… When they’re trying not to offend.
That was Septics calling us Limeys, not Diggers and Bazzas.
We used to do this rhyme when we were kids ( just one of many, such as ”One potato, two potato, three potato, four” ) to see who would be ‘on’ in a game like ‘Hide and seek’. But instead of ending in ‘a’, we’d say ”Eeny, meeny, miny…” I’d imagine kids don’t do this in playgrounds anymore. Can you imagine the teachers’ reaction if they did? lol;
”Eena, meena, mina, mo,
Catch a nigger by his toe;
If he squeals let him go,
Eena, meena, mina, mo.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe
We had that too and of course as innocent kids who’d never seen black people obviously no offence was intended.
And even now against black people I hold not the slightest animus, only Pakistanis and others who seek to destroy our civilization.
“… who’d never seen black people…”
True.
The non-white population in the UK in the 1950s was likely around 0.1% to 0.4% of the total population, with figures often cited as 20,000 to 30,000 non-white residents out of a population of approximately 50 million.
Which raises the question, given that Blacks and others of a similar hue, were as scarce as hens’ teeth in yonder days, how much “racism” was there that required a Race Relations Act in 1965?
Where was all this “racism” happening when over 99% of the population never encountered Blacks/Browns except on documentaries by Armand and Michaela Denis and the Attenborough person before he’d gone nuts?
The truth is the nationalised industries and “our” NHS needed cheap labour imported from “the Commonwealth” and the indigenous labour didn’t like this as it took their jobs and pulled wage levels down.
In the days of powerful unions and closed shops, denying “cheap labour” union cards prevented them getting jobs. Racism! So that’s what the first Act was about, preventing discriminating against cheap labour on the grounds of race. Nothing to do with the situation generally in society.
So-called race-relations legislation, and jibber-jabber then and since, has always been about protecting and projecting Government aims and ideology.
I recommend The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which should be compulsory reading. Although they’re littered with the ‘N word’ (I’m bizarrely afraid to be more specific) there is clear contempt for racism in the writing. Before ‘they’ Bowdlerise them you can still get the raw text at the Project Gutenberg site.
They still use it… the word ‘Tigger’ generally being substituted.
In my universe it was “Eenie, meenie, minie, mo… etc.
My ancestors built stonehenge therefore they must have been black therefore I am entitled to refer to them as niggers.
Anyone who listens to, sings along with, crap music needs psychiatric help.
Why are we censoring the actual words here?
I’ve never been to a karaoke evening but my understanding is that the words are on a screen. If a word appears you sing along – no? So the venue was encouaging this as it included the song on it’s roster. Who is more to blame?
The N word. What babies we have become.
Exactly. How ridiculous that there is a taboo word that has the power of forcing somebody out of a job.
But then again, a materialistic, atheist culture will invariably invent some weird substitute-religion (often a personality cult, but currently wokism performs that function), which will model itself on established religions but in a grotesque, corrupted, absurd form.
This will include sacred words (multiculturalism, diversity).
Miracles: a man changing gender, Big Bang (=something out of nothing),
Taboos: the N word.
Etc.
The only problem is that as it lacks divine power, the whole thing collapses sooner or later.
Louis CK does a nice skit on the cowardice involved in using ‘the N-word’, instead of the word itself, as it forces the listener to translate the meaning in their own head, whilst maintaining the moral superiority of not having used it yourself.
In yet another police diversity training many years ago, the trainer was as Left as you could get, and gay to boot. He was white, but ticked the rest of the Progressive Left boxes.
He was talking about words such as ‘nigger’, which everyone, including myself, accepted had often been used as a racial slur and so was falling out of use…
…except by black people. His said it was okay for black people to use the word.
Perhaps bravely, perhaps foolishly given how piss-curdlingly politically correct the police had become even by that time (this is around 2003), I asked why it was okay for some sections of society to use certain words and not for other sections of society. I remember exactly his answer; he said “It’s about ownership of the word.”
I came back with “How can people offended by such words complain that such words are still in use when *they themselves* continue to use such words. Surely, if they want others to stop using racial slurs, they should stop using them themselves. In any case, no one ‘owns’ words. If a word is part of language, then everyone ‘owns’ the word, and no one has the right to tell others that they cannot use a word that they themselves use.”
This Lefty simply repeated his ‘ownership’ mantra.
I was a sergeant at the time. I retired as a sergeant 16 years later. I’m not surprised I never got higher than that rank, because I wasn’t of the mindset that they wanted. In other words; I could think for myself.
It really is peak absurdity. If a black person says it, that’s fine because of the context. If a white person says it, strong men weep, and there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth, regardless of context.
Torode needs to join the Free Speech Union. He’d walk it with this absurd, Clown World garbage he’s accused of. But has it been explained yet, why seven years later??? 😮
Maybe someone the complainant knew wants his job
I do wonder if John Torode’s face no longer fitted so the powers that be at the BBC scratched around for a sackable reason.
In the early 1950s when my pals in the street were playing football, the lad who provided the ball (there weren’t many around at that time) picked the teams. We were in our early teens. One of our pals was a young lad from the local Barnardos home who was called Brian. He was the best footballer and was always picked first. He happened to be a black boy – the only one in our area – and we called him Blackie. it was an innocent name simply because he was black. No other motive and certainly not disparaging (One lad was called piecrust because he always came out of his house eating a piece of piecrust). We were a happy bunch. But, oh dear, if we said it now, we would be condemned by those self-appointed guardians of public decency for a (supposed) crime that never entered our minds. It is these people who have a problem, not most of us who never give a thought to any ulterior motive. It is these people who are poisoning the public arena with their holier-than-thou pontificating. Who was it who said that those who scream loudly about racism are the biggest racists because it is always at the front of their minds. The rest of us are just getting on with our lives.
As for the BBC, If Mr Davie really is concerned about abusive language, I suggest that he tunes in to Radio 4 after 11pm when a number of programmes through the week feature so-called comedians. The foul language and persistent use of the F word (another word that dare not speak its name) is littered like confetti throughout their half hour slot. Another listener lost. I doubt if I will be renewing my licence.
Beautifully put.
It’s an interesting point, when comedy was by today’s standards dark and insulting to whoever wants to be offended on the day swearing was frowned upon. Today the reverse is true, comedy is not much better than getting laughs by using the f word. Pornography, sexual crimes, theft is now the order of the day. This is deemed progress. I’ve downloaded Benny Hill and Dick Emery, it seems quite tame compared to the rubbish of today and it is really really funny, download it and you can sit in a darkened room in the basement out of earshot of the neighbours huddled around the tv like a criminal and it will be even funnier. Then the next time you are out and about smile inwardly and savour the pleasure and memories of the day when the country was a fantastic place to be. Leave the miserable activists to be miserable and stop letting them screw up your day, they will shrink and disappear.
So true.
Spike Milligan as Paki Paddy in ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ still cracks me up, I’m amazed it’s still viewable and that the miserabilists haven’t shut it down yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p_U8RNFce0
Try some of Spike’s Q series… both hilariously chaotic and jaw-droppingly inappropriate by today’s mores!
I’ve made it a point to collect as much as possible. I’m so distrustful of the corrupt systems we live under that ii keep them in various places as backup. Call me paranoid but I mix with people who have been subjected to tyrannical rule and everyone should be worried.
There was a pub in Newcastle upon Tyne that was called the Blackie Boy. It was named after the blacksmiths who used to have the premises and the name had been there for well over a hundred years. The name had survived two world wars and at least 6 monarchs but the pub was updated a few years ago and the owners decided to change the name in case any customer was offended. They renamed it Swarleys. In more than 100 years no one had ever complained but in today’s world we all have to be aware that some poor sensitive soul might take offence so history and common sense goes in the bin. The simple answer, should anyone walking past or entering the premises recoil in horror at such a name, would have been to put a plaque outside the entrance giving a potted account of its history. But no, despite the outpouring of protests from the regulars, the name had to go. I have not been in since.
I used to say of something done poorly or amateurishly or incompetently, that it was put together by ‘some monkeys’. I often said “Which monkey did this?”
One day someone said to me, you need to be careful saying that because it sounds racist, even though they knew and it was *obvious* I metaphorically meant monkeys.
So, who was the one with the issue – was it me who was referring to the literal chaos a monkey would cause, or anyone complaining about me saying ‘monkey’ who, on hearing the word ‘monkey’ immediately thinks ‘black person’..??
The guy sang a Kanye west song and got fired. Dear god something is seriously wrong in the United Kingdom of hell. In polite company you would not use the word nig…
However I notice the word is used quite often on social media by black people calling each other nig…
life has gotten so screwy (am I allowed to use that word?) one does wonder how much longer mankind will be in existence🤬🤬🤬🤬
There is no such thing as a “racial slur” just words – a growing list- that some people declare taboo to use as weapons against others in their ideological wars.