Aotearoa / New Zealand

Oh good, another "crackdown" on {insert vulnerable segment of society here}

Heaven forbid we "crackdown" on the root causes of that vulnerability.

Hate is probably too strong a word, but man do I intensely dislike David Seymour.

Him and his ilk were probably calling the Labour government a nanny state - they seem to really love regulation now though

There is also the growing awareness, that you shouldn't send sick kids to school.

My 8yo had a flu, was off school for 8 days until he felt well enough. That was one incident....if you have a one bad sickness and a couple of minor ones throughout the term, you are going to hit your 15 days pretty quickly.

He actually went back to school a day earlier than I would have liked, because he was missing his friends; and he was mostly better.

Some families are sending their sick kids to school; they simply cannot afford to miss work. This causes issues for others. This happens every year, worst in winter.

Maybe if we encouraged kids to be at school, making it easy to get there and feeding the ones who don't have enough food....supporting the families in need. Na, lets just punish our way out of the problems. NB the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Also see this previous article from May about attendance. Snippets:

[regarding attendance] The rates have dropped precipitously in the years since Covid-19, following years of a much gentler, but still steady, decline.

But although New Zealand's overall rates are worse than countries with similar education systems, they fit a universal pattern of falling attendance in classrooms around the world.

[school principal talking about attendance support programme they have] But where the government has given with one hand, it's taken with the other.

"The other thing that helped us get kids to school was the free transport for under-12s and, of course, that's gone," she says.

"I'm not being political, but if we're cutting funding to things that get our students to school to save money for tax benefits, for our families who are really struggling with poverty, I'm sure that the tax benefit they're going to get is not going to equal what they would have to pay for transport and lunch."

The dumbest thing about changing teacher only days, is they are not counted in then mandatory number of days a school is open for. All this change will do is make them close earlier, so the kids will still be off school and parents will still need to make arrangements.

It's fucking stupid.