“How dressing awesomely can improve attendance and behaviour. With science.”

You got it! Fabulous. ResearchEd?

And of course:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

Or “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.” depending on my mood.

I think it depends on what you’re expecting really. There are lots of privately run (tho often grant funded) community groups that do useful things including running libraries, community facilities, youth clubs, social and mental health support etc.

While this is basically always the case, they do actually have a decent excuse today with lots of flooding going on.

Ooh I’ve seen this one: www.netflix.com/tudum/articl...

Moleskine do one: amzn.eu/d/3pqglOY

Same. The only time a fuss was made involved a school trip, a marriage breakdown and the wife going to the papers. Not saying it was good. But it was completely commonplace and largely unremarked.

Oh and the backstory is she ran away from home at 14.

We watched Northern Exposure again recently. Key characters are two 60yos who had a rivalry over a (now) 18yo beauty queen that one of them married. It’s presented as an offbeat but sweet love story. Prime time 90s TV.

As noted, VPNs have legitimate and in many cases mandatory applications in IT security and everyday corporate life. This whole approach by the govt is painfully technically illiterate and a massive overreach.

Yes, and also as I said in another bit of thread, as soon as things seem like they might get litigious a wall of silence can descend, as 'not saying the wrong thing' feels more important and inhibits building a shared understanding. But a vacuum of information gets filled with fears or expectations.

(Should caveat my 'stages' might be slightly different as different context - but the point is, if you think *any* decisions might need to be challenged as incorrect, then you have to allow all of them to be, because by definition you don't know with certainty which was right in the first place.)

So stage 2 might not progress in the majority of cases but every stage 1 has to have a way of accessing it - it's a binary thing. Otherwise you are saying every single initial decision will be correct and there's no way to challenge that. (I suppose that is also a choice, but it comes with risks.)

I mean that you have to be able to *go to* a stage 2 in order to check that stage 1 was handled correctly, even if you change the reasons why complaints should correctly stop at stage 1, so the majority of those responses are 'no that was right'.

Exactly this. And also, the bit of this that has always felt missing is when physical daily attendance *isn't* currently in the best long term interests of a child - which for various reasons can absolutely be the case - and something outside of school is needed first (or as well as).

But again - there aren't always the routes for parents to do this in an informal way. Or generic advice about escalation assumes those routes have already been tried and failed when in fact they haven't.