Thursday 26 March 2009

"Being DEAD is NO EXCUSE for truancy", parents of 15 year old are told.

Being dead is apparently not a good enough reason not to be in school.

by johnofgwent

Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh, cry, or reach for a shovel.

We all know how Tony "Trust Me, Things Can Only Get Better" Blair couldn't resist pissing around with Education, Education, Education. Targets. SATS. Tables. Statistics. Reports. Inspections. Fingerprint scannners on the doors. CCTV covering every square yard. And so many IT systems dedicated to pointless number crunching it would take a whole herd of rogue elephants to piss on the uninterruptible power supplies sufficiently to shut them down.

And those IT systems work so well together, seamlessly crunching those details, right ? Well as GA and I and a good few others can tell you, thanks to over a decade of giving the work to outsourcers who know nothing of how we do things, nothing could be further from the truth. But this you know anyway.

Well I've come across a wonderful little tale of "joined up IT systems for joined up government". NOT. Read the details here but be ready to spit blood and teeth.

It would appear that two months ago a 15 year old girl was found dead in the bedroom of her Macclesfield, Cheshire, home by her parents. And just as her mother was pulling herself back together to go back to work, they received a letter from the High School she attended, threatening to ban her from the end of term prom dance because her school attendance to date was only 60.4% and the school's contract with parents requires a 92% attendance.

The girl's mother is quoted on the BBC News page reporting this as feeling that she would like to take her daughter's remains to the school and ask where they would like them to be put. I confess if I were in the same position there would indeed be a muddy coffin resting in the smashed window glass of the school's front doors for the headmaster to find.

The BBC news website goes on to quote a spokesman for "Capita Software SIMS (School Information Management Systems)" apologising that Megan's details were removed from two databases the school maintained, but not a third, which was the reason for thie "unfortunate" incident.

I'm speechless. I really am. I'm stopping this now, except ito say if it were down to me, the apology would be a remake of the one made to Darth Vader.