School Leaver Gifts Getting Posher?

[shelley bda]

My youngest had his last day of Primary School today, and as well as being given Year Books and a DVD of their leavers performances they were presented with their own 512mb USB Memory Sticks! did anyone else get anything as cool when they left School let alone Primary Education?

[Mithrandir]

Wow. I got nada.

[XA04]

Yeah I got bugger all from primary school and bugger all from secondary school. Nothing free anyway. Got the year photo and that..

[kidzer]

I got nothing when I left, dont really see why anyone would get anything though, but there we go

[mrt9888]

I didn't get anything and we had to pay for the photo.

[XA04]

I didn't get anything and we had to pay for the photo.

Yeah we had to pay for ours.. I can't remember how much it was but it was something stupid. Like £30

[Theo]

We had to pay for an "exclusive" mug when we left our secondary school. Needless to say, I have absolutely no idea where it is.

[this_is_gav]

Up in the North East here, I saw on the news one primary school let their kids leave school in style, in limos.

I printed out class photos for each of our year 8s who are moving up to high school (A4 photos on proper paper for free, mrt) and we've already given them photos from the prom we had last Friday.

[DR]

Just another thing for taxes and school's to waste resources on - shocking really shouldn't they buy more stuff for the school to use long term?

[this_is_gav]

The thing is, like in all areas of the public sector, you get allocated a certain budget. You don't know how much of that you'll need until you get to the point where the next lot comes along, and you can't roll it over. If you've nothing else to spend it on (trust me, some schools are just swimming in resources), then you might as well give the kids something to aim for.

Which leads me on to my next point. Most schools have a rewards programme centred around producing work on time and good behaviour. Those who match it are given some form of bonus (at our school it was the prom, discos each half term, and end-of-term 'extravaganzas'.

It's all good and well spending money on pencils and paper, but you sometimes need to give certain kids the motivation to use them too.

This isn't me saying I agree with it - our place has had so much bonus money and grants pumped into it it's unreal. We got to the point where we've just replaced our main server with a £3,000 HP (despite there being nothing wrong with the existing one) and all the year 8s were given PDAs last year. This in a school with 135 kids. The county council just keep on giving us money.

[shelley bda]

The thing is, like in all areas of the public sector, you get allocated a certain budget. You don't know how much of that you'll need until you get to the point where the next lot comes along, and you can't roll it over. If you've nothing else to spend it on (trust me, some schools are just swimming in resources), then you might as well give the kids something to aim for.

Which leads me on to my next point. Most schools have a rewards programme centred around producing work on time and good behaviour. Those who match it are given some form of bonus (at our school it was the prom, discos each half term, and end-of-term 'extravaganzas'.

They did this at his School, they had their Prom last week, the Kids organised it and the School gave them £100 to spend, they managed to blag a disco and Parents donated snacks and balloons....

They also had a Leavers trip to Camelot adventure park, which the Kids had to fundraise for by having stalls at break times with games, PS2 tournaments, sweets and things they made to sell, they managed to raise £300 and their Headmaster donated another £300 out of his own pocket for them, a brilliant idea I think because the Kids learn the value of money and get to realise that if you work hard enough, you get rewarded.

I don't know how it works at your end with funding and things but the Pre-School I work at if we don't spend all the funding we get then we have to give the unspent back, so I assume that this is the Primary Schools way of making sure it's all spent? I know they had funding recently to replace the Laptops in the School, so maybe they bought the memory sticks with the left over budget I don't know.

At least it's something the Kids can use in School ( though his new School uses digitalbrain, which means he can save his work at School and access it at home ) my Eldest got given a Bible and a Dictionary when he left Primary and both have never been opened.

[MadduckUK]

512MB sticks are worth so little nowadays, probably less than a bible or dictionary.

[this_is_gav]

I don't know how it works at your end with funding and things but the Pre-School I work at if we don't spend all the funding we get then we have to give the unspent back, so I assume that this is the Primary Schools way of making sure it's all spent?

Yep, same in this LEA. If you don't use up any part of you budget, it all vanishes back to the county council.

Ironically, up here, every spare penny they have now is going into converting our current 3-tier (first > middle > high school) into a 2-tier one (primary > secondary). They don't have the money to do it as government grant applications have been refused, so they're scraping every last penny they can, cutting back all funding and not only from education. Our already poor road systems are now facing having even less money pumped into them.

[ACiD303]

This reminds me of the scheme used in some secondary schools in Scotland (I think it was Glasgow) where the schools reward children for eating healthily with points. They can then redeem these points for cinema tickets, xboxes, iPods etc. - I wish I had something like that when I was at school!

We had to pay for our end of year photo, I didn't even give my mum the option of buying it, more waste of money.

[roorooroo]

Lol..i got absolutely nothing...more important thing is I never expected anything either!

[Vroomparrot]

i left wiv nuthin but a edukashun!

The comments on budgets are interesting. It is very similar in the University where I work - infact if you don't spend all your budget you are liable to have less allocated for the next financial year. This has always seemed very inflexible to me and is something that as a tax payer annoys me. It's also the same with any grants from external sources you may have got. We got a very large sum of money from HEFCE (tax payers money again) but this had a timelimit within which to spend it. Some of this money was for new MSc computing facilities so we kitted out an entire new room with high end pc's last year only to replace them this year! They would not let us spend this money in say another 3 years which would have made more sense. So after replacing staff pc's with last years 'new' pc's we are giving away P4 systems to other departments and in some cases even scrapping relatively good office pc's!