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| News · Satire · Spoof · Parody · Humour · Menzies Campbell |
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| You are misplaced along with: Home > News | 11th February |
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Government to extend on-the-spot fines to new areas 3 Oct 2003 by Malcolm Drury Parents caught with a child out of school could face an on-the-spot fine of up to £100 if the recommendations of a government consultation on truancy, which were announced today, are enacted. Under a complex scale, fines would be higher if parents refused to admit that their child's absence was not approved by the school. If a parent agreed the absence was unauthorised and paid within 14 days, the fine would be £25. If, however, the parent did not admit the absence was unauthorised, the fine would be £50 if paid within 14 days, and £100 if paid after 14 but by 28 days. There would be a 20% penalty added to all of these levels on Wednesdays and after 11am on Mondays, unless it were raining, when the penalty would be 50%. In the afternoon of the last Friday of the month there would be a special "two-for-one" deal in which parents caught with two children playing truant would only have to pay the fine for one. Those parents caught with only one truant child would get a credit against the next occurrence. The proposals do not address the penalty for failure to pay within 28 days, but DeadBrain has learned from a usually reliable Home Office source that the government is considering requiring delinquent parents to be chained to school railings dressed up as Teletubbies and forced to listen to recorded speeches by Iain Duncan Smith for a day. "That ought to make them think twice," he said. He also said that the government is considering adapting the proposed system to other areas of anti-social behaviour, including illegal parking, football hooliganism, using mobile phones in public, and being Robin Cook. Thus, for example, a motorist who did not admit to parking in a no-parking zone would be fined at a higher rate than one who did. In addition to the police, a range of other people would be empowered to hand out the fines in their respective areas, including head teachers, parking control officers, FIFA-accredited referees, and local authority officers. According to our source, plans are being drawn up to provide these people with basic training, beginning with the standard opening approach of flexing both legs simultaneously and saying "Now then, now then, what's going on ‘ere?" and including refresher courses in higher mathematics and logic. Performance targets would be established in keeping with the government's policy of setting targets for everything, including the number of targets. Douglas Ramsbottom, head teacher at the Margaret Thatcher Comprehensive School in Bootle, told DeadBrain that teachers are opposed to the proposals. "We have enough to do as it is," he said, "what with monitoring targets, fending off Ofsted and trying to understand this year's A-level rules. Frankly, truancy isn't such a bad thing as it helps keep class sizes down. In fact, if all the kids were here at the same time we probably wouldn't have enough room to accommodate them and we certainly wouldn't meet class size targets. The government is contradicting itself." A similar plan to apply the fines system to absent MPs in key debates has meanwhile been abandoned. A government source told DeadBrain: "If some of our lot didn't turn up over the next few months it would really help us. Besides, with the Tories we have a hard time working out who's there and who's not."
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