Letters - Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Schools need to show some tolerance too
Getting back to schoolGetting back to school
Getting back to school

Our children are back in school after the most challenging year. It was patience and tolerance, among other things, that got us through.

A lot of pupils are now in senior school, completely different to the schools they left. The transfer hasn’t been smooth for everyone.

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Parents evenings often didn’t happen, advance reconnoitring the buildings may not have been possible, full explanation of the rules and chance to ask questions, limited.

Families were preparing, often with reduced home income, finding suppliers, both on the high street and online, often didn’t have everything in all sizes in stock.

But the tolerance and patience within secondary schools appears to have waned.

I have heard of two examples, and I am sure not the only ones, where pupils have been strongly reprimanded for wearing the wrong plain black footwear.

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A child, on only the second day in a new school, is told off by three teachers and removed from class by a fourth: had this occurred in an employment situation it could be considered to be bullying.

The footwear in question concealed the ankles, they were boots. Had the child been wearing trousers, no one would have been aware, why do ankles need to be seen?

Good footwear to walk to school is essential – as is a way to inform rules tactfully.

Julie Marshal

Via email

BREXIT

Empty shelves due to Brexit

For over 40 years the UK travelled moderately comfortably along a broad highway – the European Union.

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In 2016 this country chose to turn off this main road to follow the way to Brexit.

As we have travelled this side road, it has become less and less inviting – a pot-holed surface and the way narrowing as vegetation increasingly encroached.

Shortly after leaving the main highway, we had an opportunity to effect a U turn, but were too arrogant in the certainty of our 2016 decision and so failed to have a rethink

Now, as gaps appear 0n our supermarket shelves, Ian Wright, of the Food and Drink Federation, has warned: “Britain is now in for permanent shortages.”

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This cannot be dismissed as “Project Fear” – it is our lived reality.

John Cole

Address supplied

BREXIT

First Past The Post system

I read the letter from John Prance of Penwortham with interest (Your Say, September 9).

He says that only 37 per cent of the electorate voted for Brexit (I was one of them).

Well, this is the problem with our First Past The Post system.

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And I recall watching David Dimbleby saying to Tony Blair after the 2001 election, “you have a clear mandate from the British people”.

That wasn’t true as only 26 per cent of the electorate voted for him. And in closing, can I say that when it comes to the Common Market/EEC/EU – or whatever it’s called this week – I, like many people, can recall where I was when I heard that Greenland had left the EEC in 1985.

That should have been a wake-up call for the Brussels bureaucrats, but unfortunately they paid no attention and the anti-Brexiters in this country have their head in the sand.

Richard Elwell

Address supplied

POLITICS

Just towing the party line

Well, it looks like it’s all done and dusted with the Conservative Party voting through the new tax hike in national insurance contributions.

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Considering that they were all voted in at the last election on a promise that they would not raise any taxes and two years later used Covid as an excuse to break their manifesto promise, these politicians really should be looking over their shoulders come the next election (and it can’t come quick enough) in the hope that their electorate have short memories.

Towing the party line is one thing but not following what your conscience is telling you and doing the right thing is another.

M Tipper

Lancashire

NHS

Use money for patient care

If the Government is to give more money to the NHS, it must be set in stone that it is to be used for patient care and not for administrative purposes.

A lot of money could be saved if a reassessment of administrative needs in the NHS was undertaken.

Peter Hyde

Via email

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