Texto 2

TRUANCY AND PARENTS

1- A) True:“the equivalent of 18,600 primary school children are skipping school every day, up from 17,300 last year”.

B) False:“Apart from illness, the biggest reason for authorized absence is a family holiday”.

C) False:“There has always been a link between social class and absence from school, with some (though not all) working-class communities placing a low value on schooling”.

D) True:“Schools and local authorities are … penalizing those parents who ignore this responsibility by using the range of measures available to them…”.

2- A) The government are not making any new changes to reduce truancy but they are continuing to provide support to parents with problems and to punish parents who do not sent their children to school, with a system of parenting contracts, fines and prison.

B) The main reasons why children do not go to school are illness and family holidays, although sometimes they do not go to school because their families do not value education.

3- A) Constant, regular-persistent: steady

B) To test – to try out

C) To help – support

4- A) Many initiatives have been tried out, and the legal system has hardly been changed for 130 years.

B) A spokesman explained that you had to make sure that your child attended school and not provide excuses for your child´s absence.

C) He said that if the government enforced the law, many absentees would go to school.

5- Should teenage criminals be sent to prison? Yes and no.

In modern society, more and more teenagers are committing crimes. Often neither their teachers nor their parents can control them and, for that reason, they need the discipline of prison.

However, prisons can also be “schools of crime”. In prison a teenager will meet other criminals and learn more criminal techniques from them. They should really spend time with people who give them a good example and not a bad one.

In short, this is a difficult issue. However, we urgently need to find a solution to this problem.