In common with thousands of other schools around the UK the atrocious weather conditions forced our school, which I will call Mickley Grange from now on, to close for a few days.
It would be no exaggeration to say there were feet of snow lying in the school grounds making access, even by Shank's pony, very difficult indeed. This combined with our rural and sparsely populated catchment area made opening the school impossible on health and safety grounds.
I can understand the logic of closing - deep snow, roads barely passable, pupils and staff travel miles by road to get there every day. On days like this it is dangerous to have pupils and staff braving narrow, slippery, snowbound country roads. Despite the obviously horrendous conditions two groups of people seem to underestimate the magnitude of the situation - Head teachers and parents.
Head's are loathe to close schools because even if classes are diminished to such an extent that no productive learning can take place, many parents consider school a free babysitting service. Parents are loathe for school to close because, perish the thought, they need to make alternative arrangements to entertain their offspring for the day. That is a serious inconvenience to a lot of parents, who simply do not want their children about on a normal working day.
For the first time ever I have seen red weather warnings on the Met Office website. The steady and prolonged snowfall was such that it was utterly pointless for me to clean off the car or dig out the driveway. Even if I had achieved that feat the road to our estate, which is a sharp upwards incline on the homeward journey, was covered in a two-foot-deep blanket of snow. The local news showed pictures of a school bus that slid off the road in a city centre only ten miles from here, so poor were the conditions in the most urban of areas.
Quite simply I was stranded 30 miles away from Mickley Grange with no way of getting in to work for at least a week. The local council had been gritting roads at such a frenetic pace that their salt stocks were running perilously low. As quickly as they ploughed the roads at one end of the town they were impassable again at the other.
If my experience is anything to go by then parents can be assured that school will only be closed if it is an absolute necessity. It definitely isn't done on a whim to give the teachers an extra day in bed!