by Amara Khan || Exclusives
A celebrity designer and multi award winning humanitarian is set to leave London for Northern Ireland because of continued bullying from the UK school system.
The schooling rules within London have become so extreme that Aleah Leigh‘s children find it upsetting and stressful even going to school.
Aleah tells us “The problem is that teachers now have more rights than the parents and they have become a society against working parents, especially single and unwell ones.”
Aleah needed to have a serious operation to have her womb removed, She spoke with the school her children attend Laurel Lane Primary School to let them know that her children would be going to her mother’s house for four days before the six week holiday this past Summer as she needed to prepare for the operation. The school did not accept this as a good enough reason even though she produced the relevant paperwork to prove it.
It was then suggested that her children would need to go into care as teachers at Laurel Lane believed that their ‘attendance while she was in hospital wouldn’t be gauranteed.’ This led to Aleah cancelling the operation because she was scared of what the school would do with her children.
Fortunately (or unfortunately which ever way you look at it) the day before her partners birthday she collapsed and was rushed to A&E. They managed to remove the tumors through keyhole surgery and she was fine after a few weeks, her children did not miss school as her friends and family stayed and helped her.
In another completely separate event Leigh found herself at the receiving end of fines.
She explained the new system telling us “In school now one day equates as two days, AM and PM. If you are late to school even by ten minutes, you are fined £30 per child for one day, if you miss the afternoon as well this it is two days, £60 per child and she has two children. If one of them is sick it is impossible to find someone at 7.30am to watch a sick child while she takes the other to school.”
An incident earlier this year saw Leigh fined £60 after both her children were marked as late for the AM session as one of them was sick and commuting.
An emotional Leigh told us “The teachers deem me as an unfit parent, I disagree greatly I would never leave my sick child unattended. My children have had three days off in one year dated from 04/09/2017 until 03/09/2018 I have resorted to taking images with dates and times of my children vomiting as evidence for the School, because I am terrified they are not going to believe me and fine me again. This is so much stress for me and my children, excuse the pun but I am sick of it.”
She added “The money that the school fines us does not even go back into that school as it is imposed by Court, it goes into the central government funds to spend on general government spending. So single working parents buying MPs pints on the school fines from ‘sick children and struggling parents’. It is the same pot as income tax.”
Leigh explains her decision to move from London, telling us “My children force themselves to school, while in private schools, they can be taken out in term time for a number of none valid reasons in a public schools’ rules. I work hard and my children are well behaved, polite and intelligent children, but school rules are making them upset to the point that I have no option but to move to the beautiful country of Northern Ireland. In Newry my children will be able to learn with love not pressure.”
This evening London Post reached out to Laurel Lane Primary School who are yet to comment.
