AT least three of the parents interviewed in the article about parents being fined for taking their children out of school for term-time holidays, have missed the point of the proposed new law.

The word sequential seems to have dropped out of modern educational jargon, but it is still important.

In the teaching of foreign languages, maths, science, and accounts (if they still do the latter at all), the correct method is to show all pupils a new thing every lesson, set some homework to reinforce it and connect it with what has been taught before.

If a parent encourages truancy it is not the point to say, as these three did "it doesn't do them any harm". What they have done is harm the rest of the class and its teacher, who can't progress until the truants have caught up.

Subjects like English, history, domestic science and geography are not so sensitive to truancy.

When I came to Swindon, education had just gone comprehensive under the Leicester Plan, which gave parents of children at age 14 the choice of staying in a junior high school for a year and then leaving at 15, or of going to a senior high school and leaving at 16 or 18 with some sort of qualification. This meant that in the senior high schools we had parents more or less committed to seeing their children through exams.

The Leicester Plan was mortally damaged in Swindon in (I think) 1974, when the government put up the leaving age to 16, and Swindon sent all children, regardless of ability or parents' interest, to the senior highs. The result was increasing truancy, increasing difficulty in teaching sequential subjects (reflected in ever lower scores in CSE and O Level exams).

The result of this collapse of education in Swindon was that all schools in Swindon, with the exception of Ridgeway and St Joseph's (Catholic), lost their sixth forms and were combined into the New College. The individual schools in Swindon, under the peculiar very specialist A Level system of education that we have in England, were no longer viable, and there were far too few pupils per teacher in most sixth form classes.

Whether the New College could do better than it is doing at the moment, with nearly all the most intelligent children in Swindon, I leave to others to decide. But there is no doubt in my mind that truancy at the basic and middle level is dragging everybody's children back, and should, if possible, be fined.

DONALD SHIRREFF

Lower Wanborough