Staffroom secrets revealed in book
A school teacher from Paddock Wood has written a book set to become a lifeline for parents wanting to know more about their children’s education.
Mother-of-three Jane Chappell retrained as a teacher when her children left primary school.
She hopes her expertise will help other parents navigate the ‘minefield’ that comes with their child’s education.
The 46-year-old said: “I wrote Staffroom Secrets because when I trained as a primary school teacher, I spent a lot of time saying, “I wish I’d known that.” I felt compelled to reveal all I had discovered with parents, who I knew like me wanted the best for their children.”
“It’s for twenty-two-year-old me, who had aspirations for her daughter but nowhere to go for solid, comprehensive advice.”
The book is available on Amazon.
Going back not quite as far, the introduction of charging for plastic bags has had the unintended consequence of an alarming increase in shoplifting, because people can now walk out openly carrying goods in their hands or their arms and if challenged they can claim they hadn’t brought a bag with them and didn’t want to pay for one.
That problem has been further exacerbated by the fact they don’t even have to produce a receipt to show they purchased the goods legitimately as they can claim they went through the self-checkout and when asked by the pop-up on the screen if they wanted a receipt they pressed ‘No’.
The result is that unless they have been seen to select the goods and then seek to leave the store without paying for them, they cannot be successfully challenged.
There is also the issue of people taking the store’s bags and going around selecting what they want and putting it into the bags. In former days store detectives would have been on to such activity like a shot. Now though, it could be perfectly legitimate and the store detective could follow them around, or they could be followed on cameras, only for it all to come to nought as the customer goes to the checkout and proceeds to empty the bags onto the belt. Not wishing to appear cynical by apparently seeing potential thieving in all of this, I will not advance any opinion whatsoever on so-called ‘smart shopping’. On that I make no comment. Christopher Hudson-Gool Sutton Road, Maidstone