Were authorities right to shut the schools after the heavy snowfall?

SNOW is hard to predict so better that schools decide to shut in advance based on a forecast than ‘take a chance’ and force children and families into potentially dangerous conditions. Better one day with a closure that’s not strictly necessary than have people sliding about when a shutdown would have been better. MALCOLM DAVIDSON, Glasgow. IT’S amazing that the Snowflakes are adversely affected by snowflakes falling from the sky. As a child of the Fifties, I not only had snow and ice to contend with but thick smogs. Schools didn’t close unless the heating failed. We wore winter clothes and a smog mask and walked to school. I’ve never met a child who didn’t like playing in the snow – it’s today’s adults who are the problem.

B. S. SMITH, Felton, Somerset.

WHEN I worked in education, there were often phone calls after snowfall asking whether the school would be closed. We would reply: ‘If Tesco is open, then so are we!’ CHrIS PrITCHETT, Nottingham. EVERYONE seems to remember battling through 15ft snowdrifts to get to a school lit by a single coal fire and which never – come hail, rain, sun, snow or tsunami – ever closed. Every generation thinks that the next is softer than the next, but the truth is more complex. In the Fifties, most children walked to school. It’s one thing to walk a couple of hundred yards on a snowy morning and quite another to face miles in a car on a street made treacherous by snow. The way we live today makes school shutdowns more likely – and it’s nothing to do with ‘snowflake parents’. mArION BuCHANAN, Aberdeen. KEEP your child off school for a few days and you risk a fine for causing harm to their future GCSE results. Snow falls and schools shut but, apparently, this has no adverse effect. ALAN CArPENTEr, Tingley, W. Yorks. MOST winters it snows in this country and every time we panic. ‘Chaos’ and ‘disorder’ was the description used by one TV news channel this week. The Scandinavians must be laughing themselves silly at us.

SPENCEr BrOTHErTON, Eye, Cambs. IN MY first year at secondary school, the bus could not get up a hill due to thick snow. So along with my mates, I walked the three miles back home. The next day, we were caned by the headmaster for not coming into school. Character building! PETEr HENN, maidstone, Kent.