Kids’ Strike 3rd May

On 3rd May 2016  parents all over the UK took their children out of school for a day of fun learning.  They did this in SUPPORT of their teachers and their schools as a direct message to the then Education Secretary Nicky Morgan that they want to see a change to government policies regarding high stakes testing in our young primary children.

There was massive support for our campaign with over 8000 people joining in and registering their participation in the Kids’ Strike.  8000 is a conservative estimate – we know many people did not register with us – some press reported 40,000 off school on 3rd May!   Whatever the number was we know that we made an impact – the press coverage for the event was phenomenal – the subject of SATs was discussed by just about every media outlet and the profile of the problem was raised far and wide.

During the Kids’ Strike children engaged in ‘fun learning’ – events were recorded on our Kids’ Strike Tagboard. 

Here’s how we communicated our message to schools…

1. 3rd May Absence Letter for your school (Year 2 pupil)
2. 3rd May Absence Letter for your school (All Years)
3. Letter for your child’s teacher
4. Letter for parents at school  (to add)
5. Letter of SUPPORT for your school for working parents.

Open letter to Education Secretary

This map shows where events were happening across the UK on 3rd May… these are just the ones that we knew about up until 1st May 2016.

We were going to also measure the numbers taking part by the map above but #KidsStrike3rdMay got too big for that! In the spirit of u turns and back downs and realising when something isn’t going to work we have changed our plan!

We estimate that over 8000 children were off school on 3rd May…  this is a conservative estimate!  It was amazing what we achieved in such a short space of time!

We asked people to register their participation in the Kids’s Strike and by 9am on Thursday 5th May 2016 6891 PRIMARY school children were recorded out of school on May 3rd as part of #KidsStrike3rdMay. These figures did not include numbers from people attending en masse at one of the events organised by supporters which we have been sent separately and obviously, not everyone recorded their absence.

Since Absence letters were downloaded over 63,000 times from our web site… press reports of 40,000 children being off on 3rd May might not be far off!

The letter of SUPPORT for parents to give to teachers and schools even though they couldn’t strike was downloaded nearly 5000 times

For the whole of 3rd May there were just over 12,500 tweets about the topic #KidsStrike3rdMay

https://letthekidsbekids.wordpress.com/ has been viewed nearly 500,000 times by over 300,000 people

This shows the spread of support across the country for challenging the system – this is a NATIONAL issue which concerns parents all over England.

To those of you that took part – thank you all for your AMAZING support!