this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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For the benefit of the many non-Brits complaining about how unrealistic it is: the Leaving School Grounds Unsupervised form is (when I grew up at least) a huge social divider and Big Deal in a lot of British schools. There was a whole micro industry at mine where the ~70% of kids who were allowed out would provide delivery services for sweets and pop for the 30% who weren’t.
JKR didn’t just pull this whole thing out her ass, it was something that most British kids will have instantly related to. (She’s still an awful human mind)
Yeah, kind of my point was that y'all are viewing it as a "field trip", which is typically a specific event that's infrequent, carefully organized and supervised, which is a whole different beast to the generic standing instructions of "we're not going to supervise your kids if they wander off school grounds" slip.
For the former case it's pretty much understood that everyone in class should be able to join a field trip, but for the latter it's not unusual for parents to decline and therefore teachers would absolutely be expected to enforce the rules.
The latter paragraph is a pretty common argument about realism in fantasy, but when authors ask you to suspend your disbelief about what's possible in the setting, that doesn't mean you have to suspend your disbelief about every plot point.
Yep, even fiction is expected to have its own internal consistency within its proposed reality, known to Tolkien as "secondary belief."
People who read fiction don't like it when authors break their own rules.
We had something similar, but it was for a specific reason, like going to a job (we had an OJT class) or attending classes at the local college. It was only available in the last two years of high school too.
There wasn't a weird industry or anything, kids would just skip if they wanted to, and nobody policed the lunch hour or anything. But it's kinda similar I guess.
I find it hard to believe that a school that has the students fight world level villains on their own while the teachers do fuck all would be hung up by a permission slip.