To ask school to stop sending me these texts?

@Nicelynicelyjohnson
"What would you be expecting the parent to do?"
Totally agree with you. What is the parent supposed to do?
I guess the OP could offer to come into school, sit with one of the DC, and walk them to the next class, etc (Obviously, I am not serious).
How old are the DC?
When I was at school many years ago, each lesson was 50 mins, and 10 mins allowed to get to the next class. So is there any allowance for travelling between classes?
If the DC are young and the school is very large, it may be that they are intimidated by older children, etc
Rather then getting parents to presumably punch the DC was something that happened at school, maybe the school should deal with this themselves; eg late so many times, and it is an automatic detention, etc

To me that's different. If a child is persistently late, or is truanting, that needs to be raised and sorted out fast.

Does your school give you that kind of communication, or is it just an automated message whenever a child is late to a class. If the latter it sounds like the school is leaving it up to the parents to spot serious problems arising from patterns of automated alerts. That seems negligent to me.

How does the school know whether you dropped them on time or not? A lot of kids probably make their own way and the message is generic. I presume it's BC the kid could be disciplined, and if absence gets severe then you could face a fine or whatever. So they need to let parents know. If your kid is generating those messages, it's meant to annoy you to an extent so you try and make them not be late. Don't be annoyed at the school.

The school is communicating with you so that you can talk to your children about any underlying issues.

how you manage those messages really isn’t the school’s problem.

Our school sends these texts so we know if our child is routinely late and to stop internal truanting where they attend for registration and opt out of classes thereafter. As a parent I want to know if my child isn’t where they should be, not least so I can deal with their behaviour.

@TipsyKoala

How I see it is that both school and parents have responsibilities to the child that they cannot simply get out of by saying they are overstretched. Even if they put it in a policy.

What's the most effective way of correcting low-level bad behaviour? In my experience it's enforcing consistent rules and predictable consequences, there in real time.

Now, we don't know from the OP's post whether the school is doing that. If so then they are doing the right thing. The implication of the post was that the school saw its role as informing the parent so they can sort it out. That seems to put the needs of the adult before the need of the child to be properly guided and disciplined.

(I'd take an equally dim view of a parent who texted the school each day: "Gaming until 1am", "Gaming until 1am", "Gaming until 1am", for the school to sort out. The adults are shirking their duties in both cases).

Surely it can be automated in a smarter way. Instead of alerting the parent each time Johnny is late for maths, it can send a monthly mailshot to the form tutors of the worst offenders, who might then give them detention, or whatever course of action they see fit. (Or whatever staff member is best placed - head of year, pastoral, whatever). The school should also be looking at overall trends - e.g. if there is widespread lateness to lessons, it needs to be addressed as a whole, not pinged to individual parents in real time. Whereas if it's only a few, they can focus on targeting those kids.

I would be really annoyed to get blow-by-blow updates of something this petty, which I can't do anything about in real time, and without any context. And at secondary school age, the school should be punishing the child directly and holding them responsible for getting to lessons. It's ridiculous for a hulk of a teen to get home and their mum says "I hear you were late to maths this afternoon, naughty naughty".

It's not really so much about schools having more responsibility but trying to extract yourself as parent from the relationship between school and child. I mean, I might have limited opinion about sock colour but it's important to school so I allow them to get on with it and would expect my child to deal with the consequences themselves.

Are you a single parent op? If not, change the contact number for a few weeks, give yourself a break. If the other parent gets fed up they might have a different way of dealing with it.

The teachers are TRYING to teach but their lessons are constantly disrupted by kids wandering in late after they've started the lesson. They then have to recap each time because each latecomer (bear in mind they rarely arrive all together) doesn't know what's going on.

Why can't they just send a summary at the end of the week. Ie they're regularly late for maths but on time for history and art. ( All hypothetical) You could then have a discussion on why they're late for these particular lessons.

Is it generally more effective in your experience, asking the parent to sort out the behaviour during the school day?
There seems to be a lot of variation on how schools deal with stuff like this. My DC school, they sanction but there is another local to me where the parents are contacted a lot about very minor infringements (wrong colour PE socks on indoor PE day, etc).
I'm inclined to think schools should hold more responsibility than parents when kids are at school, but I am being swayed by other view on this thread.

The texts are automated. Nobody is sitting actually typing out messages.

🤦🏻‍♀️

Also it's not a text to my phone it's a text via the school messaging system which means I have to log in to see it.

I'm at work and I don't know if it's something important or not and have to check and I can get in trouble for being on my phone too much.

If it was something important, as in urgent, the school would call.

In your position I would only log into the school messaging system when it’s convenient, lunchtimes or end of the day.

You need to speak to your children about why they’re late for lessons so often. It’s annoying and disruptive for the teachers and other pupils. Discipline them if it keeps happening.

But in your analogy you don’t have 29 other kids you’re also responsible for. If you did you might be more inclined to let the parent know they need to teach their kid to behave because you don’t have time for it.

Why are schools wasting time sending pointless texts?

Haven't they got better things to do such as teach the children?

If this becomes extreme, of course the school should raise it with the parent.

But imagine I take my nieces to the park, while my sister takes my child out to a museum. There's a bit of low-level misbehaviour on both trips.

Which approach is going to be more effective:
i) I "parent" my nieces on the spot, admonish and guide them as needed. My sister does likewise for my child.
ii) She and I spend the day WhatsApping each other when our respective children do something naughty?

I think option i) is clearly more effective. Which one would you advocate?

I don’t understand these votes sometimes. 100 or so comments and the majority of them seem in think the OP is BU. There’s been like 10 that say YANBU. But the vote is soooo strongly the other way!? How does that work?

Can you even imagine how much time and effort it would take for the school to set up a system where parents can pick and choose what kind of texts they are happy to receive?

Just stay logged in to the app, it's not that much effort to look at a text and get your kids to be on time

I think you need to talk to your kids about why punctuality is important.

But OP specifically said 'to stop sending me THESE texts'. She didn't say ALL texts, nor highlight any other subjects about which she objected to being informed.

Constant messaging is annoying I think. "Back in the day" there's no way parents would get a barrage of real time updates about minor things happening at school. School would deal, or if there was a persistent problem, they'd contact the parents to raise it and a conversation would happen. I don't think the fact automatic comms are possible means they're always the right solution. I mean one answer might be to have a home sanction but it's a very sanction -heavy way of parenting. I'm not sure what it's teaching in the longer term. I suppose you could have a chat and find out what's behind the constant lateness OP and then open a dialogue with the school if there's anything that needs accommodations to be made, but that could also have happened without the constant automatic updates annoying you at work.

@SirAlfredSpatchcock

Do you leave them to fend for themselves for their evening meal? Maybe it's up to them to plan, buy and cook it; or if not, then it's the school's job?

This is a weird analogy. Surely the analogy would be the parent texting the teacher to tell them the child hasn't eaten their greens, left food on their plate, didn't do the washing up.

Schools and parents both have a very important role in bringing up children, and they should back each other up.

Continued lateness for lessons? Raise it with the parent and implement a plan (or discipline the child at school and expect the parent to back it up).

Serious food refusal at home? Maybe it needs discussing with school.

But there's an obvious division of responsibility -- schools are in loco parentis during the day, parents at night. Who can actually do something about it at the time?

Discipline within schools has to be a collaborative effort between parents and teachers. I’m sure the teachers do have school sanctions and teachers chivvying the kids along and a bell etc to help the kids get to lessons on time. When those things don’t work and the kids are still late, they’re texting you so that you can also sanction the kids and hopefully with everyone on their case they might start arriving on time.

I don’t agree with the posters who are saying teachers are there only to teach - that’s never been the case. School isn’t just about academic learning, schools are there to help kids to prepare for working life more generally after school, which includes learning being punctual.