Mayflower primary school - nappy changing facilities for school aged children

My son is in Year 4 and I've never known any of his classes to not have any TA's so far. He also has a EHCP with 2:1 support needs. His class teacher doesn't do any of his changing.

You’ve just reminded me of when my two year old rang his nursery nurse on the landline. He was obsessed with numbers with an amazing memory. She told me about it next time I dropped him off. Thanks for jolting the lovely memory :-)

I do think that teachers and assistants need to accept that it is now part of the job and I believe that most do.

The problem is staffing/funding though.

Say you have one class teacher and 30 children. If you have 29 pupils who are amazingly well behaved all of the time, have no additional needs and can get on with their work independently whilst the class teacher 'nips' off to change a nappy 5 times a day, that is one thing, though I would still argue that this is still a safety issue as whilst they are in the toilet/they are not watching, let alone teaching, the rest of the class.

But meanwhile in the real world, this isn't the case in any Y1/2 class I have ever known. Few have a class TA any more-most have lost their jobs in staffing restructures due to budget cuts. Most KS1 classes will also have 3/4 children with a diagnosis or awaiting assessment for ADHD, another 3/4 for ASD, maybe 1 with an EpiPen needing careful watching, one with eczema needing creaming regularly, 3 with asthma needing meds (and recording when this is given), maybe one with physical needs-eg hoisting/partially blind/arthritis/deaf/absence seizures/needing Movicol to be mixed up and given twice a day. That's without even starting on teaching the class and supporting any children with literacy difficulties to make sure they make expected progress and pass the phonics test!

One teacher can only do so much. Yes, inclusion is great and children should be included, but without extra funding to provide additional support, that one teacher will pretty soon break.

@2011j I think many mums think it will happen in a day! they dont realise that you need to stay in the house and concentrate on taking child to the potty every hour and put pants on, not nappies. mums feel like they must go to the park, they must go to coffee shop to meet friends, they must go visiting or zoo!! stay in for 2 weeks and it will work. plenty cheap pants and a potty or toilet seat. easier in the summer and always easier to train boys than girls.

Our local LEA has actually invested in additional SEN school places.

Unfortunately all the new SEN schools are for admissions for Y1 children and older. They don’t have reception classes. So these children with known and diagnosed SEN will be sent to mainstream primary for at least 1 year.

I found out today, through researching old school ledgers, that in the past all children were visited by a school nurse in the months leading up to transition from nursery to primary. Schools don’t have their own nurses now. Instead we have health visitors and school nursing teams with massive caseloads. Some of these children could have been potty trained with support, but the decimation of community services means the support just isn’t there for families with challenges.

I think that Pull-ups are a big problem. When they were first around probably 25 years ago, there was only one type and most parents didn’t use them. HV advice was that they’d hamper potty training, and children would just use them as a nappy. Now there are all different types and they’re obviously far more popular or the supermarkets wouldn’t give them so much shelf space.

Expecting a child to magically wake up one day ready to decide to use the toilet themselves is ludicrous. The whole idea of potty training is so that they DO feel uncomfortable after an accident.

I really don't think that it comes to a shock to the majority of teachers that plenty of children with various needs attend mainstream school with disabilities/special needs that sometimes includes incontinence.

They deal with it by having a plan and making sure my son has support in place so he has an intimate care plan which every child will have if they need to be changed at school and named people who are to be the only ones who have permission to change him. For my son, it is 2 people (neither of which are his class teacher) who work with disabled children and are used to changing older children.

My son also has a EHCP due to other physical disabilities and has 2:1 support. He gets wonderful support at his school.

SEN, EHCP, medical conditions, etc., yes, understood, but this is not what the OPs original question was. To restate this:

Not including those with SEN, children should be potty trained before starting school - AIBU?

So she's asking about children who do not have SEN, EHCP, medical issues etc. We are talking about children who have not been taught.

So, again, what should be done if a 5+ year old cannot remain dry or toilet themselves with minimal supervision during school hours?

What are the other pupils supposed to do when their teacher disappears to do a nappy change? They won’t make as much progress if their teacher keeps disappearing off. What about when it becomes 4-5 children per class?

I am with OP as this was not common even when mine started nursery. They weren’t allowed to go to pre school until they were potty trained. So that was 3 years old. Why is it becoming more commonplace?

I'm sorry but expecting people to just accept that it's now part of the job simply isn't fair. I'll be amazed if there are any teachers left soon because the pay certainly isn't increasing with the ever growing list of things that are expected of them.

Well it’s not going to help the teacher shortage if they discover that instead of teaching phonics & times table they might have to factor in a nappy change. How & when are they supposed to deal with that in the middle of a lesson with 28 other kids waiting to learn? I appreciate it must be difficult for you but how are school supposed to deal with this logistically?

As the ERIC website clarifies:

The Equality Act 2010 *states that schools must not discriminate against or disadvantage disabled children or those with special educational needs. A delay in achieving continence - or not being toilet trained - is considered a disability. It is therefore not acceptable for a school to refuse or delay admission to children who are not yet continent

Parents are much more frazzled and have less time now as for the vast majority both parents work full time whereas in the past mothers were often homemakers and child rearers. Life is very different now even compared to pre COVID. Many are doing their best and there are so many children with additional needs that just aren’t classed bad enough where they would in the past to get a statement. I have a daughter who very clearly as many autistic traits and severe anxiety yet because she masks so well and is a pleasant, clever and bright compliant student ( who really does t want to be noticed) will not be put forward by her school for assessment. We can’t afford the private route and in our area the waiting list is up to 5 years long. They don’t see her collapse in tears or explode with emotion as soon as she gets home. They don’t see her issues with food, sleep, clothing, obsessive collecting and placement of things or her hoarding. The whole system is broken and parents are struggling. Health and education are on their knees so there’s no point judging parents because there is no help available and you can’t always tell if a child has additional needs. It is what it is and this school is doing what it has to in order to give kids access to education.

I’m going to be controversial but lots of parents just sit scrolling online & also leave the kids with an iPad. So less interaction.

Also more families where both parents work long hours. So they don’t get much quality time as a family & prefer to do fun stuff with the kids rather than potty training.

DH had a student in KS2 last year who needed a nappy changing. Mum was offered a place at a special school but insisted she wanted her son in mainstream. There are lots of parents who prefer to keep their child in mainstream school but want a 1-1 TA allocated. Then get upset when school can’t meet their (high) needs. Honestly it’s hard enough teaching a class all day let alone trying to factor in a nappy change part way through the day. It needs 2 staff present & state primaries don’t generally have a load of staff around doing nothing who are also DBS checked & able to assist. A baby nappy would be less offensive in terms of smell too.

My son needs changing multiple times in a school day. It would be unrealistic for parents to drop out of work potentially multiple times a day and would just plunge parents with disabled children into poverty.

Not to mention how inappropriate it would be to leave a child in their own waste for however long it would take the parent to get there. Disabled children deserve dignity.

I do think that teachers and assistants need to accept that it is now part of the job and I believe that most do.

its not about refusing though its about it simply not being practical.

Would you be happy your child being left in their own mess for half an hour while a parent got the sibling into a pram and walked to school to change them? Or an hour while they left work to get there? Would you be happy your child’s teacher leaving to go to their child’s school to change them?

There are a ridiculous amount of flaws in the “just get the parents” suggestion and it doesn’t nothing to create good relationships with families.

The kids with higher needs probably didn’t apply for pre-school then and had a parent at home caring for them. It’s good that nurseries And pre-schools are more accepting of SEN and disabled kids who might have missed out on the social side and activities pre-schools could have provided.

My daughter has low muscle tone which is making potty training difficult and she wasn’t even walking until 2.5 years. I wouldn’t have been able to work without nursery accepting her.

So parents can refuse but teachers can't?

@ThejoyofNC all teachers training since the 1990s have known that the inclusion into ms meant SEND children including those with toileting needs would be in ms classrooms. If a teacher is completely unwilling to deal with SEND needs they are probably in the wrong job. So if I was a teacher I would expect this to potentially be part of it.

As a leader of an extra curricular activity I have dealt with both wee and poo cleaning for SEND children - toileting help and accidents and tbh it doesn’t bother me.

I would have thought with that date it would be fairly obvious that the pandemic, lockdowns, social distancing and masks has had a profound affect on the development of young children.

I’m sorry, are you genuinely proposing that if this were your child, you would be happy for them to sit in their own waste until you arrived to change them??

And if parents work what then? Or if parents refuse? Children have a right to an education and as much as I don’t want to be changing nappies I accept it’s now part of the role. We can’t deny a child an education simply because they aren’t toilet trained for whatever reason.

By insisting parents come in we also risk alienating those families whose children who potentially need the most support.

I do think benefits have a knock on effect too because back in "the day" you could stay on income support with no pressure to get a job until your child went to secondary school then it was reduced to 7 now it's 2/3 be interesting to see if there is any correlation between people putting their children in childcare before three and non potty trained children at school

@Onceuponatimethen how understanding would you be if your employer expected you to deal with cleaning up poo when it wasn't part of your job? Nobody else in other jobs would do it but teachers are just meant to deal with it.

The other is, the has been a massive increase in the number of children with special needs. Massive. None of the children I taught in special school in the 1990s would even get an EHCP, let alone get an appropriate school place if they had an EHCP. There really has been an explosion in the numbers, which it seems no-one is aware of unless you work in a Nursery or Primary school, or associated services. Where I live, all schools are expected to somehow look after multiple children with really significant needs.

This is very true! I was speaking to my secondary school teacher friend about this recently. They thought I was joking when I said give it two years and you will have children starting year 7 in nappies. We have them in Primary at the moment and are just expected to get on with it. There is not enough special provision and they WILL be in mainstream.