Given detention for lateness on tube strike day

Today I walked home from Victoria and it took me an hour and ten mins. Yesterday the same journey by bus took two hours and it was horrendous. If your dc can’t walk then they probably need to leave much earlier.

After covid our DS y8 at the time got a detention for being late when the school bus was cancelled without any warning (no driver available). The kids had let the public bus, that goes to same place, go past because they were waiting for the school bus. I argued there was no way that he was doing a detention as def wasn't their fault. They removed detention for about 54 kids.

This is madness. My DS left an hour early today, he was still a few minutes late, there's no help for it. I think non-Londoners perhaps don't appreciate the scale of the increase in traffic. I've told him we'll walk it tomorrow, it's 35 minutes walk. He can't carry his bag all the way as it's 12kg so I'll have to walk with him. Luckily I can work from home.

It's chaos.

Yup. I would do this. Very petty on behalf of the school, don’t agree with it at all.

I work in education in London and to get to work at 8am I had to leave home at 6am - my one hour journey took double the time.

The school I work for has reasonable expectations but doesn’t expect students to leave home insanely early.

Your feelings about lateness are a you problem. Maybe get some counseling to learn to deal with the reality of everyday life?

There is no way that these 'bike lanes' make it safe to cycle in London - vans park in them, buses have stops in them, crazy lime bikers left, right and centre, not to mention drivers taking no notice of them. You have to have your wits about you. Absolutely not safe on most routes for young teenagers who are still developing spacial awareness, even on a regular rush hour, let alone this week which has been the worst I've seen in decades
Even if you do get through all that and make it to school in one piece, many schools have a no cycling policy, partly to keep the kids safe, and partly because bike theft is so prevalent and the schools don't want more responsibility.

Yesterday we allowed 2 hours for a journey that we usually allow 20 minutes for. We were still late! A 6 minute tube ride became a bus ride (normally 15 mins, 25 mins in rush hour, became 50 minutes), then a short train ride with trains going every 15 minutes - but every other train was cancelled, so that made trains every 30 minutes. There were so many people that the station supervisors were having to stop people from going to the platform.
Londoners just accept that people do their best on strike days, sometimes you can be lucky and find a sneaky route, and sometimes you're fucked and you just have to be patient and wait it out.
My DS was quite stressed about the new journey yesterday. I didn't join him on the train. He'd been told no late marks during the strike, so at least he didn't have that to worry about.

You are obviously younger than me

For safeguarding reasons...

If the child is generally on time, maybe we can believing them?
Tube strike and serious car accidents are objectively verifiable, out of their control and there isn't any teaching moment in giving detention for "my route normally takes X minutes, I'm normally planning X+15, I added another 30 minutes due to the strike and it didn't work by 5 minutes".
Many adults will be late and it will be ok.

Well your name certainly suits you! 🤣🤣

Not in my experience !
You stayed home if you were ill (no worries about attendance levels). Our uniform was casual then non existent after 3rd Year (Year 9) so no one got sent home for the wrong clothes.
Most people lived less that 2 miles from home because we all just went to the nearest school.
😁

Don't be stupid. People are late for work all the time when the tubes are on strike or if there are other disruptions. Sometimes it's unavoidable. Just because you know in advance a strike is going to happen it doesn't mean that it makes it any easier (or possible) to get where you need to get on time.

Of course the school should make concessions under these circumstances.

Actually just a thought OP, I'm not sure how far down the bus route you are but could he leave even earlier and get a bus in the opposite direction i.e. backwards towards the start of the route (even to the very first stop) and the swap to get on a bus coming back towards school? The roads will still be crawling along but at least he'll be on a bus and not stuck at the bus stop as all the full ones sail past.

Sounds a bit bonkers but I did that once on a previous strike day and it worked. I even got a seat!

Central London has lots of cycle lanes. Suburban London is patchy, and rush hour traffic is insane.

One friend's sons usually cycle to school because public transport means a huge dog leg, cycling is quicker. It's about 2 miles - no cycle paths, they use the quiet residential back streets (and one has been knocked off his bike despite that - thankfully just shaken up and a couple of bruises).

When you have drivers getting frustrated because they aren't moving even when the traffic lights are green, it is even more dangerous. Drivers start cutting up other drivers, ignoring safe distances etc and it's a free for all. Then you get the usually quiet back roads turning into packed rat runs as drivers try to find ways round the congestion, so roads usually fairly quiet and safe for cyclists change considerably.

The buses are full, and traffic increases substantially as people who would normally use public transport drive instead. Then, because of the congestion it takes the buses twice as long to do their normal route, so they can only carry half as many people as usual.

I wouldn't want a child to use those lanes.
It's like the Hunger Games - but with bikes !
It's fantastic that bike lanes exist. Unfortunately many of those who use them are clueless about road safety.

At St Thomas's, staff required for surgeries stay overnight at the hospital.

Because they set a detention when the OP's child arrived late to form? Where they also were because they were taking the register?

Not like the good old days when you had to walk 2 miles to school and and ill or not you did it and as for a sore knee, you were kicked out the house and sent to school and of uniform wasnt correct you walked home put correct uniform on and walked back to school sore knee or not

Oooo a lot of MN do love a detention & rules - can see you lot just salivating at the over-zealous enforcement of them.

OP - totally unreasonable to give him detention in circumstances like this. What good does it do students to make them feel unjustly treated?

Fwiw I'm a long way from London & cannot fathom having access to such a good transport network when it takes ds3 two hours to get to college 15 miles away lol. And yet I manage to sympathise through my envy!

My son had this. He probably went to the same school as your son. The journey was 30 mins around the M25. The only way you could guarantee getting there on time each and every day would be to arrive 90 mins early so he got detentions.

Spell it out: It is a valuable life lesson that sometimes you get a penalty and that penalty is unfair. And making a fuss just makes it 100 times worse.

No matter what his disability is, learning to not see it as a personal reflection and just to suck it up will be very useful whatever profession he chooses.

Central london has lots of bike lanes