Another fatal incident at nursery

It's not the low-paid nursery worker who should get the blame and be prosecuted. Someone in the nursery management decided what staffing level to set for food times. Someone decided not to have a staff member with specialist training and responsibility for allergy management ahd monitoring of the children with allergies. Those are the people who should face justice.

That is absolutely tragic and I agree with the decision not to scramble around to find a charge to fit a mistake.

Ultimately early years needs an absolute overhaul, the amount of regulation and general pressure does not fit the pay, same as with social care.

Exactly this.

The Daily Mail article does not give any of these details. The allergy history and if there had been previous anaphylaxis, the availability of adrenaline, if adrenaline was given, the response time of the ambulance etc. Presumably those details were available to the CPS who took the decision not to prosecute any individual.

Children have died at home due to allergic reactions, should those parents be prosecuted?

If there was a failure of the nursery to monitor, train or supervise staff or to have adequate policies in place, that should be the focus of the local authority investigation.

Did you just put nursery, child labour and prostitution all in the same sentence while questioning your privilege?

Bravo 👏

They send out reminders not to give anything with nuts in the packed lunch and I am not sure if the kids with packed lunch sit in the dinner hall as well. Probably they would and you are right, unless the school checks every lunch box and asks for ingredients of anything that comes without packaging you cant be sure. So I guess you are right. I think i need to have another word with the school. I think, they also dont keep dc's epi pen with them at all times (unlike nursery) but keep them in central school office, which is a bit worrying.

Yes its hard to be totally nut free.

I remember when we had a student with a severe nut allergy, emails were sent to the canteen to get rid of products with nuts.

Two weeks later a student found products with nuts in the canteen. It wasnt obvious but if you looked down the list of infredients there was some nuts

Wow. I do get the othering thing… but as a parent - like you I suspect - I’d rather they were othered than dead? I mean, we don’t hide a disabled child's callipers or wheelchair for fear of othering, do we?

Schools might be nut avoiding but you definitely cannot assume they are nut free if they allow children to bring food in.
One of the problems with called schools 'nut free' is it creates a false sense of security.

@CautiousLurker01 when I worked in nurseries, there was a strong focus on not ‘othering’ the children with allergies.

We weren’t allowed to sit them on a table together or provide them with anything other than a placemat at mealtimes (which all children needed to have) with the allergies written and then covered with their plate.
We couldn’t have the allergies listed in a prominent place as it would breach confidentiality.

At one point we had children with allergies to:
Egg
Dairy
Egg, dairy, sesame, soya, citrus
Tomatoes

All in the same room and all under 2 years, but toddling round and wanting whatever their peers were eating.
It was a nightmare, particularly as lunchtime was when we’d have temp staff, or staff from other rooms who didn’t know the children covering for staff on break.
We did occasionally have a child eat or drink something they shouldn’t, but we always told the parents and it was never serious, luckily.

If my child had a serious allergy, there’s no way I’d send them to a nursery.

I'm in a sixth form school.

Children are not “dying in nurseries every other week” Ridiculous scaremongering nonsense. And anyway, the number of deaths in nurseries or schools is dwarfed by deaths of children in their own homes in the company of their loving parents.

Thanks for replying. I thought it was standard across all UK schools. Or is it just primaries maybe?

I always thought we are lucky thst it's nuts as all schools and nurseries dx has attended were nut free. It must be so much harder if someone is allergic to milk. Much more difficult to avoid.

I didn’t because like others have said I needed reliable childcare in an inflexible job. Being a SAHM was not an option so all mine went to nursery aged 1.

At that time I met lots of childminders at various baby/toddler groups not bothered about what their charges were doing. I also wanted to know exactly where my children were… too many childminders just seemed to go about their day running errands with the children in tow. That never seemed particularly safe to me.

I was lucky enough to be able to send my kids to 2 excellent nurseries while I worked. Then to a competent and caring childminder. No situation is 100% safe for a child. And that includes being at home, travelling in a car, sharing a home with a dog, playing on a climbing frame etc.
Any death of a child in a care setting is awful, but it is just nasty scaremongering to say that "nurseries aren't safe." They are safe. Safer than many kids' homes, sadly. Maybe nursery should be mandatory for all, to save those kids from their home situations? That is crazy of course, but it makes more sense than "nurseries aren't safe."

Some kind of reform is needed to make it financially and professionally possible for a parent to stay at home with their children until they are old enough to go to school, without taking the kind of hit that makes having kids unviable in today's economic climate.

I just looked it up and he choked but no further details have been released yet.

A feeling of frequency doesn't make it a fact though. It is rare, which is why when it does happen it makes the news.

Yes I am in the UK.

Our school is not nut free normally.

Are you in rhe UK? I assumed most schools are nut free in the uk. I know that kids who get a packed lunch are asked to not bring in food with nuts but are staff allowed to bring in food with nuts?

Sounds like a tragic medical incident:

In an update issued today, September 29, Lancashire Police said following a Home Office post-mortem examination, the force "remains satisfied no crime has taken place." A spokesperson for the force said: "A Home Office post-mortem examination was conducted earlier this month. Although those findings are still being examined, we remain satisfied that no crime has taken place."

"We have spoken to a number of witnesses who have stated that the child had not been left unattended, that he received immediate and appropriate care, and that significant efforts were made by staff to save the boy’s life."

www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/police-issue-update-after-boy-32575897

Childminders don’t exist in many areas - plus they’re less reliable than a nursery. If your childminder is sick, or wants to take annual leave, you’re buggered. Not so much with a nursery that has set hours.

Yes but if staff are rushed off their feet in low staffed conditions , you can see how accidents can happen.

I work in a school. We had a child recently that had a severe nut allergy. I luckily remembered while he was there.

But i could see, when i am dealing with multiple other children, how one day i could have forgotten and eaten a snickers bar near him or something.

We are dealing with so many children and so many problems at once.

I never said it did.
The poster wanted some proof of kids dying at nursery, and so I shared it and noted that this might be what OP was thinking of.
It really stood out to me when I read it, because a child dying in nursery is (I had thought) so rare. So for another child to have died a couple of weeks after that article was reported, creates a feeling of frequency. Hence, I suspect, OPs comment.

No one apart from a lucky few who probably don't have kids with allergies have said that nurseries should shut down. There is a big difference between shutting down a nursery and expecting a nursery to not give your child their known allergen..

What people are asking is that they implement robust systems and follow these systems to the letter to deal with allergies. And when rhe system fails rhey need to investigate and make changes. We made an honest mistake is just not good enough.

Where does it say that the nursery are responsible? Of course, it could be due to something similar to the story in the OP but it also could've been due to a known or unknown health condition which wasn't preventable.

That is also a school nursery, not a private nursery.

The poster said statistically safer, not all children are safer. It means that if you have 1000 children at home and 1000 children in nursery it is likely
that more children will be harmed at home than at nursery.