School illness rules

I would just ignore this and trust your own judgment. It’s ridiculous and I can’t see many teachers being thrilled at the thought of a kid throwing up the night before being in school the next day. And most kids with temperatures feel rough. No way would I send my child in with a temp. Honestly sometimes it seems like schools think parents shouldn’t be making decisions for their own children!

Hand washing isn't going to stop infections spreading as they spread through the air!

If you have a high temperature then you are by definition NOT well. This is absolutely crazy and will just lead to more contagion and worse absenteeism.

UK schools have gone absolutely bonkers about attendance since 2020. The DofE's own data shows that the primary cause of long term absenteeism is sickness and yet they are pushing kids to get sick.

And doing this in the middle of a COVID wave and rising flu is just dumb.

I have a child with migraines that make him vomit, he’s always back in the next day. I have made it clear to school that it will be happening and I’ve not been challenged. He has a proper diagnosis and they’ve seen him so poorly with the pain and sickness. I keep them home with d&v but never for not contagious reasons.

I think it's fine not to have a hard and fast rule re 48 hrs off for any incident of being sick or having diarrhoea.

I work in schools and staff don't have to follow this rule. It's just when you feel well enough to come back in the only two schools I've worked in where I've had any sickness.

I think you need to use common sense. If you have a child who vomits once after too much cake and excitement at a birthday party for example, you know that's different to a child with norovirus.

So you tell them that your DC is unwell and not able to attend school. They don’t have right of access into your home.

Any school rule is irrelevant. You are the parent and you decide whether, in your opinion your DC is well enough to attend school. Same approach as I’ve always followed.
School aren’t going to turn up on your doorstep demanding your child attends school

Actually I'm going to change my mind on the D and V. The NHS advice is to stay at home for at least 2 days after the last bout:

www.nhs.uk/symptoms/diarrhoea-and-vomiting/

dc school has only one rule: if dc feels like shit they stay home.
in forrin, so no 48h rule either.

Bloody hell! That's awful. I would never send a child to school witb a fever. I would presume (a) that going to school would cause them to feel ill and (b) that they probably have something contagious.

With the diarrhoea and vomiting thing, i I would have be totally certain that the diarrhoea and vomiting had stopped before sending the child to school, which might after less than 48 hours.

For hand washing to be effective and stop the spread of infection , it has to be for a full 20 seconds, a good 10 second rinse and then for the hands to be dried thoroughly - I can really see kids doing this!

It’s because all they care about are attendance quotas. Our schools are the same (I don’t know if any official policy change because I would ignore that anyway), but they are hot to trot on attendance.

My dd regularly like one lesson a day doesn’t have a teacher in place - their PE sub for example isn’t allowed to teach PE so they all sit in the library and read instead. But god forbid you miss a day. Dd has usually between 95-99% attendance, but they sent her home in the first week of school for having a fever, and then that week I got a letter about our ‘attendance issues’ because she missed 2 days in the first week of school. I was like, well, don’t bloody call me in the middle of the day to come get her then! I have in the past simply refused to come get her because sometimes she has a ‘tummy ache’ just because one of her friends is off sick, and they don’t like that either (she was completely fine).

The rule doesn’t exist in the workplace, it doesn’t exist in secondary schools. In real life you stop being ill and, if you feel well enough, crack on. You don’t need to be at home twiddling your thumbs if you feel fine.

Yes that's definitely bad!

Ridiculous. I would ignore this. I am a teacher and had sickness and diarrhea in July. I was wiped out for over 48 hours.

In terms of vomiting - that's usually the first part of a stomach upset - the virus usually travels down to the lower part of the gut and then diarrhoea arrives.

The 48hr rule gives time for the virus to travel through the gut - most of these are faecal/oral transmission and school toilets are not known for being cleaned up very well.

Given that schools do not let children go to the toilet easily, can you imagine the discomfort and fear of having diarrhoea or abdominal pain in school and not being able to use the loo.

If they were saying 24h instead of 48h then fine. But this is bonkers

The problem with a blanket 48hr vomiting rule is that there are many non-contagious reasons why a child can vomit.

I once had to collect DS after vomiting in class. He'd had months of post-concussion migraines and headaches and he bounced out looking the brightest that he'd been in months but still had to miss 2 days off school, and still added to the snotty letters we'd got for the days that he had to stay in bed in a darkened room.

If a child's ill keep them off, but blanket rules don't cover all circumstances effectively.

Where parents are already under pressure, they often send children in and hope for the best. If they have a bit more flexibility for their own judgement call rather than minimum times off, that could actually help with them staying off during the highest risk part of the illness.

Absolutely awful.

I understand the pressures on parents to be at work, and therefore the downward pressure to push sick children into school. For many parents there is real threat to their job due to normal childhood illnesses.

A child with a fever is a sick child - a fever (an actual fever above 38C) usually comes with nausea, headache and means that it is very unlikely that a child would be able to concentrate in school or learn anything.

It basically says that school is childcare, not education.

Sick children deserve to be cared for, not dosed up with anti-pyretics to hide the fact and shoved into school.

The rule does need changing as lots of kids are just sicky not due to anything contagious so the 48 hour rule is ridiculous.

Lots of illnesses are contagious before any symptoms are obvious.

Schools should be asking parents to use common sense to see if their child genuinely needs to be off school or not.

A temperature coule be due to something minor and not contagious, just needing some calpol.

I’m so glad my DC are older now and have left school. When they were younger I kept them off when they were ill, that meant viruses, infections and high temperatures and they didn’t go back until they were well enough. I wouldn’t get away with it now. These absences had no negative effects on their education and they all past GCSEs, A levels - those rules are just going to result in more absences surely?