What is a ^good^ reason to miss school?

I'm probably slacker than most about allowing the odd 'less ill' day - say, one or two per school year - but mainly because ds has very good health and is damn lucky. It only takes one substantial illness to get below 95% but 86% is really poor.

Having said that, this is for your dh to take up with the children's mother, isn't it?

My DS2 is severely asthmatic, and this school year has spent 2 full weeks in hospital, has had 3 D&V bugs, each meaning no school for 48 hrs, and then had Norovirus and was off for a week, and another 2/3 days at a time for astma too severe for school, but not enough for hospital admission, abut 3 times this year.

His attendance as stated on his end of Yr report is 89%. With a chronic, long term health condition that has been particularly bad this year, AND lots of D&V bugs going round the school, and Noro that ended up with the school needing to be deep cleaned...

The decision as to whether or not to keep a child off school is always fraught with difficulty. Parents are under pressure from schools to achieve a 100% attendance and also off course with younger children staying off school often effects mums ability to go to work. On the other hand our children lead much busier lives than certainly I did and many are under considerable pressure to do well whether it be academically or in other fields. So many are doing extra curricular activities after school or being extensively tutored at often an early age and expected to do loads of prep as well. Other factors also effect children boys in particular often have sudden growth spurts which is also seems to be physically tiring for the body. We see many children who are just exhausted especially at this time of year and this exhaustion lowers their resistance to infection and they get the usual upper respiratory infections D and V etc etc and of course we are seeing more and more mental health problems.
As parents we need to empathise more and at times cut our children a bit of slack. Im not advocating they take days and days off school but the occasional duvet day especially at the end of a busy term year is not going to have a negative impact on their academic outcomes.
Finally "coughs" always cause considerable anxiety in parents GP's A and E dept walk in centres paediatricians see hundreds of children with coughs and anxious parents. Coughing is a natural process we are meant to cough and the vast majority are caused by secretions in the upper airways irritating but not life threatening. Parents waste an absolute fortune on cough medicine but you will find it is rarely used in the hospital setting and never in the case of serious chest infections/pneumonias. When we use it is to give a child the impression that we are doing something and in this case it is very effective but it is basically just coloured flavoured sugar and water honey and lemon is cheaper and equally effective!!

She didn't have the bug the day she took the exam it was 48 hours after her last um, expulsion. But she was still unwell in the sense that she was weak and tired. She wouldn't have been allowed at school if she had been.....exploding.

Metabilis3 I am sorry your dd is ill and I understand your points about coughs especially as you say in your area there ere significant health risks around coughs however you are saying in one sentence that anybody why sends their child to school with a cough is risking the health of all those around them causing all kinds of problems and upsets that people don't think about when making the choice to send their children to school or not (and I agree with you, my dd was at risk of needing emergency life saving treatment when ever a cough and cold bug went round, we have had too many ambulance trips and hospital time for bugs that are not a huge deal to other children) but then in your next sentence you talk about how your dd did a music exam with a winter gastro bug, what about the other children there? What about the examiner? You put them at risk of getting the bug without knowing how badly this could effect them or if they had underlying conditions that could make this type of bug very serious.
You have undermined your own argument and contradicted yourself. It them comes across as you see that other people are not as important as your dd are. The children who have been in school with a cough may have had an exam that was very important for their future for all you know, you say that the piano exam wasn't even that important to your dd! You then get short with somebody else who suggested that since you had already in your first post gone into detail about the fact in some cases a cough is a genuine and responsible reason to miss school it wasn't really necessary to go into the same thing again in a second post when the OP had already acknowledged your point. It all together points to a quite self-centred attitude, funny when your whole point you seemed to be trying to convey was that people should think about others when deciding it an illness is worthy of missing school.

Anyway, I am really hijacking this thread and I apologise, for some reason Metabilis3 really put my back up with it's hypocrisy.

To the OP, most of the reasons you list would not be considered reasonable excuses for missing school, I would if you can speak to your DSC school to find out if they share your concerns and if anything is being done to address the issues and take it from there working with the school. In an ideal world you could also speak with the children's Mother (or primary carer) to talk through the issues but I get the feeling from your posts that this wouldn't be a very productive.

Any day with a Physics lesson.

The clue to my rational sense about illness is in the name!!

schoolnurse seems to be making rational sense about illness and school.

Theas" "bit of a runny tummy" they are 11+ kids they can go to the lo, wash hands and no spread bugs!"*
All children of what ever age are notoriously bad at personal hygiene (as are adults) and no school will allow a child to come to school with an infectious tummy bug. The public health guidelines are that you must be clear of all symptoms for 48 hours. Many parents find these rules tedious and seem to be under the impression that schools are dreaming these up just to be difficult but it is essential that other children and of course staff are protected especially as some may have underlying illnesses which can easily be exacerbated by D and V. The problem is knowing if your child's runny tummy is infectious gastro-enteritis or the result of eating too many prunes or more commonly in our children a desire to have a few days off school!! We have now devised a protocol in an attempt to weed out the lead swingers and prune eaters from the genuinely unwell and infectious but nothing is fool proof and we have an obligation to err on the side of caution to protect the other children.

I think as parents we are reluctant to keep our children at home when they are ill but we do have to think about other children. Genuine flu can spread rapidly around schools resulting in not only sickness of the other children but staff as well. Most children will not function properly at school with raging tonsillitis and the evidence is that it is better long term to keep children off for 48 hours and get rid of a nasty cold than send them in sniffing and sneezing the symptoms will persist longer and there ability to learn may be affected for longer. We see more and more children with chronic fatigue syndrome/ME/glandular fever I know of no hard research but maybe a few days off school when unwell with a nasty viral infection to really get over it may have prevented this.

@flubba I wasn't aware that my current personal experiences are less valid or permitted to be mentioned than the others mentioned in this thread. I do apologise for taking up your valuable time.

Just trying to get the context of this.

The SDCs do not live with you. They live with their other parent (mother?)
They have low attendance - just to put that into context they are missing 1 day of school most weeks. That is shocking, and defintely of concern. Think the educational welfare officer would be involved in this country at that level.

Can you ask the SDC why they have so much time off?

I think you can justify needing to know on the grounds of (rightly) being concerned about the poor attendance or (rightly) being concerned about their poor health given the amount of time off.

Secondary school- ony the same things that would keep me off work.

Infectious stuff that is serious- not a cold or even a "bit of a runny tummy" they are 11+ kids they can go to the lo, wash hands and no spread bugs!

Injuries. DS has missed a few days with a calf tear, fractured collar bone and facial injury (not all together). If you can't actually get upstairs to the loo in the house you aren't going to manage school (ditto if you can't eat/drink without dribbling because your lips are so swollen!). Schools are big places to get about and jostling and busy too so actually that might be quite relevant.

We do have authorised time off for music exams/performances /services too. tHis are generaly coded "educated off site" as would I assume high level sporting endeavour

I tend to keep my daughter off when she has a nasty cold or cough, simply because she finds school challenging enough as it is, without having to sit there coughing and spluttering. She isn't likely to learn very much either.

However, she is 6, I would be tougher on older children/teens.

I haven't ever kept her off for social reasons though. I do know many that do, whether it be a holiday in term time or just because they have family visiting they don't see very often. I don't really agree with that, but I can see why they do. Not really been an issue seeing as we can't afford holidays :/

Kind of hi-jacking the thread there Metabilis

Sorry your daughter has a cough.

To all those saying that a cough isn't a reason to stay off school - DD1s school is currently alive with the sound of coughing and sniffling. And now she has come down with it - apparently she was up all night with a dreadful hacking cough. I just heard her coughing when I phoned home (I'm in Prague for a confence). That would be fine except that sh has her grade 7 singing exam on Tuesday. If this doesn't clear up in a couple of days she won't be able to do it (she can't talk at all at the moment). So, massive disappointment to her and £70ish exam fees down the drain for us. So Well Done anyone who sends their child to school with a bad cough like that - they won't be able to concentrate (lack of sleep) they will disrupt the class they are in (constant coughing) and they could really muck up someone else's plans. :( DD1 is distraught (she's been crying her eyes out). Last year she did a piano exam with winter vom, and passed but didn't do herself justice (not surprisingly) but piano isn't important for her so long as she gets to the required standard before she hits the 6th form. Singing on the other hand is her second study and she needs to do very well in it. She can't just turn up and scrape a pass (right now she can't even get a sound out so 'scraping a pass might be a bit academic). :(

Temperatures
Diarrhoea and vomiting
Funerals

Tonsillitis with associated raised temp 38+ pus and pitted tonsils, migraines, infectious D and V (difficult to diagnose and most D and V isn't infectious), significant exacerbation of asthma, recovering from a significant fracture thats impairing mobility, the first 24-48 hours of a really nasty ear infection, genuine flu, any temp over 38+ thats not responding to paracetamol/ibuprofen, any nasty infection again usually with associated raised temp e.g urinary chest etc that is being treated with oral anti biotics for the first 24 - 48 hours, any infectious skin condition in particular scabies which is highly infectious, significant menorragia - uncontrolled bleeding/flooding, oncology patients undergoing chemo who have no white blood cells, anyone one with an acute exacerbation of a chronic illness e.g. arthritis ulcertive collitis etc, insulin dependent diabetics with a significant infection, significant bereavement obviously hospital appointments. Obviously there are more but these are the ones that we see often.

That's a very poor rate.

My son had regular tonsilitis in year 7 and the same in year 8, culminating in a operation and two weeks off for recovery. In the worst of those years he managed bang on 90%.

84% attendance is shockingly low if there is nothing like major long term illness going on. At my school with that attendance any day off would need a doctor's note or be marked unauthorised as the parents wouldn't be seen fit to authorise absence themselves.

Migraine would definitely be a reason to be off school. As for a cough - we have a quiet whooping cough epidemic in some parts of this country. Adults and older teens don't get it as such - they get a bad cough without the whoop and without the throwing up. But they still carry the disease. Kids between about 9-14 are NOT protected even if they have been vaccinated. The vaccine wears off, and in the UK we don't give them another booster. They do in the US (now) because they have an above the line epidemic there. My DS was off school for the whole of last half term. We don't know for sure of course but there were apparently lots of older kids at his school with dreadful coughs before Easter. Kids too old to have WC but not, obviously, too old to carry it. And transmit it. So yes, I'd say a bad cough is definitely something you should keep away from school. A couple of days off for you might save another child TWO MONTHS (plus) off.

My dd had a poor attendance rate in the last two years of school. She had some serious emotional issues and also had a few very heavy, painful periods. Could there be something going on that you haven't been told about. Agree that poor attendance is not good and can affect grades. I did not take my dd absences lightly but sometimes her staying off school was the best decision for her and the school understood this.

I would only let my dd be off school if she was ill (properly ill not sniffs) or a bereavement. She doesn't get duvet days! She has missed lessons when she has an orthodontist appointment but her braces are coming off tomorrow so I don't have to worry about that any more.