School Lost Propery - any ideas or tricks

[BathshebaKnickerStickers]

I’ll try and keep this short but I also want to go into some detail...:)

I work in a school office - normal sized primary school - and already our lost property is building up - kids have been back 6 days.

We have reasonably priced uniform and we are happy for children to come in plain supermarket polo shirts. No specific skirts trousers etc.

We have tried various innovations to try and reduce the lost property

Keeping it for a term.
Displaying at school discos and parent’s night
Photos of items on the website every week.
Long lists of items including size and make.
Putting a list on the website of items found in a week including the replacement cost (about £300).
We have promoted label suppliers.
We have given out samples of name labels - 5 free name labels for every child in the school including nursery and incoming P1s.

We currently tag every item on the day it is found with a date 2 weeks hence. If it is not been claimed in that 2 weeks it is either recycled in fabric recycling, or any uniform items are passed to our “Take As You Need” unit where anyone can take any item they can use for free.

Previously this was 3 weeks but lost property volumes were still ridiculous.

We have made a point of telling parents to dress children for the weather - sending them in a sweatshirts and jackets in this weather just increases lost property as the kids immediately take jumpers and coats and leave them.

If any item is named and appears in list property it is immediately hand returned to the child in question.

We continually post website and newsletter reminders to name everything.

Every parent who ever reports a lost item insists it’s named but we know they aren’t because invariably named items for that child never turn up.

Is there anything else as a school that we can do..??

Is there anything your school has done that we might not have tried..?

We think that in general kids aren’t confident about to believe that the un-names aged 8-9 polo shirt is THEIR un-named aged 8-9 polo shirt, and they generally won’t collect lost property themselves. I know my own children wouldn’t pick up in names items, even if they knew what they were missing, in case it wasn’t theirs.

I work in a school office and it drives me bonkers, it hangs around for ages before we do anything with it, you're so much better than we are, we have no system at all and we go from age 2.5 to 16, parents generally feel it's my fault that they've not named their kids stuff and their kid has no clue what they've done with it!

Just say, anything lost, you don't have it but they are welcome to choose a replacement from the "spare uniform shop" for a donation to school funds. Any un named lost property will be considered a donation to the spare uniform shop.

At my old school, and at my boys school, during form time in the first week back we would have our jumpers/cardigans, ties, blazers and coats checked to see if they were labelled. If they weren't they would be named by the teacher using a fabric pen (could use a fine sharpie). That was all the easy to remove items were named and could be returned if they got lost. We used to have the person sitting next to us check the names were there so the teacher didn't have to check them all themselves.
Would something like that help?

@NotMeNoNo - I like that... it’s like what we are doing but slightly harsher...

@chrisrobin - oh I really do like that. I’m wondering if I can run that by our head teacher for the time it would take... big wombles would be fine but wee wombles would need the help of a PSA/Teacher

Labelling with a sharpie sounds great but who has the time to get loads of children to remove various uniform items so staff can label them? You can't label them while wearing them as you might get perm marker on the child or the item.

If keeping things for two weeks is creating too much backlog then go down to one week. If parents were really bothered they would label their kids stuff in the first place.

As a parent, I used to have to brace myself to go through the mountain of lost property. I agree that a very, very large amount of it is NOT NAMED! It doesn't take that long to biro/sharpie a name on to the label.

In primary, it was the sweatshirt/cardi (often used as a goalpost or similar at break and left on the field), by secondary they seem to have moved on to the sports kit.

The PTA tried selling unclaimed, un-named items very cheaply and even then parents were reluctant to buy it. I have no solution but they did dispose of stuff, they simply didn't have the space to keep it!

@chiccroissant - that’s our problem- we have so much that it seems such a waste. I bring the good uniform things home, wash them and pop them in the free things unit because we hate wasting things that we know other people can use. We’ve had north face jackets and Zara coats - unclaimed for months.

And that’s before we even mention snack boxed of rotten fruit and mouldy lunchboxes (I pop them through the staff room dishwasher but again, they are never named or claimed)

@haveuheard - I have to say it wouldn’t work for my kids because they wear a clean polo shirt every day so catching it on one day would achieve nothing. (Of course everything we own is named).

Sounds like you’re doing all you can and must be wealthy area if they can afford to lose north face coats!
Stuff here disappears - poof! Never seen again. It’s a Bermuda Triangle...

It’s a strange area as we genuinely straddle all of very affluent/pretty normal/some genuinely deprived areas with refugees and new immigrants

Our PTA sell unclaimed uniform, it worked particularly well when aimed at new parents (of students just about to start at the school).

As I left school today there were 4 unnamed jumpers in my ‘jumper dumper’ which is where I put lost property for 1 day before it shifts to the main list property. I held each one up but apparently they don’t belong to anyone. One wee soul had a sniff of a few and identified one as John’s’ from the aroma. I think he’s part boy part beagle.

Labels are expensive. It’s just cost me £20 for a set of sticker labels for my three DC... Seemed steep to me. I think iron on ones are slightly cheaper but who can be arsed.

Surely though uniform is also expensive....for want of a label a £15 sweatshirt or a £30 jacket was lost.....

I’m happy to decipher sharpie on a label, anything at all - initials written with a sharpie will ensure jumper is returned to child. Nothing at all is what I have piles of...

Turn the heating off so it's too cold to take off your jumper!

I think labelling it yourself at. School could be a slippery slope. 'Oh, you don't need to label if you are going to St Joan's, they do it all'. And then you will be blamed if stuff gets lost. At least now it's not your fault if it's lost. In fact, I think you should do less about it not more.

I think your teachers (and I am one) need to make sure the dc have their jumpers as much as they can before they go home. In some classrooms there isn't anywhere the dc can put their jumpers when they take them off so naturally it's chaos. Children need to hang their coats on their pegs by the loop, not the hood so they are more likely to stay on the pegs. Is there anything more your lunchtime staff could be doing?

I'm a parent volunteer who is trying to help with exactly this problem at our school.

I cannot believe how many parents send their kids in blue jumpers that every other child also wears and doesn't label them!

I now wash and dry and iron it all and sell it for a £1 a piece. I made £80 for the school at the summer fair doing it. (after it's been out at parents evening on a table for parents to look through. The lost property bin is also in the playground so that any child or parent can check it in the morning or after school).

Anything precious (prescription glasses), or labelled, I send back to the office.

@shitwithsugaron - we absolutely would never have thrown away your bunny.

The 15th abandoned nameless cardi maybe but never anything as precious as that

5 jumpers appeared today. And 2 hair bands. And an exercise tracker