Bradford factor makes things worse, not better

[Elendel]

I work in a school. As is the case in many schools right now, absence is ridiculously high - and it makes sense: schools are germ breeding grounds, especially at this time of year. I've had 3 absences for different illnesses so far (all last resorts, but they happened to bunch together this year - new school, new germs and all that, but you really can't work in a school with D&V or complete loss of voice).

Another colleague, who has been put on formal absence monitoring due to a relatively high Bradford factor, has recently come in with flu so bad they've had to be carted out in an ambulance. We have two teachers in the department with health conditions which mean the flu is dangerous for them, and another who looks after elderly relatives, so the fact we used the Bradford score to beat my colleague over the head with and made them come in despite severe illness means they've been put at risk.

Now it looks like I've caught the flu, too, and I, too, am considering going in. I've spent the weekend in bed with high fever (still marking work), dragged myself in the last two days, but had the shivers so bad last night I thought I was going to die. Three layers of blankets and two thick layers of clothing and I could not get warm. I'm aching and dizzy. I have a full day, meetings after school I can't miss, behaviour is horrendous right now.

And yet I'm considering going in. Because another absence would mean I'd be put on formal absence procedures, too, and I can't afford that when looking for another job.

AIBU to go in and hope I, too, am going to need to be carted out in an ambulance before someone sees how ridiculous the whole thing is?

For everyone saying things about the flu vaccine, surely you've learnt from the covid jab stuff? It doesn't stop you getting it in the first place, it's (meant to be) there to stop you from getting so poorly from it you're hospitalised or die! She'd still most likely need time off to recover from it!

As an example to the above, I've worked with businesses that trigger Bradford concern as low as 22 points. And I've also known them to use that score to help 'inform' who should be made redundant in a multiple redundancy scenario.

If a business was even going to try to use the BF number as a way to trigger a conversation, they would not use the same benchmark for all (except maybe in the first year of employment) but would instead track people's personal averages over time and trigger a chat IF they were particularly higher or lower than their specific normal trend.

But then, a decent manager would be able to do this anyway. Without the need to be sold some cheaply developed system that flashes red as a form of spoonfeeding HR.

Flu can be very serious, you can damage your health if you don't look after yourself.I have the flu as well at the moment.I send my sympathies.
Get well soon, we need you to help the children, when you are fit.Stay home

@pinotnow I'm currently at the hospital with my son on our 4th night here. I have had to take time off, no one "saying something to me" can change that. He needs me. I also think that most forms of attendance policing are crap and lacking in common sense. They pit people against each other and destroy trust and morale. If people or their dependents are ill they can't work. I'm lucky that my manager is very reasonable and as a result people don't take the piss with absence.

I'm going to defend the Bradford Factor here as I don't think it's inherently a bad thing, but it needs to be used with appropriate common sense & discretion or organisations can fall foul of the equality act.

It's great for picking up piss takers. The people who only ever have a migraine on a Monday morning, or D&V at the start of a bank holiday weekend. In a previous role, i also remember a system picked up a junior for attending his much loved Nan's funeral 3 x in 18 months.

It also picks up people with long term illnesses or compromised immunity, but if the manager doing the return to work does their job, they should use it as a well-being meeting to put in support where appropriate and to document that no disciplinary action is required.

That said, I'm very well aware that it is often misused, but I'd like to think surely a school in need of Teachers would be wiser!! Doesn't hold out much hope

@Citrusandginger I'm not against some sort of absence monitoring and in the way you have described it, it makes perfect sense.

Perhaps it's once again a case of a small minority spoiling it for everyone else. The two pisstakers I know were the kind of people off for a few weeks every half-term, in, perhaps, 50% of the time.

But my current place is dealing with that possibility in a different way already, by only allowing a certain amount of paid sick days, which increase with length of service, so tend to weed out the pisstakers early on.

@susiedaisy1912 you're right. It was unnecessarily nasty. I apologise.

I don't think teachers realise that when they complain about their T&Cs others feel aggrieved. I admit I had poor experiences with teachers who were not committed to the job and Barry in the classroom. But lots of jobs are really hard, like nursing, prison work, social care and they do not attract the same rewards OR pay.

The Bradford Factor is used to manage frequent short term absences. It is one tool and very helpful if used alongside common sense and consideration of all factors.

Having grown up children, and having worked in education but not in schools for 20 years, I appreciate common sense is often in short supply in schools and colleges.

It's ideal for people who seem to have a day off every 10 days or so because they are flaky. It isn't great for someone with endometriosis but if absences are due to that then OH should be involved and recommend that those absences are not counted or the threshold is raised. Similarly I have known people with rare cancers who have had a type of chemo on a Friday, and come in on Tuesdays once "recovered". For the year of the treatment BF scores were of course ignored.

Two way channels of communication are vitally important for suppprt to be extended.

For those mentioning 49 as the start of monitoring that is too low a threshold. The benchmark is 64.

FWIW my dd has been teaching for three years now. She has had perhaps two days of a year. She has colleagues whose absences are predictable and frequent. Everyone knows who is swinging the leg and the Bradford Factor is useful in those circumstances. A good head should be able to operate it sensitively and fairly.

My daughter has Crohn's and is currently flaring. She has frequent short absences, 1-2 days each week, often unconnected. It's because she is permanently exhausted and spikes fevers if she overdoes it.

She's also immunocompromised and I would be immensely grateful if anyone with flu, student or teacher, kept themselves at home.

What a ridiculous comment.

I'm in my 50s and have never had a flu jab and have also never had flu.

I can never understand why sickness is seen as a bad thing, and punishable by employers? We're human beings, we get sick. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. Sometimes we'll enough to power through, sometimes not.

I've dragged myself to work when unwell, spreading germs because I had been off twice already. Took me far longer to get over it because I didn't rest.

This - in much kinder, more empathetic words

I did that in 2003. Ended up with CFS was off work for 4 and a half years. Couldn't walk up the stairs some days. Still not 100% 22 years later. A very fucking shite lesson in resting up when ill with a serious virus that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

@crew2022 Teachers work bloody hard! My DC's teachers often respond to emails at 9:30pm+ saying they've just got home from work and I regularly see them arriving before 8am! Not to mention all the marking they have to do at home plus lesson planning. Without the holidays (much of which they're still in school working for!) then nobody would do the job!

I certainly couldn't do what teachers do. I'd collapse from exhaustion

@MumofCrohnie I am a teacher with crohns and I agree.

It's really short sighted for People to make catty remarks about immunity and being in the wrong job. Children become unwell. They share their germs. It's not being inclusive to insinuate people with low immunity shouldn't be in schools. It also shows children that their disabilities don't limit them job wise.

Every time we have a thread regarding teaching posters make awful comments and have literally no idea what it is like to teach in our schools at the moment.

If you wish to leave and you fear you might be up for the chop as an expensive UPS3 teacher then I don't think you need to worry about your reference.

Incidentally if you want to have a (slightly) less combative discussion next time I recommend swerving AIBU and posting in the Staffroom.

(Edited because I've just realised that this is Chat, not AIBU. It feels like an AIBU thread!)

It's such a stupid system that encourages decisions like this.

I ended up getting a 'formal warning' when I hit the automatic trigger point of 10 days off when I was hospitalised with pneumonia. It was unnecessary unkindness and "computer says" that did nothing to help my return. My friend had a ruptured cyst removed in emergency surgery and had the same. Her letter came through while she was waiting for the results to find out if it was cancer.

I have had a sickness bug and a further chest infection since and taken annual leave each time to avoid the lack of compassion that would be unleashed if I took time off sick.

This has 2 negative consequences - I have less genuine down time which is important to keep us all well and happy, and my employer doesn't actually get to monitor sickness in the workforce because it isn't documented.

What I can't understand is how the people I have worked with over a 20 plus year career, who have taken the absolute p*"' with months off for next to nothing, have seemingly been indulged and very hard to get rid of. Having ploughed on through thick and thing for years, to find myself treated like a liar for being desperately unwell, has done nothing but damaged how I feel about my employer.

I too had this virus and my family and I stopped everyone doing things out of the house for about 4 or 5 days.

I list my job in an FE college because of my Bradford score. The principal used to single people out and say I want them gone. I had a pelvic organ prolapse and had time off for that, then I got flu and finally I caught another infection and was off a third time in six months. On the day of my return my redundancy notice was served. He didn't use the sickness policy he just decided to restructure the department to remove me. But I know it was because he was furious about my Bradford score- I'd seen him do it to many others over the years because I was on SMT and he would announce who he wanted rid of at the meeting and turn to the hr director and tell her to use whatever reason she could to do it. It was a bullying culture and frankly I was glad to leave.

Bradford is used to beat up staff who are sick in education far too often. It's time to get the unions to take a stand on it.

BTW after the restructuring, my old department lost their lucrative contracts, their partners lost confidence and the restructuring resulted in way more loss than the cost of me having three bouts of sickness.

I'm glad you are not going in, you'll be ok. Stand up to your hr team and ask them what their suggestions are for dealing with illness. Look after yourself and get better, then take a stand when you return if they try the disciplinary route.

I never understand why teachers think issues like this are unique to teaching. It's the same everywhere...an excessive amount of illness will be flagged up as an issue. And for good reason...there are plenty of people who will swing the lead when there is paid sick leave available. There have to be some boundaries in place. If you are genuinely a good, dedicated teacher then they'll have conversation with you and that will be the end of it. If they have other concerns, they'll have some evidence they can use against you, because god knows it's hard to sack anyone in the public sector. And given you are typing on mumsnet you really really can't have actual flu.

@JudesBiggestFan

Flu symptoms:

• Fever*/feeling feverish or chills
• Cough
• Sore throat
• Runny or stuffy nose
• Muscle or body aches
• Headaches
• Fatigue (tiredness)
• Some people may have vomiting and diarrhea

I'm hitting every single one of those and given my colleague was diagnosed with flu at the hospital it's a fair guess. Inability to type is not listed here. I would, however, add dizziness to the point I can't see clearly and coughing to retching point and pissing myself. So yes, flu.

No one has said this is unique to teaching, so why on earth you're thinking that is beyond me. I'm having a moan about the knock-on effect the Bradford Factor had on me (since my colleague would have stayed at home NOT spreading flu hadn't he been dragged into an attendance meeting already) and is having on the wider workplace.

Not unique to teaching, either, but underestimated, is the amount of germ spreading that goes on in schools. Lack of hygiene (the amount of teens still quite happily picking their noses alone), small, overcrowded rooms, poor ventilation, poor heating, high levels of stress all significantly increase your risk of catching a disease. In addition to people sending kids in sick

I'm not a teacher, but my last workplace used the Bradford factor, and one year, I got called to HR over it - I had just had a run of bad luck- a cold where my manager had sent me home, an abscess, a couple of other things - which i think was partly becausehaving been ill, my immune system was struggling more than usual and needed building up again before i was able to battle most passing germs as i usually can - and i think this is often a problemfor people, if you've been ill, you're more likelyto be ill again.

To be fair, HR's approach was, "is there something going in you need support with?" be it a chronic illness, symptom of bad management or whatever. But if it's just used as a blunt tool - and that particularly seems to happen in workplaces where you're likely to come into contact with all sorts of people and thus diseases, such as schools and hospitals, it's just too blunt - doesn't help with infection control (I'd rather someone with a bug wasn't infecting all their colleagues by feeling they must drag themselves in.) It doesn't allow people to recover, leaving them more vulnerable to the next bug circulating, and it's poor for morale if applied with no discretion, which is likely to exacerbate illness absences.

It probably is helpful in picking up the sort of people who are often off with hangovers or just can't be arsed, but if you don't recognise those people anyway, you're not a great manager.

As the man on the telly says : ‘Thank you for your service.’

I worked for a trust which used the BF. However after a few years it was restructured to look at each case individually.
So it might trigger a meeting and each absence was looked at, mostly all it ended up with was a plan of improvement. If you weren’t off sick again within a few months it just ended. The senior HR person was great and recognised that often people get periods of repeated illness especially if you aren’t properly recovered from the last time.
It was mostly looking for the patterns of young members of staff ringing in sick on Mondays and it gave them a bit of a warning.

Honestly in all schools I worked in the vast majority of illness was long term sickness (especially kitchen staff) so BF did nothing to improve sickness records anyway.