or have I just had an unbelievable conversation with the school (primary) Welfare & Attendance Officer?

[scaleymcnamechange]

Basically, she said the school will not send a letter home to all parents reminding them about the 48 hour rule for vomiting and/or diahorrea, because, ultimately, the external attendance & welfare inspectors will give the school a hard time for it.

Is this ridiculous or am I being unreasonable for thinking it is?

What prompted me to call the school office was standing in the playground today listening to another mum cheerfully telling me her son "must have a bug" because he threw up last night. There he was lining up to go in to class ...

We are not allowed any days out of school for holidays. I wonder if this is why the school has a bad "sickness" record and why they refuse to do anything which could be seen to be encouraging further absence?

Hmmmmmmm.

Our school is OTT with the letter sent home about absences. One of them was about how they would be checking up on absences at end/beginning of terms (like they haven't got better things to do than chase parents whose children miss half a day at the last day of term).

Anyway, because of the tone of the letters which was quite intimidating, I send dd1 (then Y1) to school against my better judgement on the last day of term even though she said she didn't feel well and didn't eat her breakfast. Cue phone call at 10.30am that she had vomited all over the classroom and herself. I feel so angry with myself and also the school as well for making me question my right as a parent to keep a sick child home.

THey really need to get a balance right. Sure, children habitually absent or who go on extended holidays are putting their education at risk but it all seems to have gone too far.

Absence is absence whether it's authorised or not. Ofsted don't particularly care either way at the moment and TBH the likelihood is that if a school is tackling their poor attenders head on then the unauthorised rate will go up because you can't send a penalty warning notice if you keep authorising the absences.

I deal with absence in school, I'm also the parent of a child with a chronic medical condition so have sympathy for both sides. School have to tackle poor attenders, they have no choice so if you're happy that you're fulfilling your responsibility to have you child attend regularly, that they're genuinely ill when you keep them off and you don't take the piss with appointments and holidays then you have nothing to worry about.

"if you're happy that you're fulfilling your responsibility to have you child attend regularly, that they're genuinely ill when you keep them off and you don't take the piss with appointments and holidays then you have nothing to worry about."

All well and good - but what is to be done about children with v and d being sent in to school?

This doesn't surprise me, DS school gives 100% attendance certificates, which I always praise him for but vehmentently disagree with them. DS had 1/2 day off once to have a tooth pulled under local aneasthetic at 4yo and missed out on the certificate. To me that sends the message that him being in school would have been 'braver, than what he went through. He's had other time off too but this wasthe case where I thought .

We tell parents when they're called to collect dc with d&v that they can't return until 48hrs after they are well again and so the earliest they can return is x day. Some come back that day but at least its not the next day.

YANBU - I kept my DD at home today due to her being sick overnight. She seemed ok this morning but I didn't want to pass it onto anyone else.

I think it's a bit daft if clearly the child does not have an infectious disease and is being kept out of school not on the advice of doctors, but on the advice of some sort of putative d and v quarantine blanket ban.

I would even go so far as to suggest this may breach the DDA if the child has a chronic medical condition lasting a year or more and is missing a lot of school arbitrarily because the school is unnecessarily inflexible.

But we have to be glad we are not in Germany. There you get banned for 10 days on the evidence of a single nit, I am told.

How are parents meant to know about this, if the school don't inform them?

I had never, ever heard of this until I came across it on here.

scaley - I'd be asking why they have a 48 hour policy if they're not going to stick to it. And frankly no Ofsted or EWO I've ever met has questioned a 48 hour rule. YANBU.

I thought it was 24 hours after last vomit as standard advice? oops Just sent DD2 back to school after 24 hours.

One should certainly not be sending one's kid in to share their bug less than 12 hours after they've last puked.

Surely attendance is split? On any report I've seen it's always distinguished into 2 groups - authorised (ie illness) and unauthorised (ie mitching / holidays). Is not this the way to get round it?

Yes, but they will still want leeway to fiddle some of the unauthorised into the authorised .... won't they ?

When we had Ofsted in last year, the person at school in charge of keeping the attendance records had a massive grilling about every child whose attendance was under 90% She had a little interview about each child, even the little girl with leukaemia.

Oh, YANBU, btw!

Attendance is split but it's the overall % that concerns the school. If it's under 95% then school can only get a 'satisfactory' from Ofsted in that respect. Authorised absence affects the % in the same way as unauthorised.

Yes gapbear is right we have to show how we are tracking indiviual children with poor attendance. But it's also importsnt to show how you are supporting parents who have genuine issues.

Don't even get me started on attendance!
Last december my DS missed all of the month because of his asthma. All the time he was off his younger brother was still attending so it wasn't a case of we couldn't be bothered to get the older one to school. In the january letters were sent home to individuals about low attendance of which we didn't get one.
Then in tha april after my DS had attended school for 99% of the previous term we get a letter about his low attendence. My OH went ballistic at the headteacher about the suitability of sending an attendance letter to a child who missed everything in the run up to christmas because he was so ill and who nearly spent christmas in hospital.
We received a personal apology from the headteacher because she had used her discretion in the january to not send a letter but that discretion had slipped through the net in the april. We also pointed out that the attendance letter discriminated against those with an ongoing condition/illness. She didn't like the use of the word "discrimination".

Sorry to hijack the thread. It still rankles even a year later.

With regard to time off after D&V. My DC go to 4 different schools of which 2 say 48 hours after and 2 say 24 hours after.

"I think it's a bit daft if clearly the child does not have an infectious disease" - how do you know that your child does not have an infectious disease if they have puked or had diahorrea?

I have never been able to tell. Would that I could, to save the fretting over the rest of us getting it!

Surely 99% is only one school day off per term? How mad to send out low attendance letters for one day off- particularly when even fairly minor conditions like a common cold might require two days off!

His attendance for sept-march was at 86% because of his time of in december but the term Jan-April he only missed 2 days because he throw up and had to stay home because of the 48 hr rule.
One lad who had his tonsils out came out with 2 letters on the same day. 1 for his low attendance the winter term and 1 for 100% attendance the spring term.

If it's been going on 9 months, as with the other poster. GP could run stool tests and tule out infection. But it sounds as though the school would still exclude, which would be wrong as it may be things like the cilia in the gut causing a problem or a food intolerance, coeliac disease or whatever (I imagine).

time off in december

Schools do this with teachers attendance too. I know a teacher who had an operation which had complications. She ended up in intensive care. She was threatened with disciplinary action for not handing her sick note personally. Her husband had to take in pictures of her connected to the ventilator and take the head t visit her in hospital before they backed off. It's all about statistics and stuff the people.

I agree that allowing infectious children into school will increase the absence rate as it will only serve to infect more children.

We had a very bad time over attendance when dd was in junior school. They had had letters from the GP, the paed, the clinic, the school doctor- all explaining that dd's absences were unavoidable due to her chronic condition. That still didn't stop them from calling us into the school for endless lecturing about attendance and the value of education, it did not stop the head from calling in Social Services or from making snide remarks on her school reports. Or from marking dd as absent when she was being educated in the hospital school- which the school knew about. His take was "Yes we know Corydd is ill but you can't expect us to be happy about it". If you have a chronically ill or disabled child, the least you can do is to feel guilty

(mind you, he also made remarks about absenteeism on the reports of dd's friends who had been given an authorised holiday to spend with their terminally ill mum )

They have improved slightly, but ds' report from last year keeps repeating that his performance is affected by his poor attendance without a single word to explain that there is a medical reason behind it (same chronic condition). We complained, but never got an answer to our letter. So presumably the report he takes up to secondary school next year will give the same impression.