to think a school should be able to look after a child for over an hour?

[pingu2209]

More of a "is my friend being unreasonable" or the school?

A mum friend of mine has a career job but can't afford a nanny. A nanny would cost all of her salary. She uses the before and after school club. She works 1 hour away and her husband works 1 1/2 hours away from school. She was phoned up and asked to come and collect her son as he had a temperature and a rash.

She said, "okay I will be there in about 1 1/4 hours." The school office said, "well we need you here asap, can you get someone to come in the next 10 mins?"

My friend said, "no, I don't have any family living near by and I am uncomfortable asking a friend to pick up my son who is ill and may be contagious."

The school said to her, "you need to have an emergency contact who can get here in under 10 mins."

She replied, "well that would be great in an ideal world, but we are not from here and have no family. A friend would pick up if I was running late, but as all my friends here have children, I can't ask them to pick up my son who is ill. I am just over an hour away but the longer I am on the phone to you the longer I will be. I need to make a couple of calls to cancel meetings etc. I can't just run out, I need about 15 mins just to close up my desk etc."

I understand that a school is there to educate our children, it is not childcare or a 'sick room'. However, surely they need to understand that if both parents are working and they don't have a nanny, one of them will be along as soon as possible.

Who is being unreasonable?

howabout - I completely disagree, and your logic only strenghtens my argument. My partner is a teacher and (obviously) a parent, so therefore (using my logic) is entitled to leave work if our child is sick. That's not "logic", it's law. It's called Parental Leave (look it up).

Ultimately, my partner and I have ultimate responsibility for our children, not the school.

I think the school is being unreasonable.

As someone said above, what did schools do before the days of mobile phones...?

The mother said she would get there as soon as she could. Even if there was a possibility someone could have collected her child it probably would have taken the same time to phone around trying to find someone.

It's inconvenient for the school to have a sick child there but really there must have been somewhere quiet for him to sit and wait...? And I agree, if he was really that bad an ambulance could have been called.

It's unreasonable to expect a working parent to find a job closer to school just in case their child needs to be picked up. Unless your child has a chronic condition it's not that often they need picking up sick from school.

The teachers I know work more than 10 mins away from the schools their children go to. A lot more than 10 mins.

Smiler what sanctions do you suggest for children with parents who cannot be there in 10 mins?

I agree SardineQueen. And I am a bit shocked that so many people seem to think an hour or over is an unusually long commute. I don't live in London and although some people have short communtes, some have very long.

Jobs are not easy to get at the moment. I actually know a few families where the father is having to work away Monday to Friday because they can't find anything within commuting distance. An hours commute would be a luxury for them.

In our area schools are heavily oversubscribed, and many people have been given schools much more than 10 mins from where they live.

The selfish pigs.

I know at least 3 families where the dad is away for the week as well, because of not being able to find anything reasonable near to home.

Why do many schools still assume some kind of stereotypical 1950s set up as default?

SardineQueen - you clearly haven't seen my earlier post which agreed that 10 mins was "absurd", have you?

many of the parents at my dd's school work at an organisation with security procedures that mean that it takes more than 10 minutes to get out of the building at the end of the day.

only 4 of the mums in dd's class are SAHMs (and no SAHDs). One is disabled, two live out in the country, and that just leaves me - I could get there in 10 mins at this time of year but not if it is winter and I have to get the kids togged up.

10 mins is a really big ask.

School is being unreasonable.Lots of parents have long commutes or jobs they can't just walk out of .Woukd you want your lawyer to walk out in the middle of your case, or your surgeon to walk out in the middle of your operation?

Equally if you want people to keep children off school the day after they've been sick then the schools should stop handing out certificates for 100% attendance and going off in one when children are sick a few days a year and ruin the charts on the ofsted report.

I don't think that schools are asking for people to give up their jobs, work nearer home, be on a coat-hook all day awaiting a call. I think they are reasonable in expecting parents to have some sort of back-up provision for their children if the child takes sick at school. Particularly if that child is infant school age. I don't think that's too much of an expectation.
Most schools usually ask for 2 other contacts for situations such as this.

As for the '10-minute' thing - surely just another way of saying please have someone collect the child as soon as you can (and sooner rather than later).

Its pretty often that there wouldn't be someone to pick ds up in under an hour tbh. We don't have any family to help, and though dh and I are both home based workers we are often out on site elsewhere. Our only local friends work ft, and its not as easy as 'inviting people for playdates' as the whole working thing means that those don't happen.

If you have emergency contacts, then maybe its easy to hoik your judgey pants, but for many of us its really hard to find people who you can ask that sort of thing of

Have skimmed the majority of the thread but just to add this has happened to me too. The very small school my DS goes to knows I am a single parent and they know I work in another county (so an hour's commute) on a couple of occasions they have phoned me saying he was unwell and to pick him up, followed by tuts and bemusement at why I couldn't be closer etc. However one time I ended up losing it as they had really put the guilt trip on nice and thick about how far away I was, for me to rush back, deal with horribly stressul traffic, nearly crash and only to find he had gone back to class as he was 'feeling better'!

To say I was furious was an understatement.

Oh good grief-do people really really think that the "10mins" was meant to be taken literally?

SybilBeddows - me too. I work 10 mins away from DD's school but it takes me at least half an hour to get off the premises. That always confuses the school/nursery since they know I'm only in the next village!

The point is juuule that not all parents have someone closer who they can ask to pick up a child in this situation.

As I've said in a previous post - 10 mins is absurd. I think 30 minutes it reasonable though.

The bottom line is - most schools (and I'm talking about Primary here) DO NOT have the resource to lose a member of staff for up to an hour. I'm sorry - but that's the reality of the situation. Now - you can blame who you want (I'd start with the Government personally) but, schools don't enforce this "for a laugh" or to be difficult, or to make you feel like a bad parent. The school has a job to do - TEACH. It becomes very difficult to do this when (typically) in a school of 80 -100 children, it's not unusual for 2 or 3 children to be ill at any one time, and need picking up. Imagine the drain on resources if none of those parents could get to the school for 2 or 3 hours?

"I'm very sorry Mrs Smith but little Jonny didn't learn that much today because the TA in his class was looking after a poorly child for 3 hours".

As a parent - would you be happy about that?

Ishani - I completely agree with you - regarding attendance.

Smiler - No-one is asking for a member of staff to nurse a child. But why can't they sit quietly in the office with the school secretary as they used to do in the past.

Secretary usually minds sick kids at our school

lesely33 - NO!!! That's the problem. In Primary, it needs to be someone the child knows (imagine they're upset) so either a teacher or a TA. Those days of just sitting in a dark corner of the secretarys office are gone. It also needs to be a first aider for H&S reasons.

"In The Days Before Mobiles"...schools still had a long list of numbers to call. I remember being horrifically bullied by a teacher just after my parents split up as my form teacher INSISTED they MUST had a phone number for my father...we didn;t have a phone number for him at the time and he was living and working 250 miles away....but she insisted on asking me every morning in front of the whole class until my Mum went to the school.

They still needed numbers of my Mum, her work, a neighbour, some other relatives - even though the nature of my family meant my Mum was always my emergancy contact ONLY as she was only ever goping to be at home or at work (both in the same small town) - however they insisted they needed around 5 contact numbers including a compulsoty number for both parents.

fairydoll - that might hapen in your school but, it's not OFSTED practice for that to happen. The school (is it Primary?) will have to fulfill a Pastoral function which is measured by Ofsted, and simply "leaving them to sit in the Secretarys office" isn't really acceptable......

I used to be an emergency contact for friends when I was a SAHM, but now that I work, I'm not, and I don't expect them to be contacts for me either. Fortunately, I'm not far from school (we live in a small city), but my emergency contacts are now just me and DH. No family close by.

I've not encountered a 10 minute rule. It seems to be that you get there as soon as you reasonably can, and that might mean finishing off something important, cancelling a meeting, letting your boss know you're leaving, etc. Both my primary school and secondary school have a sick bay close to the reception desk so admin staff can pop in and out to check.