Re DS dunking child at swimming

[sezamcgregor]

DS is Y2. They are going swimming with school. It's on Thursday afternoons. There are 24 in his class.

The class is known to be "lively" with "lots of big characters". School have also identified Thursday and Friday afternoons to be hard work as children are becoming tired and harder to keep concentration.

So, children split into two groups of 12:

Group A - Non swimmers, armbands on in shallow end, swimming teacher plus two school staff members

Group B - Swimmers (can swim without armbands) at the deep end, swimming teacher

Two incidents occur towards the end of the lesson, one of which is DS pulling a child under the water as he over took her.

Pulled over by Head Teacher today and put forward my mitigation that a) there was one person to 12 children who school know can be challenging b) it was Thursday afternoon which school know is a difficult time slot.

HT totally dismissed my comments.

She said that she will also be speaking to the swimming instructor as she should have alerted school staff earlier that she could not cope with the group. (Surely school staff would have noticed if she were not coping and offered to help??)

DS is missing next week's swim as a consequence - which is fine. I have no problem with that and agree that there should be a consequence.

But AIBU to think that she needs to look at the whole picture? I have a kind of "well, what did they expect to happen" view of it

OP you're making an assumption that anyone who posted unsympathetically has 'normal' children.

I posted upthread, perhaps not very sympathetically, and I do have a child with behavioural problems. My life is not easy. I stand by the comments I made regarding this situation, but I really do hope you are able to get to the root of the problems with your ds and get the support you need. I know that being the parent in the playground who gets the 'looks' is crap.

sez that's not right. The IEP should be written with your input.

Good luck with SN diagnoses op but in the meantime you really need to stop blaming others for your sons behaviour. My ds was very similar to what you describe, no boundaries, no concern for consequence etc. I took him to docs, children's centre, nspcc, psychologist and he had one on one sessions with a behaviour specialist.

Never diagnosed with anything, kicked out of mainstream school at 14. There have been issues with drugs, police, alcohol and theft and I still find myself defending him, he blamed others and I believed him and defended him. It didn't help me.

fwiw I think that one adult to 12 children, given their ages, is wrong. My dcs have lessons at a local pool, the usual ration in each group at their level (ages 5 -7) is 2 swimming teachers to a max of 8 children.

Bloody hell.

Have people lost sight of the fact that this is a six year old child who already needs extra supervision in class, and is currently awaiting an appointment with a paediatrician? And that is quite aside from the fact that there was clearly little enough supervision around a swimming pool that one child was able to push another in the pool and another could pull one under the water....

No, dunking another person under water is not acceptable. But children older than six and even adults have been doing it to each other for years. Most swimming pools have life guards for a reason – not just to rescue drowning people but to ensure that people behave responsibly in and around the water which invariably, many do not. Those signs around swimming pools which read “no running, no diving, no pushing others into the pool,” are there not because of toddlers who cannot yet be expected to behave responsibly and can’t read the signs anyway, they are there for people (not all of whom are children) who often behave stupidly in and around water.

The child was disciplined, the other child did not drown, it shouldn’t have happened but it did. And one of the reasons why it happened was because a group of children who should have been supervised were in a swimming pool without adequate supervision. The behaviour of the children should never have been allowed to escalate to a level where children were pushing each other into the water and pulling others under the water – it should have been calmed right down way before that could happen.

Yes the op’s ds was responsible for what he did, but the school were responsible for ensuring all children were being adequately supervised in the water, and they failed in that responsibility.

The vitriol being directed at the op here is apawling.

The trouble is there isn't a bottomless pit of money to provide for support assistants. The HT has mentioned the only way to give ds a support assistant is to take one away from other children, and it sounds, as you say, that it was a situation where the class was out of control, it wasn't a case of a child who is unable to access the usual, well managed situation on any day without additional support. It's also very difficult to work out timetables for a school and work out appropriate slots - it probably isn't the school's fault that that class's slot is a Thursday and now its apparent that Thursdays is a bad day for the class. Plus that class as a whole need to learn how to handle this situation and behave safely - that's stage one of teaching swimming. It's good to hear he managed well at swimming last year, that suggests he can learn to this year too.

The first stage would seem to be to structure and manage the class differently if the current structure is too loose. I've taught some very challenged kids with a wide range of needs often in whole class groups, including swimming, and the first thing I'd be doing is structuring that lesson to the nth degree and if need be with less kids in the pool at a time so that they can be better spread out, and I can keep the most challenged/unpredictable children right beside me at all times. A bath mat and a warm towelling dressing gown for any child who needs to come out of the pool and sit by an adult unless they are having their turn. And I'd be explaining to the kids needing that structure that they will get more time in the pool and more freedom when they show me they are ready to handle it, exactly what I need to see them do in terms of good choices and how many times I need to see it. A 'trust jar' can work quite well, where you add something like a cotton wool ball into a clear jar for every good choice and action of self control and the fuller the jar the most trust/ freedom the child has earned, but an irresponsible or dangerous choice empties that jar immediately and those freedoms have to be re earned by a lot of consistent good choices. You want the child to realise trust equates with exciting things they get to do and takes a lot of time to earn, and is lost completely with an unsafe choice. Those are some strategies you can suggest if you think the class as a whole are not behaving well and ds is spiraling because of that; the school SENCo may also have more.

Yes absolutely ds needs praise and building up as he learns to manage his impulses and develop his social skills, and there are lots of chances for that during the school day. But a whole class swimming lesson, like using PE apparatus or going out on a trip, has to focus first on the number one priority of everyone staying safe.

It's not about their ages Sharon, it's their standard. If they're at the deep end, they are presumably stage 3 or 4 ish, and 12 - 1 should be fine. Not ideal but legally fine.
I don't think it's great that a half of the 6/7 yr olds in this class are still in armbands though. (Sorry, slight tangent)

SEZ you absolutely should have input in the IEP. And it absolutely should already be done.

Please come over to the SN boards. There are loads of people over there that can assist you with this that have been through it and can offer loads of good advice.

FWIW, my 8yo is disabled and has an IEP. The school sat down with me with their "rough copy" of the IEP so we could discuss it and make any alterations, then they finalised it and sent me a copy. My 5yo has some SNs, I discussed what things I wanted on the IEP with the Senco, who then discussed that with the teacher and then wrote up the IEP to include the things we discussed. At any point, if I feel there are problems with it, or things need to be changed, both schools are happy to discuss it further and make whatever alterations are needed. One school is mainstream, the other is specialised school.

You don't need to give excuses to the head teacher, you need to control your child.

How is the op able to control her child while he is swimming with school?

To me your posts are so sad OP. For both your son and all children with AN, because you don't seem to give to give him any credit or capacity for change or growth in terms of his behaviour. There are very few children who cannot understand any of the implications or outcomes of there behaviour at all, and these are the children who receive the highest level of specialised assistance (BIL 2 works in the field) You say you don't want the school to write him off, but that's what you seem to be doing, by throwing up your hands and blaming everyone. If you push key parties like the teachers away with rudeness, your son will struggle even more. If you do not apologise to children and parents when things happen you will isolate your son. Please don't.

op isn't claiming that her ds can't 'understand any of the implications or outcomes' of his behaviour' though is she? If her ds does have additional needs he may process his experiences differently to NT children, so shouting and telling him off may well not be of any help at all. Which I think is what the op is trying to say.

I must have read the thread differently.

Agreed agiant unfortunately though she's new to the extremely complex world of children with additional needs and has not yet learned to articulate her instincts towards knowing her child is struggling and what the best way to deal with him is, despite popular opinion in how these things should be dealt with. For that she has been harangued and attacked by various posters that seemed to be thoroughly overexcited at the opportunity to do so.

I haven't attacked the OP

Yes Nicki it takes me right back to when my ds was the same age...

Oh dear. I wonder what's changed at the school for the ht and other teachers to have developed this collective amnesia/ massive change in approach?

I think it would be worth getting a meeting with the ht to find out what's going on. It sounds like there has been a policy change or some kind of decision specifically that has changed their approach.

You need to know why you're suddenly banging your head on a brick wall.

I don't think you're 'playing the game' very well, and doing due diligence to showing you are concerned by bad behaviour and support the school. Only then can you move past it onto the 'real conversation' that needs to happen.

I suspect the ht is reacting similiarly to some people on this thread. Getting more and more angry and outraged that you won't take responsibility for your sons actions, as you're more concerned with the bigger point behind it.

It's not particularly fair, but I'd be trying to play this tactically. Suck ot up (one kore time), and do the due diligence, and get that door open to have the bigger conversation...

Parent of very challenging child here… The strategy in this situation is not to accuse the swimming teacher or try to mitigate what your son did in any way. It’s to apologise profusely, promise to give your DS the required bollocking, and then ask whether the HT thinks he needs more supervision in the swim class?

Ducking is very unacceptable and if your DS does it again he might not be allowed to continue the school class. It’s a real safety concern. My DS coped in school swimming because the whole class was very well disciplined and the swim teacher’s word was law. I suppose I naively assumed all school swim lessons were like that! I am shocked that this is not an isolated incident and that another child has been pushed in (not by your DS). It seems to me that the HT is quite right, the swimming teacher is not managing the class properly. At least it doesn’t sound as if the HT is blaming you.

And my DS needed one-to-one for a very long time before he matured enough to have the same control as the average Y2. It’s why some SN are referred to as “developmental delays”. Being given the one-to-one when he needed it made it possible for him to join in with other kids and develop the skills he needed so he could take advantage of the self control when it came. He doesn’t need one-to-one any more.

(I also think you might be better off talking on Special Needs, we “get” this stuff over there! )

I don't think they're "mitigating circumstances". They're things which need to be avoided so that dangerous silliness doesn't happen (though timetabling fun physical activity for times when kids are getting bored is very common and I doubt you'll get much sympathy for suggesting Thursday pm is maths instead), but there is never a mitigating circumstance for a child deliberately attacking another child.

What your son did was awful. Now how can you work with the school to make sure it doesn't happen again?

are the two members of staff in the pool on on the side. If the latter surely they are giving equal supervision to each group. If your child is impulsive then it makes no odds how many are in the water , he could still have dunked her. Agree his behaviour was dangerous and missing one week would make no odds , he'll probably have forgotten by the next lesson and may not even be able to control himself. Your thing about Thursday afternoons being tricky is a red herring though , he's in year 2 not nursery. Focus on his behaviour and assessments rather than making excuses.

It has taken me ages to read this thread but I wanted to post just to say that the OP did not deserve the pasting she got.

Well done for sticking with it OP I'm glad to see that on the whole the thread has sobered up and you are getting constructive support.

And for those of you have directed nothing but vitriol at the OP, just because a post is in aibu does not automatically mean a bun fight, draw in your claws and remember that there is a human asking for help.

I just wanted to say a ratio of 1 to 12 is not enough, regardless of incidents. My children go to a swim club and if it goes above 1 to 8 it's really not good at all, children are waiting around too long and the teacher spends more time disciplining. That's not to say the teachers aren't good, they are excellent, but I'm not sure real learning is taking place if there's 1 to 12 and lots of waiting and shouting.

Okay. Let's at least clarify this. None of us knows the OP's son personally, so I will give an example with my ds to explain.

Ds1 is 8yo. They go to swimming through his school. He has a 1:1 that literally is by his side the entire time, even in the water. If he didn't, he would be all over the place. He is impulsive, sensory overloaded at the pool due to the water/the noise/the movements around him/the acoustics/the drive to the pool/the changing room and so on. He doesn't understand that pulling or pushing someone under might hurt them. He certainly doesn't understand drowning. He might briefly understand that someone could be hurt, but a few minutes later if an impulse strikes he might do it again, especially if others are doing it or he is encouraged by others nearby. At that point, the only thing bobbing about in his head is that impulse - the possible consequences, possibility of someone being hurt, that is All. Gone. It is all about the impulse.

And while we're working on this, I couldn't guarantee that he won't do this. And that is precisely why he has a 1:1 next to him at all times - for the safety of others, and for his own safety as he also struggles with walking instead of running around the pool area and other impulsive behaviour. He is not mean - he would never intentionally hurt someone, and if he did accidentally hurt someone, he would be devastated and express being sad and sorry. But five minutes later... it's gone and he is right back at square one again....

Now whether or not the OP's son is at this level, I don't know. But those that are going on that he just needs to LEARN, need to understand that you're not looking at it the right way. Right now he needs to be MANAGED and SUPERVISED while he's being taught and while he's trying to learn. Because it may be awhile before he a-learns and b-retains that info.

All children are not the same.

Being realistic about a child's behaviour under certain circumstances - and pointing out there are ways to prevent poor behaviour happening - is NOT the same as "blaming" teachers for it! Surprised so many posters are not seeing that . Hope your ds gets the help he needs, OP.

Swim classes in our area are 1 to 12. Long established council classes. Its perfectly normal ratio, the same teachers do the school classes. 3 teachers for class of 30. Ds class most were deep end swimmers so was nearer 15 to 1 for them. Very boy heavy class who not always best behaved. First couple of lessons not good but foot put down from great height and they were much betterr afterwards.