To think that schools should log incidences of fighting/ punching in infant school

[ReallyTired]

I realise that young children often struggle to manage their feelings. Maybe it would be a real pain for the dinner ladies to record every time that small boys play fight. I feel that proper record keeping would enable the school to know which children are potential bullies, being bullied or have regular anger issues or need help with social skills.

Do you know exactly what happened? Were you told of these incidents by a member of staff or by your daughter, as young children are notoriously unreliable reporters? Quite often one child will bump into another and the receiver will believe they have been punched. Not

odyssey2001
It is hard to know "exactly what happened" if there is no log of an incident. The fact that children aren't always truthful is all the more reason to log incidences. If a child comes home with a big fat lip then something must have happened to cause it.

If a child comes home with a fat lip it definitely should be recorded in accident book. Thats standard practice. Children don't always tell us though. Incidents can be missed. But you could never record every single disagreement. That would be impossible.

I am not expecting dinner ladies to record every single disagreement. Disagreement can be a healthy part of life. If a child substains an injury then the parent has a right to an explaination.

Yes definitely. That should have happened.

Totally and utterly BU. Next we'll be asked for CCTV recordings sent home on a daily basis so parents can see absolutely everything.
Our setting also logs significant incidences and the professionals are trusted to use their professional judgement to decide whether it's significant or not. Sometimes we even notice something and speak to the parent about it at the end of the day without writing a single thing down on a piece of paper! And we expect our parents to trust us in the exercise of our professionalism. And in the main, those parents actually do trust us. Yes, sometimes we might make a mistake, but this is exceptional rather than the norm.
If those of us working in schools logged everything that SOME parents expected we'd never actually do any teaching and your children would never do any learning.
And to suggest you can somehow predict future bullies by keeping such logs is utterly absurd. No amount of logging is going to prevent bullying, if your child is being bullied, do the reasonable thing and go and speak reasonably to the reasonable people, and in most cases really very compassionate and caring people who spend all day doing their best looking after your children, follow the processes and work together to resolve the problems.

(Apologies for the OTT sarcasm, but some of the expectations here are just utterly ridiculous. But I do love the voices of reason & sense!)

Time, I think you're missing a few key points there.

OP's child was punched in the mouth. If the supervisor's professional judgement was that that was not a significant incident, well, I think the supervisor made the wrong judgement in this case. Injuries should be logged.

A playground supervisor might think a particular incident was just a play fight and someone accidentally got hurt. But if a teacher had also logged the same aggressor "accidentally" hurting the same child on Monday, and the other supervisor had seen them wrestling last week, you start to build up a pattern that this needs to be taken further. You can't make that professional judgement without all the information, and if you only know what happened today you don't have the full information.

And of course if we know our children are being bullied we'll speak to the staff. The difficult bit is if our children don't tell us. Whether like my DS who didn't realise that someone trying to fight him in the playground every day wasn't just something he had to deal with. Or because they can't tell us because they're SN. Or because they don't think we can help. Or because it's real bullying and the bully has threatened them to keep them quiet.

Lots of schools have CCTV, especially secondary schools. I wouldn't mind if my daughter's school had CCTV. It protects both staff and children. Schools tend to have bully hot spots and CCTV is like an extra pair of eyes.

Due to my ineptness, I didn't read the subsequent info, and yes agree a punch to the mouth should have been dealt with and logged. Injuries don't always appear immediately, such as swollen lips which might explain non recording. However, a deliberate act should go somewhere, and parents informed, and some form of logging, either accident book, behaviour incident book, parent conversation record, doesn't matter which really. Outcomes also shd be recorded.

But, the people who look after your children can not record everything, that just isn't a realistic expectation. And if they do, you need to accept that other aspects of their work will deteriorate. Parents do need to trust.

Of course it should have been logged, reported and dealt with. It's a significant injury. Just boggling that anyone would think other wise. Op, ask tosp speak to the head teacher.