To already roll eyes at the whingy school threads..

[Ditsyprint40]

Working in a school, and being totally inundated with both serious and trivial things..

My son's school a hour away so it would be impossible to pick him up in 10 mins.

I would like to ask parents who think local cover is too much to ask for

I can't decide whether you're being deliberately obtuse or just goady to be honest.

Nobody lives in isolation not knowing their friends parents. It's easy to set up a cooperative of parents willing to cover such events.
I didn't think this would be so unappealing to parents these days, obviously I was wrong

All the parents at DD's school work......how do you suggest this magic cooperative works?

And even working from home, having a sick child means I'm not working.

To me it's the lack of consideration for the sick child, staff, teachers, other children and of course any visitors who walked through the doors to be greeted by poor child shouting for Hughie and Ralph

No. Its real life. Working parents, no support networks - fairly common on here

Stripesstpots I completely agree with what you wrote, especially about being a parent of four and two have SN not everyone has support and I definitely don't have a support network. It's just me and my hubby. I live in a beautiful and friendly village but I could never ask anyone to pick up my boys especially as they just wouldn't know how to handle them especially when I'll.

I'm so shocked at reading some of the comments that teachers have written I only hope none of my kids teachers feel the same way. I have a lot of respect for teachers as I know they are helping to shape my children's future but respect goes both ways.

I don't understand Gilly's posts. What happens when a pupil is picked up after longer than this made up time limit? There seems to be an implication that they'd be expelled?

For goodness sake gilly

Are you having trouble reading

You stated categorically that a parent unable to reach their sick child in 10 minutes was a parent that didnt care about their child

Then you changed it to 30minutes

All people have said is that they will do their best to get to their child but it will be longer than 10 minutes

I live 10 minutes away from the school as to the majority of my friends but you seem to want me to find some random who lives 2 minutes away and put them on permanent standby. And my school wouldnt just hand my child over to anyone who turned up they wanted 2/4 emergency contacts

And i know i am exaggerating...but at least i know i am exaggerating

And the worst thing is you will come off mumsnet and say to your friends that you have been on a thread full of mums who dont care ahout getting to a sick child. And you will all tut and say "mothers today".

Bet you wont mention the bit where you said 10 minutes to pick up your child

Anyway....i know you want the best for your children and other children so i will stop

Ego147

"To whom is a teacher responsible and accountable

Good question.
Personally, it's the pupils and their parents. I would hope most teachers feel that way. Teaching is such an important job and the right start makes all the difference in life.

But teachers are accountable to the Head, OFSTED and the Government. Often the needs of the pupils and parents clash with the accountability towards these people.

That is so so hard"

Thank you for answering my question.
I agree it is hard, particularly when those 'masters' have differing needs and priorities.
Some parents want you do the job of two teachers I expect.
Govt wants to pay for 1/2 a teacher.

But teachers should be accountable to the children and their parents whom they teach, morally. Legally they are accountable to their employer. It is tricky.
But I get fed up when I hear teachers slagging off parents, esp first few days of term, on the UK's biggest parenting website.

Jacques

just surprised tbh, I didn't think this happened.
I haven't been at local schools for a while, as a parent, but in the community people talk very much like it's the same, and when I visit I find likewise.
Round here it's unusual for all children in the class to have both parents working it's 50/50 or sometimes 75% sahp.
Our schools don't really have catchment areas, it's just the closest school. They are very small victorian schools and no room for sick bays, or even as a pp suggested a chair outside a room or very small office would be a fire hazard.
The Heads office is usually no bigger than a store room, certainly no room for a sofa for child to lie on.
They just got sick of having ill children and nowhere to put them.
Maybe our area is unusual then and other schools in other areas have staff and space to look after ill children.
There are certainly no staff rooms and receptionist offices, they have a small corner as you enter the buildings.

I have a good support network but they don't sit by their phones all day in case the school call My office is half an hour away but I quite often work on rural sites further away. That's life, unfortunately. You can only plan so far.

Re the collecting of a sick child.

I live a 10 min walk from my child's school.
Due to my own health issues I don't currently work outside the house.
However, H works an hour away and is not contactable by mobile at work.
I am usually around, but if sods law dictates I am at the Hospital for a couple of hours (again, mobile off) then there IS no one.
Family are 400 miles away.
Good friend in village works an hour away.
Other older 'granny type' friend in village works 3 days a week.
sometimes a quick dash to school cant be done.

I spoke to my Mother earlier and mentioned this.
She told me of my older brothers first day at school.
She worked nights as a nurse at the time.
They were very very hard up and the only alarm clock in the house (the only clock at all) was part of an electric Teasmaid affair that they'd been given as a wedding gift. The electric meter (unknown to her) had run out and she slept too late. She ended up picking him up at 5pm from a Head Teacher who 'tore her to pieces'. She says she'll never forget the humiliation of having to explain to a person who clearly didn't believe her, as her son stood crying. Nowadays that would possibly warrant SS intervention, her being so late, so perhaps she was 'lucky'. She was human. She made a mistake. She remembers it still with shame and she is 78. Parents DO care.
I remember the humiliation of not being able to go on a school trip due to not having wellingtons. In the 1970's supermarkets didn't offer cheap clothes / shoes and I simply didn't have any at that point. I remember the teacher scoffing, in front of the class, about 'a British child who didn't possess wellingtons'. My mother sent me, in her only pair of boots, 4 sizes too big, brown suede. They were ruined. The teacher pointed out my 'unsuitable footwear' to everyone and commented on 'a mother who would send her child in suede boots'. She was not a kind woman.

As teachers, you have a huge amount of power and influence in childrens (and sometimes their parents) lives. Be careful, and kind, with how you exercise it. I have also had some inspirational teachers. My children, aged 12 and 9, as yet, have not.

I always back up the school. However, do not send my child home with a 'target sheet' to be completed over the summer holidays 'or at the beginning of year 11' with absolutely non-specific suggestions such as 'ecology' or 'waves'. Do what the maths teacher did: provide a list of specific exercises to do again; or what the French teacher did, which was to provide a booklet of exercises to practice verb tenses and conjugations. If you are specific, I will support you (and my child) by getting said student to sit down and do the work. If you are not specific, you will get an irritated email from me and a request for a meeting at which I will ask you to be detailed and specific in what you expect my child to do. I value education, and the job you do - I couldn't do it. So don't expect me to know what my son should be doing to improve!

Nobody lives in isolation not knowing their friends parents. It's easy to set up a cooperative of parents willing to cover such events.
I didn't think this would be so unappealing to parents these days, obviously I was wrong

You're still wrong, and naive. The situation you describe isn't unappealing. For many people, it's very appealing, just completely unrealistic.

What your describing is a very privileged state in traditional communities which largely don't exist any more because of the realities of the economic situation we live in.

If you are not specific, you will get an irritated email from me and a request for a meeting at which I will ask you to be detailed and specific in what you expect my child to do

I agree - except they don't get an email - more of a 'tut' under the breath followed by 'what kind of stupid target is that'. Some of the targets I've seen have been so vague - I also believe in backing the school up but sometimes I just get annoyed with some of their expectations and vagueness.

I say that as a teacher - God knows what some of my pupils' parents used to say about me on the playground pre MN. Looking back, I probably pissed them off - unintentionally but I was young (ish) and naive then.

Some threads on MN have made me realise that I did make mistakes.

Dailymail - your post is so sad, but it will hopefully help people realise what happens outside their own bubble.

Re the apparent lack of professionalism in this thread:
I've been reading through it and, apart from that one post about yoghurt stains and orange trainers which was incredibly rude and a bit worrying for the children that person teaches, I haven't actually seen anything unprofessional?

I've seen a lot of general moans and complaints about trivial things but no specific naming and shaming or allusions to particular people. I'd had call this unprofessional.

Regarding the "if you hate it so much, leave" comments: you'll find quite a few teachers actually love their job. It is a fantastic feeling when you see progress, whether it's academic, social, emotional etc. But it's all the unnecessary factors that make teachers moany-
giving up holidays or weekends or evenings to laminate a billion things for displays that end up ripped to shreds after a week
marking 30 pieces of work for every lesson of a day (some schools are awful for heavy duty marking)
having to spend time looking for lost property
having endless training sessions for a constantly changing curriculum
having to in depth plan up to 25/30 individual lessons for the week ahead AND make/find resources because God forbid you photocopy a worksheet (again some schools are worse than others for this)
waking up to emails from parents demanding to know why xyz

So much of this could be avoided/condensed down if people (govt and leadership) actually had a clue.

I get that there are worse jobs out there and that a lot of people work long and difficult hours. I'm not arguing that at all. It just seems that some (not all) parents have forgotten what teachers should actually be doing.

Yy Cashewnutts. Complaining about parents and children by name would be extremely unprofessional, as would complaining about your school or colleagues in a way that allowed anyone on MN to identify them. Complaining about aspects of your job is a perfectly normal thing to do, on MN, FB or in rl.

Someone asked upthread how people would feel if she were to complain about her patients on here. Same thing applies - complaining about annoying or inconsiderate stuff that some patients do? Perfectly fine. Not unprofessional at all imo. Might make people more aware of how to make their appointments more helpful for themselves and their doctor.

Complaining about parents and children by name would be extremely unprofessional

I know a school near here where some of the teachers and the Head decided to discuss and complain about Y6 and their parents on Facebook. That didn't go down too well. Especially with their professional body. And the LEA. And the parents.

There are still school staff who don't quite get the risks of social media.

Kind of sad to read this thread, remembering vividly how it felt leaving Dd at school for the first time at literally just turned 4, and will be doing it again with DS next year. Some parents will be overprotective, some (like myself) will have major problems with depression and anxiety, or other health problems, or difficulties in their home lives, or negative memories about the own school experiences, so they may be worried/concerned about how their dcs school days will be.

I know someone who goes into the mentoring sessions he runs for student teachers at his school armed with anything he could find by searching their names on the internet, to show them how easy it would be for parents or pupils to do the same. They are always horrified but grateful for the warning.

Eolian I remember talking to someone who worked in computer security - he would spend the first half of the meeting hacking into everyone's (work) laptops then start his talk with a slideshow of their holiday picks...

I like the "well get a job closer to the school then" in regards to being available to pick up an ill child.

No can do i'm afriad, i work in child protection and i will not take a job in the borough i live in due to the nature of my job. I work in a neighbouring borough but it still takes just over an hour to get from my office to the school. If i'm in a meeting or home visit then i'll be longer, can't be helped. Or maybe i should resign from my job and be at home just incase one of my kids become unwell at school!

I live 10 mins walk from DS school, but currently heavily preg it's more like 15-20. So my choice is leave DS1 waiting a few minutes longer (bad mum!) Or possibly damage myself and/or DS2 by rushing. And that's assuming i'm at home, not at the docs or running errands - i don't drive, so it's however long it takes for the bus to come, plus the journey. No family closer than 30 mins drive, and they all work, and don't know anyone locally as we've just moved here. And i'm a SAHM, i wouldn't want to try throwing work into the mix!

gilly again, it's simply not always possible to have someone there even in 30 mins, even if they live locally to the school - because people have lives to live. They could live a 10 minute walk from the school, but if they don't happen to be home (when you were a contact did you ensure that you were at home even single school day?) then it could take a while to get there.

Personally, I am utterly aghast that this needs explaining, several times by several posters, and yet you still don't seem to get it. On that basis, you really don't seem the sharpest tool, do you? Even if you do, apparently, care more about ill children that the rest of us.

I did not expect this thread to turn out like this!!

I LOVE my job, the kids and (most) the first parents. I've had a cracking start to the week.. Actual school has been great, it was a light hearted dig at all the whingy posts I'd read on here!

The only problem I've had from school on 3 years was when they kidnapped my son. Picked him up from preschool for speech therapy that he wasn't actually enrolled in. Somebody had forgotten to cancel the paperwork.

The head wanted me to leave work to go get him, which I refused to do. Then asked for DH to do it, seeing as he was in Australia he wouldn't either. I told her they picked him up, they should return him. But they said they couldn't take him on the bus as he had missed a booster vaccine (the reason he couldn't be in speech therapy). I told her to sort it out and hung up. The head ended up calling the transport department to get permission to take him back on the bus that had picked him up, and escorted him herself. He was the only kid on the bus, so not sure who they thought he'd infect, even though a) he wasn't ill and b) he'd actually had the booster by that stage

Apart from that, no complaints!