Aibu to think headmistress is living in la la land?

[Maxandrubyrubyandmax]

Get out of a 30 min meeting at work 5missed calls on mobile and my secretary comes rushing over at same time land line calls. Headmistress from ds school. DS has run into post and banged his nose. Can I get there immediately. Apparently DS is fine but we have to pick him up. Explain I will be about 45 min as need to pack up and get train and walk to school. DH about an hour away. Quizzed about couldn't a grandparent pick up
DS (no the nearest is 2 hours away). Didn't we have friends? Yes but it's not 1955 so they all work? Other relatives? No they live miles away and yes they work. Set off to school. Head mistress rings DH goes through same questions. As no one has moved house in last 5min gets same answer. Get to school. DS sat chatting to school secretary happy as you like. Head mistress goes through same questions nope still no one hAs moved or given up job in last 45 min. But there must be someone says the head. Well no actually there isn't. But she wants someone who can be at school in 5 min. Start to get pissed off. No one I tell her. She then shakes her head and says I guess that's how it is these days then. Aibu to be pissed off and felt judged about the fact I have moved away from the family home, got a job and don't just drop off child and sit at home all day? If it had been urgent I would have jumped in a taxi

Gladgran
Ok I will trundle up my street and ask all the neighbours, the pensioners, the working parents and grandparents who are looking after grandkids anyway if they could be available 6 or 7 hours day 5 days a week to collect my sick child from school.
I am sure they will be queuing up to do it. Not.

Why is it so bloody hard to understand for some people that sometimes there just is not anyone else go get our Kids? I have no one within 50 miles and even they are too old to drive now. But they actually have a full life and are currently on the other side of the world visiting relatives 😀

Why should some random agree to be home just in case my kids get ill? What if they went out for the day? Would the HT get mad at them for not being available?
It's nonsense. HT was ridiculous.

This will be a bit outing, but when I was 14 I got appendicitis on French exchange, on the last day. For reasons that still baffle me, the ALL THREE of the staff on the trip went home with the rest of the kids on the trip my mum got the 'pick her up' call in work and had to come home, book a ferry crossing, pack, drive to Dover, get to France and drive 4 hrs the other side and stay in a hotel near the hospital for 4 days until I'd recovered enough to travel home. That was a real emergency! Only took a day and a half to get there - op, your 45 minutes looks positively speedy in comparison

I can probably explain that awful situation. If a teacher had stayed then some children may have had to stay because the school had only taken the bare minimum of staff. Most schools try to take a spare in case of just such an emergency.

The spare could have stayed with you until your mother arrived.

Horrible situation for you and your mum.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to collect someone else's puking child and take them back to my house to ensure that it spread to my family too.

I will collect my own children. Nobody else's. I wouldn't agree to do it. I wouldn't want or agree to anyone else collecting mine under those circumstances either.

Having a member of staff who is medically trained to be nurse for emergencies, but also do general care, talks to classes as they do their various SPHE (is that the right subject?) lessons (allowing the class teacher to assist another class or prep another class or have a meeting with a parent or do 20 minutes marking or whatever other thing they need to get done), being able to run sessions on healthy eating or mindfulness or other useful sessions, do policy stuff on supporting DCs with additional needs (asthma, diabetes, those who have temporary problems like broken limbs, ... who may need some additional supports or policies put in place) - but also able to drop everything if there was an actual medical issue to be dealt with - that would be great.

I'll go watch the flying pigs outside my window now for fun....

Schools have a nurse attached. They are called the school nurse and do vaccinations etc. However they cover quite a few schools and don't usually look after sick children. I know some have covered sessions in PHSE - but the skills required in nursing and teaching are different.
(I'm both)
I think a job as described in schools is really more an unqualified nurse role - a registered nurse would be in danger of becoming deskilled by doing that sort of job for long.

YANBU OP.

Our story: DS fell during afternoon break and banged his head so his primary school rang me to come and collect him. I said I'd be there within half an hour but traffic was awful so only arrived 10 mins before school ended. His classmates were starting to collect their belongings at the playground door as I spoke to the teacher at the other door. We walked home with his school friends. At the end of term he was marked as absent that afternoon.

Nurses aren't generally trained in first aid either.

I'm also a bit shocked by you saying teachers actively don't want first aid training. I think it should be mandatory

Years ago I was a school governor and the headteacher was very dubious about the teachers having first aid training. A couple of support staff were first aid trained - so they could provide first aid to staff - but she saw no reason for staff to provide first aid to children. Bizarre. If you are first aid trained and act in accordance with the protocols you can't be sued, so I don't know what her problem was.

£50 a year to possibly end up dealing with a life-altering/ending incident, then possibly face an awful outcome from it, and then possibly find yourself stood in front of a panel from a H&S Executive Investigation??? I wouldn't even consider doing that for £500 extra per year

It's not the case. I was a first aider at work for years until I became a home-worker and in some jobs I received a small payment for the year - eg £100. There is no way you'd find yourself in front of a HSE investigation unless there was a H&S issue - which is not the responsibility of a first aider. You might be called as a witness but so could non first-aiders in that scenario. You might have to fill out forms if an accident is quite a bad one, but that's usually more the case in factories and the like, where you might cut an arm off if the machinery is not properly maintained or you don't have the right equipment. Not the same as dealing with a kid who has eg fainted.

The HT was massively unreasonable. Our DDs HT is the same - thinks it's the 50s and all mums are SAHMs.

My story, was working at in Istanbul for a few days (I travel occasionally as part of my job) and had walked way from my mobile, came back to find it ringing- missed the call, saw it was school so called back.

Explained I had just missed the call,

• admin said well we tried you at home as well,
• so I said I'm not at home....
• can you come and collect DD1 she has had a bump in the playground and has hurt her elbow
• me: is it broken?
• No, but she's very upset
• ok I'll have to call her dad to get her, he'll be about a hour
• that's too long, can you come
• no, I'm in Istanbul
• YOU ARE WHERE???? (Aghast) who is looking after the children
• me their dad and the Aupair

To cut a long story short my DM (who also works and had to leave early to do it ) picked her up and she had the tiniest graze on her elbow - it was completely ridiculous!

I worked with children for years, usually not in schools, and we had to have so many trained First Aiders per ratio of children. We were not paid extra for it either. Legally, unless you do something massively stupid, you are protected.
I am surprised as I had assumed schools had the same rules about First Aiders. And honestly, most of a First Aid course is what not to do. You are taught resuscitation, dealing with very minor injuries, stemming massive blood loss, and just about everything else is - call an ambulance. I couldn't watch a child die in front of me and not try to resuscitate, even though my training is now massively out of date.

BiddyPop normally when a child is sick, they just need to sit somewhere till someone collects them. If a child collapses unconscious and stops breathing, I would hope you would not just ignore them. You would have to deal with it. In true medical emergencies, unless a parent is at the school, no parent will get there quickly enough. Staff have to deal with it, and have to call an ambulance. Thankfully such instances are very rare.

Brasty I should hope that I or anyone would deal with something more serious like that!

I am a trained first aider and absolutely would help anyone in need like that, whether I am in charge or not (so regardless of it happening at work where I am one of a team of voluntary occupational first aiders, both the highest FA trained and the only female Cub leader (Cubs always want a mammy in the middle of the night, although the guys are fine for gorey penknife cuts!), or someone on the street/train/plane etc.

I hope you just mixed me up with another poster and not that I came across as not wanting to help, that is soooooo the opposite of where I am coming from, just asking for schools to be understanding at the same time of parents who both work outside the house and may have to travel and don't have a huge support network but can usually juggle things if you give 10 minutes notice/thinking/planning time.

Yes YABU! And making assumptions about the HT's motives i.e. that she thinks it's 1955 when mums didn't work. I am sure she is well aware that many parents work but she has a duty of care. Your son was injured and I presume that because he hit his nose, they would have monitored him as they would for a head injury and that's why they called you. So many schools are pulled up by parents for not contacting them when their DC are hurt that they cover themselves now by informing parents especially if the injury is around the head area. All parents are asked to provide an emergency contact these days and that means someone who can get there quickly. Having means in place for your children shouldn't be an inconvenience but something that you should really think about as a precaution. Things do happen at school and it is useful to have a back up plan- last year, the school had to close at the start of the day because of a burst pipe and I was able to call on a friend to pick up my son. I wouldn't ask a neighbour to pick up a sick child but if I worked quite a distance away, I would contact a local childminder to be available and to be my emergency contact. The school is asking for these details so they can call someone quickly, their aim is not to inconvenience you. After all, it's your child they're talking about. Surely you should be glad they informed you that the child was hurt. I work in a school and sometimes we find it difficult to get hold of parents which is frustrating and can upset the child further. Even if the child is not that badly hurt, they want some tlc- nothing wrong with that and schools are often aware of that. Your son was chatting happily to the school secretary - well done to her for helping to take your son's mind off his pain and not just putting him in a corner somewhere till you arrived. It sounds like your son was taken care of and looked after by the school and the staff that you are complaining about.
The whole point about having contacts is to have people that can arrive at the school quickly in order to help the child not to inconvenience you. When you look at it from that point of view, you'll understand that the HT and school are only interested in the welfare of your child. You have written a lot about your opinions of what the HT meant but it doesn't appear that she said those things but rather that you 'felt judged' and possibly a little guilty that you weren't there for your DS when he was hurt. He's fine, they looked after him! You've turned it into a big story about emergency contacts but we have to do these things and IMO we should organise care for our children for these situations. I'm sure if we were absent from work for a few days we'd have measures in place, why not for our children??

Tasout and when you don't have anyone?

Plus what was the need of the HT to ring op's husband to confirm what she said,after speaking to her,while op was on way,when she never bothered to ring him to begin with? That wAs sexist and kinda effed up. What was she expecting the husband to say ? "Oh silly wife,ofc we have shitloads of family and a jetpack in the boot of her car. Someone will arrive in the next five minutes!"

A child minder isn't going to want a vomiting child though. Particularly not if they have other mindees.

Rebelrogue
When you don't have someone, you put measures in place. That's the point I was trying to make.
There's a lot of blame directed at the school for something that all schools have to do i.e. contact someone on the list given. It doesn't sound like the school was trying to make out the OP as a liar, just contacting the husband to see if he could make it. Do we know whether he was contacted AFTER the school spoke to OP or while they were trying to get hold of her.
There's a lot more of making wrong here when it sounds like the school was doing its job taking care of a sick/ injured child.

It's hard but I've always always had a plan for one of us to be less than 30 mins from school. Especially after my son suffered a very bad head injury aged 8 years old at school and I was fortunate to be at home.

That's my choice- our choice as a family. Having worked in schools I've looked after children who just want to go home as they feel so poorly. I've seen children have fits and the school call an ambulance because mum was an hour away/ then the parent kick off saying why did they call an ambulance, now she has to go to hospital and she doesn't have time for this.

HT not unreasonable. Parents should have a plan!

What plan, if you aren't lucky enough to have relatives close by who are willing and able to help? I know a few people who I could ask to collect my dc from school if I couldn't do it at the normal end of school, but I couldn't ask somebody else with their own kids to pick up a vomiting child or go to hospital with them. And a childminder isn't going to want to pick up random vomiters.

Tasout yes, OP specifies HT rang her OH after she spoke to OP. While OP was actually on her way anyways.

tasout
Try
The head contacted ops husband after speaking to get. There was no need op told her her oh couldn't get there any quicker.

And once again where are we supposed to conjure up someone to pick up s sick child from when everyone i know works and have no family to call on.
I am lucky at tbe moment I can go do it but soon I won't be able to just up sticks and go.

Arghgh not try Rtt !

HT didn't take ops word for it she phoned her oh to check up on her story Pretty bloody sexist and rude if you ask me.

What's your plan for single parents muggle?