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

Budget for a nurse?!? You must be kidding. The "school nurse" visits once every few weeks as she does the rounds of all the schools....

We have to have 4 contacts that they can try when we send in all the forms. A friend and I put each other to fill spaces.

Were you in a big city, Watery, and especially were you in London? When DS was at school it would have taken me 45 minutes by public transport and longer by taxi to get to his school. He was 9 when DW and I first had mobiles so before then if DW (SAHM) was out of the house she would be unreachable - and even after that there are times and places where phones have to be off; not on silent, not on vibrate, o-f-f off. All our friends within easy reach were parents with young children too. MIL did not drive and was in any event a panicker.

You are just not being realistic.

Do schools not understand that they have a legal duty of care to the children? If a parent cannot get there in time and a child has a broken arm, they need to call for medical assistance. All this rubbish about insurance and not being able to call ambulances - it is just negligent. I refuse to believe that the vast majority of parents fall into the "I'm going Christmas shopping" category up thread. OP, I would very likely have been in a similar situation to you - I'm an hour away, or sometimes 11 hours away on the other side of the Atlantic, and DH is either working from home 10 minutes away, or completely uncontactable somewhere else in the country. Grandparents are 45 minutes away, provided that they can be contacted and haven't gone off somewhere to have a life, rather than sit around waiting for a call from the school.
Slightly off topic, but a colleague told me that at his DC's school, they have a policy of not pursuing a child who runs off the premises. They watch them go, and then call the parents whose job it then is to find said child. WTAF is wrong with schools these days?

I think there appears to be the attitude in schools that parents stay at home all day waiting for the phone to ring or there is an army of retired relatives waiting to take the helm. Bonkers I know some parents do SAH but even those that do have millions of things to do in a day that God forbid make them unavailable immediately. I get that your child is your responsibility but school have a duty of care till you get there. They would have to send someone in an ambulance to the hospital, the world does not end it's not like you said you weren't coming .

I wonder if these schools also have attendance awards....

The school needs to learn to deal with this better!

What do they think schools with boarders do, ask the parents to fly over from China?!

Bloody hate those attendance awards and I work in a school. Waste of time. Poor kids with Chicken Pox got penalised this term. It spread lime wild fire since start of Spring Term!

Watery, good for you for always being available and with an army of supportive family on hand too as back-up.

Most people I know are quite simply do not have that. It is cloud cuckoo land. Our nearest living relatives are very elderly, a three hour drive away and therefore not remotely realistic.

Your views are like those of the schools in question here - very far removed from the reality of many families.

This ambulance thing. People get that there are things that require additional medical care that the parent is best placed to sort but are not ambulance situations. There are also things where cautious parents would go to the GP or A and E and more pragmatic parents wouldn't. It's a very personal thing with a huge amount of discretion and because of that we make a lot of mistakes and prefer them to be on the cautious side. I'd rather have a parent cross with me than a child sent back to class with a minor broken arm because I was scared of over reacting.
We really look after the children and will do as long as needed. All day if necessary...but I do expect people to make their best endeavours to get to their child in a timely manner

Watery: Good luck explaining that to the parent of the child distressed/disruptive because the 1 to 1 isn't available. There are often threads on here complaining about the 1 to 1 being used for other duties.

This is the school sat fault, not the parent.

I don't know what the solution is but the attitude here from many seems to be that the school is unreasonable to expect a sick or injured child to be collected ASAP.

That's literally exactly the opposite to what nearly everyone on this thread has been saying. They are trying to get there as soon as possible. The problem is that what is literally possible is longer than the school would like. This problem is simply not new. As has been pointed out over and over, mobiles and landlines are a relatively recent invention so even if 1970/80s mum was a SAHP, there was no guarantee that she would be able to get there any faster than today's parent who might have their phone off/out of range or, god forbid, be working in a role that doesn't accommodate a sudden downing of tools. My mother was a SAHP till I was 15, we didn't have a family car, and my school was an hour's walk/bus ride away. Thank the catchment rules for that, if you must, since that's where they put me.

This is the school sat fault, not the parent.

How can that be? There are no spare staff. I don't understand how you can possibly think that. The school is at fault for having to move a 1 to 1 because the parents of an injured child can't get there quickly?

Would parents here be happy to pay a set amount each year to pay for a nurse to be at the school? That's one solution.

The headmistress can take him home with her next time. What, shes at work? shakes head sadly

I've had this in a previous school in London. HT called can i pick up DD as she had been vomiting. I was a in a meeting and after 8 calls I answered. I explained that I was about 2 hours away and asked why they hadn't called DH who was a SAHD at the time and first contact. All i got was "oh we didn't want to bother him" i explain he was a SAHD a and i was working. I still got " but I'm sure DD would prefer mummy to come can't you come and get a her?" Ffs no i can't call DH. Really frustrating.

Slightlytired Can I answer your point about children running away from school? Thankfully I've never had one actually escape but I've been told by staff who've been in that situation that if you run after a child who is worked up and anxious they are likely to run even further away and risk injury. Experience says most children will go home and in the meantime, you call the police. I know that sounds brutal but it's not because people are washing their hands of the children.

As a child of the 70s I remember going to the sick room until either felt better or end of school day, no phone at home, none of neighbours had either...there was a box at the end of the road...so calling home wasn't an option.
And I remember the entertainment of watching 3 teachers chasing a boy across the fields below the school on a frequent basis.

I wondered what they used to do when people didn't have phones. Did children not get so Ill?

As some of the stories on these threads show, schools used to expect injured or ill DC to buck up and get on with it a lot more.

At my school a Strepsil was deemed to sort out everything bar actual unconsciousness. DH broke his wrist at school - they thought he was making a fuss, sent him to his next class and he didn't get medical attention for hours.

These days schools are much much more cautious about any kind of injury or illness no matter how minor. Perhaps with good reason but it does lead to this problem.

I can understand schools' frustration at parents who don't pick up their child or send them in sick, but that's entirely different from parents who will get there asap but work a long way away or have a job where they can't just walk out.

Re no spare staff - do most schools not have at least one or two administrative staff who are not teaching and could have a child sit with them while they do their work?

totoromama

As far as I can see, schools are still run on the expectation that there's a parent at home who can attend daytime meetings on a day's notice, run up costumes for assemblies for Thursday when told on Monday, etc etc etc.

It's the only thing I don't respect and adore about our school - can't understand why it's still the case, but it just doesn't work that way for the majority of families.

Smug PPs who feel sorry for DCs who have commuter parents, do feel free to add my two to the pity list. Two days a week they have both parents 90 minutes away. It has been an issue exactly once in seven years of schooling, and they don't seem enormously psychologically scarred, and they seem to quite appreciate having a roof over their heads and food and stuff, but fill your boots if it makes you happier

Watery - okay, there are no 'spare staff' as in 'teachers sitting around doing nothing'. Of course not.

You put the child somewhere quiet with a bucket/cloth/water, and a headteacher/secretary/teacher/TA, or some combination thereof, puts their head in every so often. Until the parent arrives.

Some common sense and flexibility is required, surely.

You're right teawamutu - this is all of a piece with the 11am "art show", 2pm "syllabus meeting" and endless requests for costumes, cakes and craft projects.

I suppose it's to tick the Ofsted "parental involvement" box but I'd be far happier with, say, a phone call with the teacher every half term or so - more useful and less hassle for everyone.

Anyway bit of a tangent but I agree it's the same underlying assumption.

bestthing thanks for your response. I thought the reasoning might be something like that. The other option of course, is that they chase the child, catch them, and actually stop them being hit by a car, etc. At the school in question, they had a child escape, they phoned the police, and the police apparently would not come out. So there's a 7 year old wandering around dangerous country lanes (village school) while the parents frantically try to get back before something really terrible happens to the child. I simply don't get it.

I think someone else has mentioned this but it's worth repeating. JSA rules are that jobs are suitable up to 90 minutes away. So it is unreasonable for schools to expect parents to be there within 2 hours really.

Not sure why the mother was even called in this case! Sounds like a minor injury - if his nose wasn't broken then not much she can do. At my DC's school, he'd have got an ice pack on it for 20 mins and back to class. They might ring me as a courtesy to warn me that there would be bruising when I picked him up, but they wouldn't demand me go in unless he needed taking to hospital.

So it is unreasonable for schools to expect parents to be there within 2 hours really.

No it isn't, not if a child is bleeding or puking all over the place. Schools are for education not nursing or childcare. We aren't medically qualified, not fair to expect us to play nurse. It's no use parents saying the school has to deal with it - no we don't - not our job. There has to be a better solution other than expecting teachers to "deal with it". Like parents paying for a nurse, as I suggested.