Help me word an email to the school that isn't full of expletives please.

[ReanimatedSGB]

I know I can do better that 'For fuck's sake, you petty-minded bunch of cunts', of course...

DS got a day in inclusion (ie isolation) because of his shoes. They are, admittedly, not quite regulation shoes, though they are plain black - but he was wearing them because his normal school shoes were discovered to have a fucking great hole in on Sunday evening. He wore the not-quite-right shoes yesterday and there was no problem - I got home from work too late to take him shoe-shopping as my shift overran - but I got a phone call at work this morning saying they were 'unacceptable' and he would either be sent home or have to spend the day in inclusion. I was halfway up the M4 at the time. I explained the reason and that we were going to buy a new pair tomorrow (because I wouldn't be home till 7pm), but they said if he didn't have proper shoes in the morning it would be the same thing again.
Mercifully our nearest Sainsburys is open till 10pm and is one of those big enough to have a clothing and footwear department, so we have actually got new shoes, but what the fuck is the point of taking a well-behaved kid out of class for the day when he's only wearing not-quite-right shoes for a perfectly good reason.

I doubt they could send him home. Exclusion is supposed to be a last resort when there is not other option and I doubt they’d want an official exclusion on their record if they could avoid it. And sending him home without excluding official is unlawful.
If similar happens again I’d just keep him off and tell the school why. If it affects their attendance figures I’m sure they’d be able to be a bit flexible.

What on earth is an isolation booth, why do they have them in schools and why is it called "inclusion" since it sounds like they are excluded from lessons?

PP students are flagged up and supported
It literally costs hundreds to kit out a chikd for secondary school.

It's not just pp children who would struggle to replace a pair of shoes less than a term in. I think the majority would find it hard ten days off payday when all the bills have come out.

Bumsex schools can send home for uniform and it’s not counted as an unlawful exclusion because they can come back into school with the correct uniform.

I would have sent him in with a note explaining the situation to pre-empt the issue. It sounds much less like an excuse when you're on the front foot.

And to be honest, you did manage to get him a pair of shoes so clearly it wasn't impossible, just inconvenient.

Not actually the point I made.

Perhaps you wouldn’t mind clarifying your point then *

Do you genuinely believe that draconian enforcement of school dress codes is necessary in order to create school which provides a good education for its pupils and good exam results?

Some posters on MN are bloody delusional about what's happening in some academies around uniform, unlawful exclusionary practice, and unlawful part-time timetables.

I didn't send a note because he wore the 'wrong' shoes yesterday and nothing happened. I thought they might, in fact, have 'passed' as acceptable.

What the school should have done was accept my reasonable explanation over the phone and let him get on with a normal day.

Makes me wonder sometimes how schools cannot understand that some parents aren't exactly loaded and struggle to make ends meet whilst tearing around like blue arsed bluebottles in order to do that?.

And WTF does he need to be put in the exclusion room or booth whatever?.

angel
An isolation room is just a small classroom and sometimes it has those study carols (desks with sides) so students work without being part of a group.

It’s called inclusion because the alternative is exclusion and they are excluded from lessons but “included” in education at school as they are set work.

Ideally it’s used to remove disruptive students from lessons so that the rest of the class can carry on working. But as another PP said, with the amount of budget cuts going on, a lot of support staff are being cut from schools and so there can be other students there who might otherwise be better off in another setting (or another school) but there is no money to provide that.

I think all schools would like the money to provide the right resources for students.

Some rules are not reasonable. Send them a email. But be careful here and try to get your point to them politely.

Part-time timetables are legal as long as they are a short term response. Where they are used long term they are not legal.
Some students find it massively difficult to be in school unsupported for long periods of time and it can be good for them to have a reduced timetable where they can be successful and build this back up, rather than throwing them in and letting them drown.

Just googling further and it seems school can send a child home for uniform infringement and mark it as authorised absence. But it's meant to be to go home briefly to remedy it.

Why couldn't he have either (a) worn the shoes with holes in? Damp feet for a day or two isn't exactly a big issue

I can't believe someone actually said this.

Yeah, my 16yo ds is on a part-time timetable at the moment, after several weeks of not being able to go to school at all.

He's in Y11 and was predicted straight 8s and 9s until now. He's sitting mocks during his part-time hours and it's not going well.

Funnily enough he didn't find it "massively stressful to be in school" until the Ready to Learn regime was brought in, the uniform fascism, across-the-board rote-learning homework (seriously, they have Victorian copy-books for each subject and ALL homework is "look, cover, write, check", in all subjects) and crazy uniform fascism started. And the support for his ASD was sucked out by underfunding. He was doing OK on a full-time timetable until then.

Over ten years ago now I joined the military.

In basic (where half the point is to adhere to ridiculous petty rules) I (and probably half the course thinking back) was allowed a note from the physio to say the issued boots weren’t appropriate for my feet so I was wearing my own still black, still polished, still similar looking boots.

If the bloody military can manage to work out its better to have someone in warm dry kit that fits them properly I don’t see why a school can’t reach this perfectly sensible conclusion.

and isolation/inclusion doesn't have to be reported in the same way formal exclusions have to be.

They can send them home if it’s just a matter of collecting something. They can’t indefinitely informally exclude them until they have it.

No, students in isolation are still in school so it’s a present mark. There is no code for the area in school you are in. All schools in the country have to use the same register codes.

And actually if the afternoon register is done, say, at 2pm and your child has a dental appointment after this, there is no absence recorded as such either. (Well it’s recorded for the lesson but when attendance is worked out the AM and PM mark is used). So you could leave every day at 2:05pm and have 100% attendance.

Half the time they bring the uniform violations om themselves anyway.

A black pleated skirt is a black pleated skirt. But no we won't let you buy one for 7 pound in Tesco you can spend 26 pound on a skirt thats no better qualifying available from one online supplier who will take 6 weeks to deliver it to you when despite being aware that every July they will get hundreds of orders they still run out and 5th of September you are frantically driving to asda hoping to god you get away with it til the order arrives and you have To send back cos your ordered in July and your kids dared to grow and you are Half an inch off regulation length now

Set up to fail from the beginning and they are fucking laughing their heads off knowing full well parents are screwed

bumsex correct.

I can assure you that nobody is laughing their heads off trying to get thousands of teens to wear uniform.

Loads of academies are breaking the law over exclusions being masqueraded as something else.

Loads of academies break all sorts of rules. I think financial mismanagement is a particularly huge problem.

My son's school have a stock of shoes that children can borrow until they get sorted out. They're new and selected to match what the majority of the pupils are wearing.
Most parents can organise new shoes within a week or so?