School chores?

[LyricalBoudicca]

At my daughter's school the y6 children have various jobs allocated to them on a rota. One of the jobs involves scraping all of the half-finished lunch plates of all the younger children into the bin. She is now looking for excuses not to go in on the day on which this job is allocated as it makes her feel sick. Pondering on this and assessing if she was being 'precious' I seem to remember picking up litter/tidying up the library as jobs I used to at primary school do but nothing as yukky as what her class is being made to do. Apparently, she is not the only child disgusted by this but she wouldn't want to be the only one to complain. Part of me thinks a few chores is a good training for life but there are yuk limits at that age. Is this fairly standard in schools or is her school asking a bit too much?

We used to do this in primary school.

I think it's perfectly fine, to be honest.

@Hellocatshome

I caught Hepatitis by doing that job How on earth did you catch hepatitis from washing dishes?

Are there stats on this? Great excuse for task dodging.

Bloody hell!
The U.K. sounds more like a third world country every day.

Shock horror families in the UK do their chores instead of hiring a butler

I would talk to the school about it the children are responses for throwing there own food away they shouldn't be making your daughter doing it when my child was at school everyone would throw there own food away apart from reception the teachers would do it for them.

Scraping the dirty plates of dozens of unrelated individuals is not a "life skill"

Mucking in with slightly unpleasant jobs for the benefit of the school (or workplace, or home, or society) is a great attitude to develop though!

Presumably she’s being asked to use a knife/fork to move some fish fingers and beans off the plate and into the bin. She’s not licking the plate clean.

I really wouldn’t put it in the ‘third world’ category, it’s just a slightly unpleasant chore. I don’t think getting kids out of anything they find unpleasant or annoying is good for them at all.

We used to have to do that at primary and I remember the smell making me feel sick, I hated it but got on with it.
Weirdly i waitressed for years and it never me bothered me then

They take turns in doing it at my kids’ infant school. I think some of the kids love it. I have heard the lunchtime assistants say that not all kids have the constitution for it though, so I think they aren’t forced to do it if it makes them feel ill!

I can’t believe some of the comments on here. You’re all being really precious and pathetic. They haven’t asked the kids to clean the toilets. They’re just learning some basic life skills, probably because they’re not learning them at home.

Clearly none of you have worked a minimum wage job. What do you think people in cafes do with leftover food on plates?
This all screams “my little Timmy is far above anything like that”. There’s nothing wrong with teaching children good work ethic, clearly you snobs won’t be.

If it was my child and they didn't want to do it then I'd ask them to explain the reasons why (I'd be totally behind not wanting to do it) and then tell the school its not going to continue.

For the OP if you don't want to go nuclear, then use it as a teaching experience. Sometimes you just have to do nasty jobs and that it should be incentive to ensure good grades so that when adult life comes calling you get first pick of the chores / employment.

That sounds vile, especially with a pandemic going on!! Our Y6's have to sort out things for the assembly, be buddies for the Reception kids, etc.

I remember having this very chore 40 odd years ago. Not my favourite chore but never did me any harm. Can think of far worse.

Does this mean she doesn't really get a lunch break either? By the time she eats her own lunch and scrapes the plates surely there won't be much time left for her to go outside and play?

If scraping food off a plate is a 3rd world country problem, how do 1st world countries get the food off a plate? 🤔

Tell her not to be such a ridiculous princess and help out the same as everyone else. My boys' plate scraping rota started in yr 3 (pretty interesting when the plates are nearly as big as them).

Some children have extremely sensitive noses and find it difficult to lean over a bin full of rotting food for more than a few seconds without feeling sick. Certainly J knwo children like that and was that way when young myself, I still hold my breath when scraping plates. Ugh why is your food rotting seconds after you've eaten it?!

at rotting food! Feel sorry for those on second sitting having to eat this feast decaying before their very eyes

@FatBettyintheCoop

Bloody hell! The U.K. sounds more like a third world country every day.

I find that really insulting. My friend cares for children who used to live in a refugee camp in Africa. They had no food or clean water. That's a third world issue, not scraping unwanted food off plates in the UK.

I’d not be that happy with this, on a few levels.

My DN is exceptionally sensitive to smells and tastes (eating a strawberry once made him puke) and this would have been a nightmare for him. It would have been hard to get him to school on those days.

My DD is happy to clear and scrape at home, but her school offers no choices on food and doesn’t allow packed lunches. The food is often not that nice (I’ve tried it - one day I thought it was curry day from the smell and then realised it was supposed to be lentil bolognaise - hmmmm.) Making the kids scrape away loads of food - that many dislike and many leave 50% of - sounds yuck.

Not every school offers simple-to-scrape foods like fishfingers - ours does lamb curry, jerk chicken, lentil stew etc on rotation so it would be pretty messy to scrape too. It’s also not a simple plate they use, but one of those plastic sectioned tray things.

Also this seems pretty odd to do in Covid times. I’d prefer each child to scrape their own plate, to my mind. Personal responsibility.

(FYI I have done plenty of this sort of job in my time. Food retail, supermarket cafe, chambermaid … )

I'd ask for my child to be allocated another chore.

As an adult I'd imagine the chore starts off fine but doing tens of them would start to make me heave - especially when I saw the main container with the mountain of food.

I don't think that the chore is suitable at all. Wipe the tables after the trays are gone is fine.

According to my dd the job that everyone wanted the most was taking afternoon registers to every classroom.

I think it sounds like a good idea. It's about community, responsibility and working together. In fact I am going to suggest that we introduce some school chores in my own class.

....especially when I saw the main container with the mountain of food

Tell them not to look down into it, they can easy scrape the food in without inspecting the contents of the bin.

difficult to lean over a bin full of rotting food

It is fresh food, slightly mushed, but still fresh

sensitive to smells

Show them how to do at arms length then the smell will be no worse than someone next to them eating it.

It is good for dc to work out solutions to problems. You'll be doing your them a favour longterm if you teach them to muck in and stop being precious.

Show them how to do at arms length then the smell will be no worse than someone next to them eating it.

That’s a problem too. Kids with sensory issues struggle with the smell of food being eaten near them too. It’s not being precious; it’s an actual thing.

@PrimaryMumma

>> Show them how to do at arms length then the smell will be no worse than someone next to them eating it.

That’s a problem too. Kids with sensory issues struggle with the smell of food being eaten near them too. It’s not being precious; it’s an actual thing.

Agree, but there is a world of difference between a child with genuine sensory issues and one who just doesn't like the smell. For most children who didnt want to do the chore it would be because it just wasnt fun. Op would have said if her child had sensory issues.

@BananaPB

I'd ask for my child to be allocated another chore.

As an adult I'd imagine the chore starts off fine but doing tens of them would start to make me heave - especially when I saw the main container with the mountain of food.

I don't think that the chore is suitable at all. Wipe the tables after the trays are gone is fine.

According to my dd the job that everyone wanted the most was taking afternoon registers to every classroom.

But surely you have explained to your dd that everyone wants the easy/pleasant chores but the unpleasant ones still need to be done. If everyone asked their child to be allocated a different chore then none of the unpleasant and necessary ones would be done.

When I was a kid it was washing out the paint pots. You could stretch that out to twenty minutes of pissing about with a friend at the sink and it was easy. However we understood that sometimes you needed to stack chairs/tidy gym equipment/stack plates and cups.

Sometimes you got the unpleasant chores sometimes the nicer ones, but it wouldn’t be fair for one person to always have the easy chores simply because they dislike another one.