To be very pissed off with school

[AlbertaAnnie]

First day back at school today - school is round the corner from my house. My son is year 6 and walks to school himself ( he’s done this all last year no issues). He went to school as normal this morning and at 9.30 I revived this text from the school.
“ CHILD1 has not turned up at school today, please could you call the school immediately to update us.”
This immediate made me panic and think the worst! He’s very responsible and wouldn’t skip school so all the worst case scenario’s we’re going through my head!
Rang school in a panic shoes on ready to run over! They asked me to hold while the called his class and he was there all along but had been missed off the register! They said he must have “snuck” in past the teacher! He didn’t sneak we just went to school as normal!
anyway I know people are human and errors can happen but surely they should check before causing such alarm! I’m shocked that this isn’t standard procedure and more shocked that if he had actually been missing it would have taken them 30 mins to inform me. Spoke to head teacher and she was awful and so insincere in her apology and just came across very defensive! I want to take it further as I’m unhappy about the whole situation.
AINU to feel so angry with the school or am I being ott? Thanks!

If my son had been kidnapped outside of school it would obviously not be the schools fault - this however was not the case

I'd have been panicking too but it was only for a few minutes. They've apologised. What more can be done? It was a mistake and next time I'm sure they'll check more thoroughly.

I had this once.
My Ds was 6 at the time dropped him to the gate as I always did.
2hrs later, I got a call ' Ds isnt in today is he ok?'
I panicked, I was 8months pregnant and 1hr from the school.
When the receptionist camr back and saif ' Oh dont worry, he is there just wasnt ticked off ' she then laughed.
I told her I didnt think it was funny at all and it was 2hrs after school had started they even noticed he 'wasnt in', I asked if she thought it was an acceptable amount of time to have contacted me- she thought it was'🤦‍♀️
I put a complaint in.

If my son had been kidnapped outside of school it would obviously not be the schools fault

If your son had been kidnapped (or more likely injured) on the way in to school and they hadn't picked up on him being missing in a timely manner they would be rightly held accountable. When youngish children are missing or injured minutes do manner. And for most primaries that means sending the text around 9.30am (half an hour late). In the majority of cases it will be that the parent forgot to inform school of something. In some (hopefully very few) cases it will be that the child has arrived in school but nobody knows and the parent will worry unnecessarily. Very occasionally something bad will have happened and the school, parent and any other services can work together to find and help the child.

It is not possible to have a system whereby no parent is worried unnecessarily AND there is no delay in identifying a missing child. It is a balancing act.

That's pretty good going, considering that they aren't legally allowed to remove them until the first day the kid is physically in the new school and that new school then sends the confirmation. And the old school will also be dealing with the new intake at Y7 and L6 enrolment and retakes - for the new one to do all that in one day and expect the old school to not have anybody else to deal with, well, it would be a little unfair.

Yes annoying but better that than your child actually going missing bogging off home it's useful. bloody kids

The texts are sent automatically! It's not like the receptionist went and physically got your number and sent the text. Attendance called, input to comp, comp sends text automatically to the number in the system for your son. Human error or comp error is possible.

So what u want to happen is...
Teacher calls roll
Teacher inputs roll to system
Receptionist views the roll
Receptionist rings teacher, "just checking that Tom, Dick and Harry are the people that are absent"
Teacher must then call the roll again??
Receptionist then rings the next classroom?

Receptionists are probably the most busy staff member in our school. And teachers have 30 odd kids to be dealing with? In an ideal world they could do that but in an ideal world the human error would have happened in the first place.

I said in a previous post it can easily happen, but in my 7 years I have done it once and I input 6 rolls a day to the system! Tom was absent, I accidentally marked Harry as absent who was next on the roll! Text was automatically sent, it had nothing to do with the receptionist.

Nope that’s not want I want to happen.
i would obviously not want them to check on every absentee - however as errors do happen I would expect them to check on any absentee child where the parents had not already contacted the school to say they hadn’t been in before worrying the parents - this number for the size of my sons school would be extremely small and easy to call the class prior to texts being sent and causing stress for no reason

It’s not practical to double-check every child that is deemed absent. If they have not been checked on the register, they are assumed to be absent. You can’t double check every class “just to make sure.” This would certainly mean parents of genuinely missing children would be notified even later than 9.30am.

We all have moments in life which frighten us or make us anxious. You just have to accept it.

Or walk your kid to school.

It’s not reasonable and a waste of resources just to save your emotions. It’s far quicker to check with the parent themselves.

30 minutes is quite good really, how quickly do you expect the office to receive all the registers and then message all the parents of students the teacher have marked absent?

I’m intrigued by this “phone in the classroom” thing. Who answers it - is one of the kids on duty? Can’t imagine the teacher would be wanting to break off mid-announcement to the class to answer the phone.

🙌

Call the class?

This happened to me with my daughter, who just so happens to be in a special Ed school and is a flight risk!
I was at work and panicked but she was in class.
the week after she did actually go missing but no one noticed until I got a phone call at 2.30 asking where she was!
so missing for 5 and a half hours by this point! 🤦‍♀️

You often get them in mobiles where you're mire isolated. They d only be used in real emergencies so yes a teacher would answer straight away.
As to the OP, if she can't trust her son to walk to school aline then he shouldn't be doing it. That's school protocol, wait for the registers to be sent in and then notify parents of any unauthorised absence.

How are you going to take it further? This kind of thing happens. Kids go to sort out their pe kit or stop to chat and don't get registered. They then might slip into class after the register has been taken. You have already complained to the head. The next stage would be the governors. All you will get is an apology and an explanation that they made a mistake and these things happen which is exactly the same as you have already had. Let it go.

I completely trust my son to walk to school? Not sure where you even got the idea from that him walking to school was a issue?

Now THAT is outrageous

Nowhere has OP said that she can't trust her son to walk to school alone! You've plucked that from thin air.

With regard to phones in classrooms for emergency use by staff, surely it is about time. Glad to hear it is happening. It has to be much more efficient than sending a child down to the school office with a written message, or worse still the teacher having to leave the entire class unattended in order to go themselves.

Ah that makes more sense, thinking of the phone as something the teacher would use to call the office / reception with, rather than vice versa.

From a headteacher's perspective:

There are two competing pressures here, as in the thread.

Most register systems allow a bulk text to all the parents of absent children asking them to notify the reason for absence. Sending that means it can be done quickly as soon as all registers have been completed (often by 9.10 or 9.15 realistically) and therefore if a child were missing, that becomes clear very quickly. Tracking down each and every child to check they really weren't in school would delay this massively - you wouldn't get to the end of the list before 10am in a school of any reasonable size.

Obviously, the other side is that we shouldn't be telling parents their child is missing when they are safely in school - that is about as stressful as it gets.

So schools have to make the judgment call as to whether to verify every absence and therefore it may be later when a child who really is missing gets noticed; or potentially cause a parent to become extremely distressed thinking something is wrong when it isn't. The first is potentially a life threatening situation, so takes precedence.

However, you are completely right to be annoyed and expect the school to be apologising profusely if this is a one-off (it's happened once to us, and I called them myself to apologise). If it's regular, then the teacher isn't doing the register properly.

Thank you for your point of view - it’s good to see it from different sides, I wish you were the head at my kids school, they have been a contributing factor to making it worse!

As a teacher with a phone in the classroom, it’s really distracting to answer it when teaching. The teachers morning would look like this almost every day:

register, submit
start teaching
phone rings
answer phone
confirm that yes, x y and z are missing, as I just filled in on the register 5 minutes ago
go back to teaching by which point you’ve lost the flow and the kids concentration.

i get that for you today this would have saved you the worry but 95% of the time it is unnecessary as registers are completed correctly. even in a small school there’s possibly someone missing in every class so that’s 7 phone calls for the busy receptionist to make, to confirm what they have already been told.

it is better you had a few minutes of worry than children who actually were absent (abducted on the way to school, harmed by parents overnight, something had happened to single parent overnight and young child is locked in at home unsupervised with no one to help them or the parent….etc etc) were not followed up.

I hear what your saying but they would only need to check on the kids who’s parents hadn’t already contacted the school which would be rare instances. Additionally would that that conversation not have gone more like…..ah yes I marked X as absent but I can see he’s here so please change that as it’s incorrect. Thanks for checking?