Son didn't go to school for three days.

[Spopssas]

School rang me on Monday, saying did I know that he hadn't attended that day, and was absent for three days last week.

No I didn't.

I work in attendance at a large secondary school 🙋🏻‍♀️ Your school should have 100% contacted you - they had a duty of care.

We text both parents if a child has an unreported absence and call if we still don’t hear back. If a child doesn’t turn up to a lesson during the school day then we have to locate them, we don’t just leave it and assume they’ve gone home or whatever.

I’d be tempted to flag this witH DSL so they can review their policies.

That is hash... It does depend how old the child is.

Once they are travelling to school - secondary aged - on their own - I think not knowing if they got there is acceptable.

I do think the school should contact on first day of absence ( you should ring in and say if they are not there)

We also contact home every single day, parents can’t just call to say child is unwell so won’t be in for the rest of the week. We have to make contact in some way each day…even kids that are regularly/persistently off school

That’s very odd. DCs have attended different secondary schools and we get texts in the morning to call them to explain absence if child is not in school without a parent calling in.

I know this as there’s been times I’ve called in and I’ve still got a text.

Did you ask if your son’s school has this policy OP and if so, why weren’t you notified on the day? I would have thought every UK school would these days and it’s definitely something I’d raise with them.

Obviously something’s going on the background with your DS and now you know, you can get to the bottom of it but it’s perfectly reasonable to leave a 15 year old to get to school on their own if you’re leaving a bit earlier for work

Well, yes. I'm sorry, but as a fellow parent I'd like to think I'd notice if my child skipped school for 3 days 🙄

School have a duty of care, irrespective of your judgemental opinion of the OP's parenting

Somewhat harsh - so a kid skips
School and is an automatic delinquent?! Could be any reason why they skipped school - being bullied, anxiety whatever.

OP school should have notified you earlier. I had to leave my 15 year old to get to school himself so that I could get to work. If my Ds hadn't turned up for school and hadn't been notified I would have been none the wiser for a while.

Hope you get to speak to you Ds and can resolve the matter

Some of these responses are silly. DS1 slept through his alarm one day. He normally leaves v early in the morning, sometimes before other people wake up. So on this day he wandered into the living room all dazed at midday and said "I have a problem..." I thought he'd just got home (we are abroad and school finishes earlier). He explained he'd slept in and I was when I realised nobody at school had bothered to contact me to say he hadn't turned up!

Anyway I sent an email to say he was ill as didn't see the point explaining further - he obviously needed to sleep.

But I mentioned this to a friend and she thought it was totally scandalous that I hadn't looked in his bedroom between the hours of 7 and 12 and noticed that he was there! Well first of all, he has a high sleeper bed, so I probably wouldn't have noticed him even if I had done that, but also, who does that? Are other people going in and inspecting their teenagers' bedrooms every day while they are at school? What?? Of course I didn't go in there looking for him, because I thought he was at school!

I did think it was bad, as some days he might not be expected home until 5. That's a long time to be missing, with nobody flagging up, if something ever happened to him on the way to school.

I know that is unlikely to happen but even so.

We get a text within 30 min of registration saying please report absence. I drop Ds off but for kids who make their own way , i think it’s really important in case of accident and to make you aware , if they’ve decided to skip . 3 days is poor even Dds college wouldn’t wait that long without contact and we have access online to see she’s attending each lesson .
Hope you can sort the issue, school can be really difficult at that age . I remember the problems in Dds year at 15 and honestly , if parents weren’t notified there would of been a load skipping I’m sure , if they believed they would get away with it .

My kids school call by 10am if I haven’t called in before that time and when my dd had one day they were calling at 12 to ask where she was even though I rang already in the morning . I don’t think your being unreasonable at all , school should have called you

That's piss poor.
Dds secondary school call, text and email with a message that she has not registered and is unaccounted for, by 10 am. It's an automated, failsafe.

As someone who has worked in schools, school have a duty of care and a duty to safeguard. They take a register which would have identified the boy was absent without any message from a parent explaining why much quicker than the Mum could have known if he was acting as though he was leaving or had been.

That’s scandalous and also very dangerous you should of been notified on the first day.
DS2 is 18 3rd year of college even I get a call if he’s not in by 9.30 actually got one this morning! He was running late

OP yanbu
I have worked in schools and have children in them also and all the ones I have experience of would have rang by 11am on the first day at the latest unless a parent had rang in.
For him to have missed three days and be missing a fourth (if I have read that correctly) before anyone contacted you and no one in school to have any idea of where he was is shocking and a major safeguarding fail!

Suppose he had had an accident and the OP did not know until he did not arrive home at night, suppose something bad had happened.
One of mine used to leave by 7am and not arrive back till after 5pm (school out of area) and so they would have been missing for ten hours already before anyone realised.

Op are you sure he didn't phone in sick himself ?

Some responses on here are stupid. Of course the school should have informed you of his absence.

Rory Blackhall was dropped 300 yards away from school. He never made it. The alarm wasn't raised until hometime. He was murdered and found days later.
I thought all schools needed to alert parents after that.

This is really helpful. Thank you so much. I'm going to ask about this asap.

Thanks to everyone who has answered. This is where mumsnet is invaluable. All your different experiences and examples have given me the confidence to take this up with the school.
I have raised my son alone since he was a baby. He is my everything. He is smart, good and well-liked at school by his teachers. Maybe this is why, each day he was absent in a lesson, the teacher wasn't concerned.
My heartbreaking thought is, if he had run into a problem on the way to school on day one (hit by a vehicle/attacked) and therefore not turned up, the school wouldn't have checked out why he was absent without me ringing in. He could have been dying.

🤣 you mean you track your kids phone so can see their every move. Can't see how you'd know otherwise unless you don't work

Yes I can imagine you’re pretty shaken by this. I have a year 10 dd. The school definitely needs to address this from a safeguarding perspective. I only once forgot to tell school dd was absent and I was contacted by 9.40am. Similar sized school. Unless your ds has managed to circumvent the system this is a pretty serious fail in the duty of care for your ds.

Perhaps you can put something in place for your ds now? Call him when he’s supposed to leave, a phone tracker etc.

He cannot be trusted to be where he needs to be and should be. I would therefore insist he has life 360 or the equivalent enabled on his phone so i can check where he is at all times. He is a child. He has shown he cannot be trusted so now needs to earn your trust back. It will also give you peace of mind. Tough if he does not like having to share his location. Kids need to learn that their actions have consequences and that trust is earned.

OP, just cautioning you to go in with an open mind.

This happens occasionally at my school. Sometimes the pupil has emailed in from their parent's account or got a friend to call in pretending to be the parent. Sometimes we have left messages that the child has deleted or the parent has missed.

So the whole thing was a cry for help and school missed it? Poor kid must feel like no one at school notices or cares about him.

Get the life 360 app. That way you can check if he is at school. Parents are responsible for kids not schools.

The registers are digital, the attendance manager will be sent a list of those who have not called in sick and not attended, register is taken each lesson and they will be flagged if they attend a lesson and then not the next one.

It should be part of every school policy to notify parents as soon as possible on the first day of absence as a safe guarding concern in case they have left for school and something has happened on the way. In fact I believe it was after the Andrew Goddard missing person case that these policies started being implemented as had his parents been called the outcome may have been different.

It doesn’t matter how big the school is, this is something they absolutely should be on top of.