To ask school to stop sending me these texts?

[SquiglePig]

I have 3 kids in same high-school.

They've started to send texts to parents everytime a child is late to a lesson, basically saying 'your child is late for lesson, please don't allow this to happen again etc'

My kids are never late to school in the mornings, ever.

It's my responsibility to get them into school on time, which I do.

I've had the discussion with them about getting to lessons on time but what can I actually do?

I feel like once they're on school grounds I don't really have physical control over how long it takes them to get to lessons even though I keep telling them.

Also it's not a text to my phone it's a text via the school messaging system which means I have to log in to see it.

I'm at work and I don't know if it's something important or not and have to check and I can get in trouble for being on my phone too much.

Please don't think this is me saying I have no responsibility over my children's behaviour in school, of course I do but I feel that I do not need to recieve a text every time one of them is late to arrive to a lesson when I've got them into school on time.

In my day there were teachers in the hall to usher kids to their lessons?

I don’t understand these votes sometimes. 100 or so comments and the majority of them seem in think the OP is BU. There’s been like 10 that say YANBU. But the vote is soooo strongly the other way!? How does that work?

If this becomes extreme, of course the school should raise it with the parent.

But imagine I take my nieces to the park, while my sister takes my child out to a museum. There's a bit of low-level misbehaviour on both trips.

Which approach is going to be more effective:
i) I "parent" my nieces on the spot, admonish and guide them as needed. My sister does likewise for my child.
ii) She and I spend the day WhatsApping each other when our respective children do something naughty?

I think option i) is clearly more effective. Which one would you advocate?

Why are schools wasting time sending pointless texts?

Haven't they got better things to do such as teach the children?

But in your analogy you don’t have 29 other kids you’re also responsible for. If you did you might be more inclined to let the parent know they need to teach their kid to behave because you don’t have time for it.

Also it's not a text to my phone it's a text via the school messaging system which means I have to log in to see it.

I'm at work and I don't know if it's something important or not and have to check and I can get in trouble for being on my phone too much.

If it was something important, as in urgent, the school would call.

In your position I would only log into the school messaging system when it’s convenient, lunchtimes or end of the day.

You need to speak to your children about why they’re late for lessons so often. It’s annoying and disruptive for the teachers and other pupils. Discipline them if it keeps happening.

The texts are automated. Nobody is sitting actually typing out messages.

🤦🏻‍♀️

Is it generally more effective in your experience, asking the parent to sort out the behaviour during the school day?
There seems to be a lot of variation on how schools deal with stuff like this. My DC school, they sanction but there is another local to me where the parents are contacted a lot about very minor infringements (wrong colour PE socks on indoor PE day, etc).
I'm inclined to think schools should hold more responsibility than parents when kids are at school, but I am being swayed by other view on this thread.

Why can't they just send a summary at the end of the week. Ie they're regularly late for maths but on time for history and art. ( All hypothetical) You could then have a discussion on why they're late for these particular lessons.

The teachers are TRYING to teach but their lessons are constantly disrupted by kids wandering in late after they've started the lesson. They then have to recap each time because each latecomer (bear in mind they rarely arrive all together) doesn't know what's going on.

Are you a single parent op? If not, change the contact number for a few weeks, give yourself a break. If the other parent gets fed up they might have a different way of dealing with it.

It's not really so much about schools having more responsibility but trying to extract yourself as parent from the relationship between school and child. I mean, I might have limited opinion about sock colour but it's important to school so I allow them to get on with it and would expect my child to deal with the consequences themselves.

Surely it can be automated in a smarter way. Instead of alerting the parent each time Johnny is late for maths, it can send a monthly mailshot to the form tutors of the worst offenders, who might then give them detention, or whatever course of action they see fit. (Or whatever staff member is best placed - head of year, pastoral, whatever). The school should also be looking at overall trends - e.g. if there is widespread lateness to lessons, it needs to be addressed as a whole, not pinged to individual parents in real time. Whereas if it's only a few, they can focus on targeting those kids.

I would be really annoyed to get blow-by-blow updates of something this petty, which I can't do anything about in real time, and without any context. And at secondary school age, the school should be punishing the child directly and holding them responsible for getting to lessons. It's ridiculous for a hulk of a teen to get home and their mum says "I hear you were late to maths this afternoon, naughty naughty".

@TipsyKoala

How I see it is that both school and parents have responsibilities to the child that they cannot simply get out of by saying they are overstretched. Even if they put it in a policy.

What's the most effective way of correcting low-level bad behaviour? In my experience it's enforcing consistent rules and predictable consequences, there in real time.

Now, we don't know from the OP's post whether the school is doing that. If so then they are doing the right thing. The implication of the post was that the school saw its role as informing the parent so they can sort it out. That seems to put the needs of the adult before the need of the child to be properly guided and disciplined.

(I'd take an equally dim view of a parent who texted the school each day: "Gaming until 1am", "Gaming until 1am", "Gaming until 1am", for the school to sort out. The adults are shirking their duties in both cases).

Our school sends these texts so we know if our child is routinely late and to stop internal truanting where they attend for registration and opt out of classes thereafter. As a parent I want to know if my child isn’t where they should be, not least so I can deal with their behaviour.

The school is communicating with you so that you can talk to your children about any underlying issues.

how you manage those messages really isn’t the school’s problem.

How does the school know whether you dropped them on time or not? A lot of kids probably make their own way and the message is generic. I presume it's BC the kid could be disciplined, and if absence gets severe then you could face a fine or whatever. So they need to let parents know. If your kid is generating those messages, it's meant to annoy you to an extent so you try and make them not be late. Don't be annoyed at the school.

To me that's different. If a child is persistently late, or is truanting, that needs to be raised and sorted out fast.

Does your school give you that kind of communication, or is it just an automated message whenever a child is late to a class. If the latter it sounds like the school is leaving it up to the parents to spot serious problems arising from patterns of automated alerts. That seems negligent to me.

@Nicelynicelyjohnson
"What would you be expecting the parent to do?"
Totally agree with you. What is the parent supposed to do?
I guess the OP could offer to come into school, sit with one of the DC, and walk them to the next class, etc (Obviously, I am not serious).
How old are the DC?
When I was at school many years ago, each lesson was 50 mins, and 10 mins allowed to get to the next class. So is there any allowance for travelling between classes?
If the DC are young and the school is very large, it may be that they are intimidated by older children, etc
Rather then getting parents to presumably punch the DC was something that happened at school, maybe the school should deal with this themselves; eg late so many times, and it is an automatic detention, etc

again, most students are never late at a single lesson. So every lateness is an issue. Most classes I teach, all students are there on time. I only can think of two students who are likely to be late in any one full week, of around 16 lessons, (and they are both in the same class)

No, we don't need a monthly collation - we have that anyway - we need every instance to be dealt with, and the parents informed

Do you punish those students who are late?
And what would you expect parents to do in this circumstance?
I am not minimising lateness, it's incredibly annoying, I am just wondering if pushing the problem back to the parents rather than onto the student is effective.

This must vary between schools, surely. Either the OP's three children are all unusually bad in this respect, or their school has a widespread lateness problem and has thrown a technological solution at the problem. If almost all pupils at this school were punctual, why would they bother installing this system of notifications? It would be much more efficient for staff to simply address the tiny number of miscreants.

My daughter often gets to school on time and then the teacher forgets to mark them in so I get one of these messages, which I reply to saying she was there on time (I know she is on time as she is only five minutes walk from school)
I even got on this morning when she was doing an exam.
The new automated systems sound good but don't work very effectively

Perhaps if they had consequences at home for the constant disrespect and rudeness they are exhibiting at school....

And it is rude and disrespectful to be constantly late. It's disruptive to everyone else's learning and sends a message that you don't care about the teacher's time or lesson.

If you don't want the constant texts, then crack down on your teenagers. Apply consequences.

why isn't the school giving them detentions for being constantly late in the school day?

You need to find out why they are constantly late to lessons. If it is a systemic problem in school, e.g. only one toilet being open at break or timetabling kids to be at the opposite side of the school with no time to get there, then you need to raise it with school. I assume the texts will be automated which suggests the majority of the class are being registered as present and on time. You need to find out why your children aren't.