To complain to the school?

[Water41]

Picking my niece and nephew up from school. They're meant to be out at 3pm. I'm in the queue in horrible cold and snow and there's still no sign of them coming out. It happened yesterday too, and was almost 20 past when the youngest came out which meant the oldest was stood in reception by herself.

Speaking as a primary school teacher, I can promise you the teacher wasn't stalling for time on purpose! We want to give them back to you as soon as possible!

An incident I remember "fondly" from my days of teaching Year One... I was on my own in the room with 30 5-6 year olds, trying to get them ready for hometime, when one was suddenly spectacularly sick everywhere. So I'm trying to deal with a crying, sick-covered child, and trying to stop the other 29 from stepping in it, and dealing with the massive load of puke on my carpet...

Are all the children that late out? This seems very strange.

You posted at 3.55 pm so they were at that point 55 minutes late coming out???
Why didn't you go into reception to ask what was going on?
Has there been some misunderstanding and there's an extra activity going on?
I find it very hard to believe that children would be kept in for an extra 55 minutes at the end of the school day without it having been communicated previously. And also find it very strange that all the waiting parents would simply wait outside for 55 minutes without someone going in to find out what was happening.

In theory the teaching time finishes 3 pm in the case of your school. So add on getting 30 children dressed to go home in that weather plus matching them up with book bags, lunch boxes etc. In theory we are required to teach until 3 as “ every second counts”
But in the real world we would hope to have them ready to go out of the door fully dressed by 3 pm.
As someone else said, an over running assembly, a lost bookbag, mixed up untamed jumpers etc could have delayed things.

It's happened to me regularly over the years.Its annoying as fuck but not much you can do

Yes. It's on the website for the school.

Agree with this. If there were tons of parents all waiting outside for almost an hour, why didn't anyone go in and see what was happening? Have you spoken to the children's parents to check there isn't something you don't know about? I'd get the info from them rather than look at the school website as it could well be out of date if they're lax with keeping it maintained (I know our school is and theres some outdated info on there).

Did you ask the children's parent if this is correct? Some school websites are not updated regularly!

Also are you going to update as to why they were out 55 mins late today? Was there an emergency?

A bigger guide would be if the playground is full of other parents also waiting for their children. If OP is the only one there, that might be a good hint that she has the wrong time ...

I know it's the correct time. I've been picking them up five days a week since they started at the school.

Everyone was waiting - three big queues of people!

What did they say when you asked why they were so late?

@Water41 so you were all waiting for almost an hour after the normal pick up time? Is that right?

I've no idea why it says 3:55. It was 3:20 when they came out so 20 mins late in some very horrible weather.

So you arrive at 2.55pm but were still in the parent queue waiting for them at 3.55pm? So they were over an hour late out of school?! That doesn’t make any sense unless there was an extra preplanned club or event on the children were involved in. Understandably teachers want kids gone within minutes. No way would a teacher keep a bunch of tired kids voluntarily for an hour just for lolz.

Or was your youngest just 20 minutes late out for a couple of days? That doesn’t seem something worth complaining about unless it becomes a pattern. Might just be kids getting longer to pack up/get ready/wrap up warm/get back into routine? Or maybe the last activity of the day just overran ever so slightly? That’s normal and happens sometimes though 20 mins repeatedly would be curious. Your oldest primary school child waiting in a warm reception for 10 minutes for their sibling to come out is hardly a hardship. All of us have had to wait for parents, teachers, friends for time periods when we were young. As 3.10 is the earliest you can leave anyway as that’s when your oldest comes out, you only had to wait around an extra 10 mins.

The first step is to ask the teacher about what's causing them to be late to be let out. Unless your nephew can explain it himself, but he might not have a full understanding of what's happening.

The next time it happens you should go into reception and ask why they aren't out yet. 20 minutes is too long.
I used to be a primary school teacher. We had them ready to leave on the dot and that meant going to the cloakrooms 5 minutes before finishing time (sometimes even a bit before that for the younger classes who took longer). That meant that they were all out within 5 minutes of finishing time because we knew that some parents were rushing somewhere else, some children were travelling by school bus, others needed to go to clubs etc. And as teachers we had clubs to run, or meetings to go to or work to be getting on with.

If parents start going in when they aren't on time the school will eventually realize there is issue.

3 queues of parents standing outside waiting for 20 minutes and nobody saying anything is ridiculous.

This passive aggressive MN phrase is so tedious. Please stop. The very point of the OP's post is to ask whether we think she should raise this, so obviously she hasn't already. As you know.

Oh fgs, it's the OP's style of writing in the present tense about the past, not that she was still there at 3.55pm. It's a colloquial form, e.g. "so I'm standing waiting..."

It's really not though. I don't see why it's so hard for her to just ask at the end of the day 'is there a reason they're coming out so late' rather than filing a complaint, which will be tedious. It's not hard.

It's not. OP posted further on unsure of why her post said 3.55pm, so she was posting in "real time" even though the time was incorrect.

I did ask and was told they'd be out soon - 10 mins later I was still waiting!

Why was one of them waiting on her own if you were there?

So, ask your niece/nephew's parents to email the school and ask if this is the standard release time now for the children, or if it's caused by a particular reason. One possible one could be getting changed after PE for example, and the children being slow.

It's not that it says 3.55 all posts show the time they were posted. Did you type and press post whilst you were still queueing ?
That's whats confusing

Because the school is split into two halves - the lower school is in one side, the older kids are on the other so you have to pick the younger kids up first then walk to the other side to get the older ones.