Mayflower primary school - nappy changing facilities for school aged children

[2011j]

AIBU to think this shouldn't be necessary?

Not including those with sen, children should be potty trained before starting school - AIBU?

The article is talking about reception aged children

I used a book and the corresponding online forum for advice. Much better than a sure start centre

For you maybe, but not for many people. What happens if your child hasn’t read the book so doesn’t know what they are supposed to be doing?

often online forums are full of contradictory advice and judgment so for many they don’t help with problems

Yes, underfunding of the HV Teams, and the complete decimation of Sure Start Centres has SO much to answer for.

I am aware of this as a I have a,child in a SEN,school for children with severe and profound learning disabilities

we have four special school,s in my L A all of which have doubled in capacity in the past 10\15 years
the needs of these kids are very complex so would never have flown under the radar
any ideas what is causing thus?

Why would the child need to read the book? Me as the parent reads the book, then I teach the child.

More and more parents are both working full time now with their children in nursery Monday to Friday. They need to work, and have every right to work, but I do think that may be partly what’s causing this problem.

But that's not new.

Because past governments decided to close many of the special schools to save money and lots of SEN kids are stuck in mainstream schools that can't meet their needs!

There is such a rise in the number of children not toilet trained by school age. (4/5)

I was a nursery teacher as an NQT and we didn't take children at 3 into the school nursery until they were toilet trained. Delayed start meant they were back, toilet trained within a fortnight! Out of 104 three year olds, I would say maximum of three per year weren't trained.

My DD and DGC’s, ‘gentle parenting’, no SEN issues.
Just started toilet training one DGC, now ready for school in September. ( was 4 last month).
He just refuses to be trained. He is a big boy, tall for his age and still in a nappy. He doesn't stay with us during the day any longer as changing his nappy is awful.
I wonder if it would have been easier earlier and later is more difficult. She is now delaying him starting school as she doesn't want him to go to school whilst he still soils himself.

I don't know why this is the case, lack of expectation, lack of routine. Mine were trained at two.

Inclusion. If you close a load of special schools in the name of inclusion all the kids who would have had a place in them will be in mainstream school and many will have personal care needs.

I have 2 sons with SEN. Both were late to toilet train. One was in a special school so there was no problem with changing nappies etc and helping to train him. The second wasn’t diagnosed till he was 8, so I was called out numerous times during his reception years to deal with the accidents he’d had. Maybe they thought I was a shit parent, I don’t know, but I do know I’d been toilet training him for over a year before he started school and he was still having issues.

Most kids will have undiagnosed SEN (and may be left undiagnosed for many years) some will be parents who cba, or see it as someone else’s job - those would hopefully be a minority.

Considering the average reading age in this country is estimated at around age 9-11, there will be an awful lot of people who would struggle to understand instructions in a book or online forum. People with poor reading skills would very much benefit from a health visitor or sessions in a sure start centre to help.

Some children start school at just turned 4, so those children that take longer to get it might not be reliably trained. I had a friend who tried really hard to potty train her son, got all the help from the health visitor etc but he just didn't get it at all and then magically did just as he turned 4. As he was a late July born, she was really worried that she might be sending him into reception in pull ups. She certainly wasn't a lazy parent.

The population has changed massively!

We’re saving babies now at 22/23 weeks that would never have been saved previously. The majority of them have long term complex needs which we are just not set up to deal with. There aren’t enough Sen places for all these children so they get pushed into mainstream.

It's difficult to understand the logic here. If nappies become unaffordable, it stands to reason that more parents would prioritise potty training earlier. For families where both parents work, children are typically in nursery settings, and nurseries generally encourage potty training.

While a rise in children with SEN may explain some delays in toilet training, that doesn't account for the full picture. Unfortunately, some of this comes down to a lack of parenting knowledge and common sense. Increasingly, parents are not equipping their children with basic self-care skills, it's lazy and incompetent.

This puts an unfair burden on early years staff and teachers, who are often expected to change nappies for children well beyond the typical potty-training age. Unless a child has a disability that prevents it, not teaching them to use the toilet before pre-school is neglectful.

I think this is just the latest moral panic to be honest. Yes there are more children who aren't toilet trained but there are so many news stories I'm convinced it's partly just people are now noticing it more.

In the past children did a staggered start to school, more children were at home and not in childcare until school and they had to be toilet trained to attend a preschool. So either you didn't see non toilet trained children or they were toilet trained out of necessity.

People are weirdly sanctimonious about training early. I potty trained DS (some mild SEN maybe) at 3 and a half and he got it pretty quickly. Would have been a disaster at 2!

The other stuff like "blow their nose" is surely quite anecdotal? As for holding a pencil there are lots of studies that show boys in particular haven't developed the correct muscle skills at 4 to always be great at writing. We push kids into it far to soon in my opinion.

This doesn’t add up. Children in nurseries are often toilet trained quickly and effectively, usually when they're in the room for 2-3 year olds. It’s also worth noting that once a child is eating a full adult diet, their bowel movements become more like those of adults, larger, smellier, and more difficult to manage in nappies.

For nursery staff, especially those earning minimum wage, changing nappies under those conditions is understandably unpleasant and something they'd prefer to avoid. That alone creates a strong incentive to support early toilet training and they do.

It’s ‘increasing’ as the number of SEN kids in mainstream schools has increased as schools for students with SEN have been shut down or defunded/slimmed down. So, not really increasing as such, but the demographic of the student population has substantially changed.

I think this is just the latest moral panic to be honest. Yes there are more children who aren't toilet trained but there are so many news stories I'm convinced it's partly just people are now noticing it more.

Hardly. If children were arriving at school not toilet trained in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, then there schools would have noticed. It didn't happen.
Now it does happen, far too much.

The news stories might bring it to more members of the population at large, but schools are very, very aware it is the problem that has massively increased and not just that things are noticed that weren't noticed before.

I don't think there is any one reason for it all, but a lot of contributing factors.

My DD is in reception year now, she was born a couple of months before we went into lockdown due to covid. Her school cohort has more children that started school (in reception year) in nappies than they've ever had before according to their reeption class teacher. The teacher puts it down to a lot of social failures during and after lockdown, where health visitors effectively abandoned families, social groups for parents and babies weren't able to meet, and parents weren't able to access wider family support. Add to that as others have noted, the increase in numbers of children with additional needs attending mainstream schools, and the eyewatering cost of childcare meaning that a lot of children are not going to nursery at all, where they might get nudged into potty training. As I said, lots of contributing factors.

Other than children with SEN, lack of parenting and/or parenting skills.

It’s a fact that more children aged 4 are in nappies. There are the same number of Sen schools as there were 30 years ago here, the difference is that there are far more children with Sen - some due to diagnostic criteria changing but that’s not the whole story. Why more children are getting to 4 without being school ready is a question that needs answering.

As we run a play group at work I do see the 0-4 year olds with parents and purely from observation I see that parents aren’t even attempting potty training before 3.5 or so and give up easily saying “they are not ready” whereas in my experience you have to persevere and it’s a messy process!!! I had a late trainer due to asd, it can take a long time, and it’s so much easier not to bother. Basically the reasons will differ on an individual basis but across a school, a lea, the country you can see trends and its kids are arriving at school commonly unable to do things that a generation ago it was rare for them to struggle with eg knife and fork, zips, buttons, in the 70’s you had to tie a proper tie and do shoelaces/bows at 4, my brother really struggled whereas I had the luxury of buckles (no Velcro then!)

Yes, but:

1. It's far more common for children with special needs to be in mainstream schools than it was in the past (and the pros and cons of this are too much of a discussion to get in to here without derailing this thread)
2. Yes, in some cases it's the parent's "fault" - but where it is, it's not the children's fault, so they shouldn't miss out on education
3. And if you're thinking "oh, we should help the children but the parents should be investigated by social services", then what you'll do is add massive pressure onto parents of children who have special needs but are as yet undiagnosed

Yes, bad enough for nursery staff but for teachers and TAs having to change a 5+ year old's nappy?I hope they can refuse but suspect they can't.

There is the internet? Books? Loads and loads of free information on potty training, more than there would have been 10y ago. The HVs I’ve met are not who I’d go to for support with potty training unless I had done my own work and then needed referring on

This is absolutely a change. In the past it's been rare to need these kinds of facilities on a regular basis.

I think the most basic reason is that in the past the general view would be that if a child's toileting could not be managed within the regular facilities a school had, they are not ready for mainstream school. Now schools are viewed as a kind of childcare that needs to meet the needs of all students in the same setting, no matter how disparate.

So people who had children who were just slow developers might wait an extra year or so to start them in school. In fact at one time where I grew up (not the UK) there was a "school readiness" checklist, which suggested that a child should normally have met certain milestones before beginning school. Being toilet trained was one.

People also used to really try and make sure children approaching school age had met certain milestones. Able to do up a coat, comfortable in the toilet without help, know their phone number and last name, that kind of thing. People no longer seem to do this as often (I see kids of 9 quite regularly in my job who do not know their phone number, more than half in a class typically!)

Children with special needs were often in other kinds of provision if they couldn't manage with a fairly standard school washroom set up. Not always specifically because of that issue, but also because they often had other additional needs that the school wasn't the best place to meet.

As far as kids with no special needs - I think there are a few reasons more are not trained when coming to school. To my mind it is a combination of FT working parents, childcare facilities run without adequate support to really meet children's needs when they are there for long hours, some very bad advice recommending that parents delay training past the optimal time which makes it harder later, and a belief by parents that they should not be in conflict with their children and things like toilet training should come easily.