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?

Well it’s not going to help the teacher shortage if they discover that instead of teaching phonics & times table they might have to factor in a nappy change. How & when are they supposed to deal with that in the middle of a lesson with 28 other kids waiting to learn? I appreciate it must be difficult for you but how are school supposed to deal with this logistically?

I'm sorry but expecting people to just accept that it's now part of the job simply isn't fair. I'll be amazed if there are any teachers left soon because the pay certainly isn't increasing with the ever growing list of things that are expected of them.

What are the other pupils supposed to do when their teacher disappears to do a nappy change? They won’t make as much progress if their teacher keeps disappearing off. What about when it becomes 4-5 children per class?

I am with OP as this was not common even when mine started nursery. They weren’t allowed to go to pre school until they were potty trained. So that was 3 years old. Why is it becoming more commonplace?

SEN, EHCP, medical conditions, etc., yes, understood, but this is not what the OPs original question was. To restate this:

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

So she's asking about children who do not have SEN, EHCP, medical issues etc. We are talking about children who have not been taught.

So, again, what should be done if a 5+ year old cannot remain dry or toilet themselves with minimal supervision during school hours?

I really don't think that it comes to a shock to the majority of teachers that plenty of children with various needs attend mainstream school with disabilities/special needs that sometimes includes incontinence.

They deal with it by having a plan and making sure my son has support in place so he has an intimate care plan which every child will have if they need to be changed at school and named people who are to be the only ones who have permission to change him. For my son, it is 2 people (neither of which are his class teacher) who work with disabled children and are used to changing older children.

My son also has a EHCP due to other physical disabilities and has 2:1 support. He gets wonderful support at his school.

I think that Pull-ups are a big problem. When they were first around probably 25 years ago, there was only one type and most parents didn’t use them. HV advice was that they’d hamper potty training, and children would just use them as a nappy. Now there are all different types and they’re obviously far more popular or the supermarkets wouldn’t give them so much shelf space.

Expecting a child to magically wake up one day ready to decide to use the toilet themselves is ludicrous. The whole idea of potty training is so that they DO feel uncomfortable after an accident.

Our local LEA has actually invested in additional SEN school places.

Unfortunately all the new SEN schools are for admissions for Y1 children and older. They don’t have reception classes. So these children with known and diagnosed SEN will be sent to mainstream primary for at least 1 year.

I found out today, through researching old school ledgers, that in the past all children were visited by a school nurse in the months leading up to transition from nursery to primary. Schools don’t have their own nurses now. Instead we have health visitors and school nursing teams with massive caseloads. Some of these children could have been potty trained with support, but the decimation of community services means the support just isn’t there for families with challenges.

@2011j I think many mums think it will happen in a day! they dont realise that you need to stay in the house and concentrate on taking child to the potty every hour and put pants on, not nappies. mums feel like they must go to the park, they must go to coffee shop to meet friends, they must go visiting or zoo!! stay in for 2 weeks and it will work. plenty cheap pants and a potty or toilet seat. easier in the summer and always easier to train boys than girls.

I do think that teachers and assistants need to accept that it is now part of the job and I believe that most do.

The problem is staffing/funding though.

Say you have one class teacher and 30 children. If you have 29 pupils who are amazingly well behaved all of the time, have no additional needs and can get on with their work independently whilst the class teacher 'nips' off to change a nappy 5 times a day, that is one thing, though I would still argue that this is still a safety issue as whilst they are in the toilet/they are not watching, let alone teaching, the rest of the class.

But meanwhile in the real world, this isn't the case in any Y1/2 class I have ever known. Few have a class TA any more-most have lost their jobs in staffing restructures due to budget cuts. Most KS1 classes will also have 3/4 children with a diagnosis or awaiting assessment for ADHD, another 3/4 for ASD, maybe 1 with an EpiPen needing careful watching, one with eczema needing creaming regularly, 3 with asthma needing meds (and recording when this is given), maybe one with physical needs-eg hoisting/partially blind/arthritis/deaf/absence seizures/needing Movicol to be mixed up and given twice a day. That's without even starting on teaching the class and supporting any children with literacy difficulties to make sure they make expected progress and pass the phonics test!

One teacher can only do so much. Yes, inclusion is great and children should be included, but without extra funding to provide additional support, that one teacher will pretty soon break.

You’ve just reminded me of when my two year old rang his nursery nurse on the landline. He was obsessed with numbers with an amazing memory. She told me about it next time I dropped him off. Thanks for jolting the lovely memory :-)

My son is in Year 4 and I've never known any of his classes to not have any TA's so far. He also has a EHCP with 2:1 support needs. His class teacher doesn't do any of his changing.

I think it's a mix of lack of time and also that nappies are so much more comfortable now, so you don't have the constant whining from uncomfortable children to encourage you to get it sorted.

My kids are both in their forties now. When they were small there were no kids starting mainstream school without being potty trained. However it was easier then to do potty training as we had more time as it was rare for mothers to work full time outside the home.

Really unpleasant for them

not on

I live in a European country where there are no SEN schools and all children go to mainstream.
Nearly all children start nursery school at 3 and practically all children are out of nappies, aside from the children who already have 1 2 1 support in place and maybe the odd one who was born late in the year and was still 2 in September.

All children here have a paediatrician and will have had routine checks every 6 months up until 2/3 years old.
The children who are diagnosed later on in their childhood, and therefore do have SEN are still almost all potty trained by the time they start school at 3.

This is a social and cultural issue in the UK because otherwise it would be happening everywhere, and it isn’t. The fact that we are diagnosing more children with SEN doesn’t mean that there are more children with disabilities, just that we are acknowledging them more. The amount of children with severe enough SEN that doesn’t enable potty training hasn’t increased.

We have plenty of children with no SEN coming to us for their reception year in nappies, unable to dress themselves, not knowing how to use a knife and fork. Hand them a tablet and they know how to use that though!

One of our mums actually told us she isn’t going to even start potty training her toddler because the school did such a good job of it with her older ones!

@EverythingElseIsTaken you don’t know they have no SEN though? All that can be known of Reception kids is no dx. Who knows which ones will later be diagnosed. Mine wasn’t diagnosed until age 10.

I think you are SO right here. Whilst there are a small number of children would would benefit from pull-ups, incontinence at an older age has been normalised.

In an earlier post I suggested people could make some policy suggestions in the vain hope that Kier or one of his little people were reading and interested. So here is mine:

"Advertising of children's continence aids should, subject to consultation with parenting groups, be restricted to those products suitable for the first 18 months of life" *

*unless specifically targeted to children with special needs.

Potty training should be done early - it wasn’t hard . But I was at home full time and they sat on the potty after meals.
Once they are older it can become a battle - sitting in the potty at 18 months playing with toys is much easier than getting a 4 year old to sit for a while on the loo.

My son is in Year 4 and I've never known any of his classes to not have any TA's so far.

This used to be the case in schools round here as well. It absolutely isn't now. Our EYFS classes have a TA, but beyond that-we have TA support allocated only to individual high need pupils with an EHCP.

More funding is definitely needed. It should be the same everywhere too and not so school dependent.

I'm just glad after everything he's been through that he didn't have to change schools as well.

Whatever the reasons, this has happened over the last 20 years. Are we going to see the age creep up closer to secondary school in another 20 years?

Schools should be inclusive of diasabled children. Plenty of children with physcial disabilities don't have learning difficulties or cognitive impairment and can do just fine in mainstream school with the right support. In the past such children might have been sent to special school along with childs with other types of SEN and not recieved a proper education.

We dealt with it before by children being changed in inappropriate places - bathroom floors, the staff room etc. Unsafe for them, unsafe for staff. Some schools insist parents come in and change the children, including in those unsuitable places.

The need has always been there, I was at primary school in the 80s and there were 2 children in my class in nappies (twins, born prematurely and with developmental delay and CP).

As schools get bigger and specialist schools close down in the name of integration, the issue will become more common. All schools are going is meeting existing needs in a more appropriate way.

Out of interest, would you say which country this is?

The excuses about two working parents is just rubbish.

I worked full time, my DM worked full time. Our children were all toilet trained between the ages of two and three. (additional needs excepted).

It is just an excuse.