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?

This isn't about SEN kids, diagnosed or otherwise. Obviously those situations are different.

The vast majority of NT children are capable of being potty trained. You can teach bloody babies to wee in a potty very young! The only reason these kids aren't potty trained is because parents CBA and it's become normalised.

Teachers shouldn't be having to change nappies for 5 year olds with no additional needs.

Local authorities systematically and deliberately use the legal process as a means to delay and obstruct complying with their legal duties.

It's a chicken/egg problem and in the middle of this is a vulnerable child who is being failed due to a multitude of factors.

Parents fighting the system and systems unable to cope with the challenges of lack of funding/resources/provisions.

Parents even with ongoing tribunal appeals, the outcome heavily relies on co-operation from the local authority, which they might be legally required to do, but they do not because of lack of accountability.

The system needs a complete overhaul and for the councils to be held accountable, currently as it stands we are accepting councils to be unlawfully failing children!

Additionally it’s so easy to lay blame at the parents, when the likely factor is there is a underlying reason as to why children are not reaching their milestones however if for example a child does have a parent that is failing to aid their child to reach milestones, isn’t helping the child!

Likely the child is being failed further by adults point scoring blame and not understanding that at the CORE of all this, is a vulnerable child.

^ This is excellent, but too much like common sense for the UK's politicians. Unfortunately we have a spineless generation of politicians who really cannot be bothered to address issues such as this.

It will make the parents toilet train them quite quickly if they were made to come in.
They set their kids up for this not the poor teachers.

Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to send your dc in pull-ups if they were not SN

i remember making sure my ds was toilet

trained to go to playgroup at 2.5 as they wouldn’t have taken him

pp is talking about my child who is bowel incontinent and no amount of toilet training will change that..

Absolutely agree. We tried to potty train our girl at 2.5 and she absolutely wasn't having it. She couldn't tell us she needed a wee, nor did she notice, or care, if she wet herself.

She went into Preschool at 3 and immediately said she wanted to be a big girl and go to the toilet like the other kids. She was 3y 2m when she started Preschool and 3y 3m when she was fully potty trained.

If she hadn't been going to Preschool I'm certain she'd have been closer to 4 before we even attempted it as she just wasn't ready to do it on her own. We tried to read books, we tried to talk to her, we tried rewards charts, everything, but there weren't any groups, there weren't visits from the Health Visitor, she was our first baby and we had no idea what to do.

She's still in nappies at bedtime and there's no sign that's changing any time soon but we'll just keep going.

What would it help? Would your answer change if you knew why the OP was asking?

Yes, it is and I know that sounds mad! It is a small class of around 15.

I think that if Terry towelling nappies were the only option then most (but not all) children would be completely potty trained by aged 2.5. Nappies are cheap and convenient, not to mention absolutely awful for the environment.

It is about SEND kids though.

When I started teaching 15 years ago you may have had the odd reception child starting in nappies (very rare!) generally dry after a month or two.

Now there are children in nappies in every year group from nursery to upper Juniors- so that is why schools now need changing facilities.

There are more typical children starting nursery in nappies, but that is likely because children start at 2 now so it's more 'normal' and accepted.

I obviously can only speak with very limited and local knowledge, but in our town they all but closed the sen school. At its last ofsted inspection in the early 2000s there were over 300 pupil on the role. It is now a small unit within another school, and has spaces for only 60. Previously it served children aged 2-18, with lots of different needs. My friend’s older brother went there. It was a long time ago, his only diagnosis was ‘special needs and learning difficulties’. He’s in his 40s now, and has a mental age of about 6ish. My old hairdresser also attended. They focused heavily on getting children their maths and English GCSE’s, which allowed them to access college courses (so it wasn’t just the most extreme needs that were supported.).

Now, a little boy in my son’s year 3 class is completely nonverbal, uses reigns when he walks outside, and is unlikely to ever be able to dress/use the toilet himself. There is not a space for him in that school because it takes less than 1/5 of the students it used to. There are so many children in my son’s school with EHCP that they’ve been able to hire teachers to work solely with the children who will never meet the key stage targets, to try and give them the best outcome. Obviously this is a vicious circle, because then parents are told that as mainstream school is ‘meeting their needs’, they aren’t priority for the sen unit.
My mam is a TA, the little girl she works with would have absolutely had a place at the old sen school. But because they can pay my mam to work 1 to 1 with her, again the council view it as mainstream meeting her needs.

This is obviously a very localised view. But I can’t imagine it’s super rare.

DH did get a shock at having to oversee nappy changes at KS2 tbh & it was the TA who did it. But he often had to be in the toilet area. So I don’t think most teachers would be keen. They are mostly nice people who would just get on with it.

In my town we do have several special schools but all children must have profound and severe learning disabilities, a few of them also require children to have global developmental delay.

My son is physically disabled but has no learning disabilities and is capable of meeting key stage targets so he'd have no chance of getting in to one of the special schools.

In general I agree with this, though I do think there could be some cases where there can be advantages to special schools. I've heard a few people lament the loss of programs that they had available as students specifically for blind or deaf children, for example.

I think though we should be less hesitant about specialist provisions in general. Mainstream school works when the children in a class of 18 or 25 have similar educational needs. Children who really struggle, or are very bright, may well do better in a class more directed to their needs, as well as children with other kinds of issues that affect what kind of education is best for them.

Inclusion as an educational principle has become ideological, resulting in classrooms where few if any children have their educational needs met.

It’s so broken, isn’t it. The sen unit here doesn’t tend to accept children with global developmental delay until at least year 2 (occasionally year 1). They argue that there is nothing they can do for a reception child that can’t be done in a mainstream school, with a 1 to 1 support worker. Those children go to mainstream in nappies because the council can’t allocate them an appropriate space.

In KS2, so ages 7-11, unless a disability prevents them from managing independently, can children who are not toilet trained change their own pull-up nappies?

Consanguinity. And pushy parents that don't understand child development attempting potty training too early and causing long term toileting problems.

It really is.

Though I am happy that he gets to stay in his mainstream school, it would've been a last resort for him to move schools.

Well obviously if they could, they would.

Do you think it’s because of closures of special schools?

Why is the UK so hopeless -Covid was everywhere but it is the excuse for everything now

@MissTRENDING I guess he wasn't able to. He was actually offered a place at a SEN school but Mum really wanted him in mainstream and so was resistant to him going. I believe the teacher the following year said she was unable to meet his needs and deal with an otherwise tricky class behaviour wise. So he has now gone to SEN school.

I don't think people who have never taught can comprehend how difficult it is to meet the needs of so many children all at once for a full day.

Personally I would not be keen to nappy change and provide intimate care for a child beyond toddler age. I am sympathetic to the child with special needs but don't see that a teacher in primary school should be cleaning up bums. I don't think parents should just assume that a class teacher will be OK to do this. It would be quite smelly beyond the age of 2-3 I would say.

In the past those with additional needs went to residential schools, institutions, died young due to lack of nutrition and medical care, were kept home with stay at home parents out of sight of the world.

Now we have a world where we educate children to the best of their ability, or at least that's the aim.

That's what changed.

The poster said

DH did get a shock at having to oversee nappy changes at KS2 tbh & it was the TA who did it. But he often had to be in the toilet area. So I don’t think most teachers would be keen.

Why would an experienced teacher be surprised if the children are severely disabled? The post suggests that maybe this wasn't the case.

The point of this thread is to highlight that, of course, when a child has a disability, expectations around potty training must be adjusted, as these children have special needs. However, it seems that more and more children regardless of disability are struggling with this skill. The thread has mentioned some possible contributing factors, such as the availability of affordable, absorbent pull-ups in larger sizes, unrealistic, permissive or disengaged parenting, and the challenge of both parents working and not having time enough at home to see the potty training through although this is a bit illogical as many nurseries prefer children to be toilet trained but this could be contributing factor.

Bring back Sure Start centres to guide parents during these important early years.