To be concerned I didn't get a call from school today

[Eggandbeans2025]

My dd is in s2 ( I think that's yr 8 in England) And she wasn't at school today due to a injury on her foot ( she can't walk at all on it).

I was under the impression dh would call her school today to let them know she wouldn't be in. He was under the impression I would call them. We fucked up with the lack of communication this morning. The school hasn't called me or dh to let us know she wasn't at school.

She travels for an hr on public transport to get to school ( like most of the school)

I'm i being unreasonable to now be concerned about it. We should've called them this morning but she wasn't at school today without any explanation. Anything could've been wrong and it would only be when she didn't return home we would be aware.

I'm surprised the school doesn't have an automated notification system for this. I thought they all did now! Do they think she's in? Or genuinely have no process for this?

That’s really bad on the schools part. They absolutely should have contacted you if she didn’t turn up for school and they hadn’t heard from you.

Would you expect a call though? My dc secondary school don’t call, they just update an app which parents are expected to look at. It marks them present, late, absent with reason known or absent without reason known. They don’t call unless it’s persistent. Whether or not that’s good I wouldn’t like to say, fortunately I’ve not had to find out. If it’s unusual for your dd then maybe they were less concerned? I can see why you would worry though.

That is bizarre! I’d give school a call tomorrow and kindly let them know what happened and ask what the normal process is. But I’d be nice about as it could be some odd computer glitch.

Had she messaged any of her schoolfriends about the injury and they told school staff?

Our school calls. I know because we got a call when ds1 was mistakenly marked as absent. There was a bit of a heart in mouth moment before the school realised the error but it was reassuring that they were onto it within half an hour.

Do they school have accurate contact details for you or your husband? I have received an absence message before for a child that was not mine. I assume the details entered on the system were incorrect.

So if you don’t notify them and your child is absent they don’t do anything? So you wouldn’t know if there’d been an accident until they didn’t come home from school? Or if they’d played truant you’d never know? In all 7 schools my DC have been at we’d have received a call (normally).

My kids have left secondary recently but I would have received a text message saying that my child wasn’t at registration. It was their mistake a few times but I would expect to be contacted.

you'll know because you check the app! (and most of us check their phones to see where they are).

If you don't notify it's unauthorised absence, and in my local school, that's a detention for when they come back.

You check in the app. Then it’s on you as the parent to deal with it.
As I say, I’ve never had an issue so don’t know what else the school might do.
They made it clear from day 1 that it’s parents responsibility to check.

I don't check the app or track my kids to make sure they are at school. I just assume they're at school. That seems very anxious.

This is what the school website says
When pupils have not arrived in school by 9:30am and we have not been informed of any reason for their absence then parents/carers will receive an automated call (Absent Alert Call).

We didn't get this today.

Yes definitely

Yep. Mines the exact same. No calls, but the app gets updated every lesson.

Just let them know their system isn’t working and apologise for not calling.

This is very possible but its still not ok.

It's definitely working as I put a message on what's app which two parents put they got a call this morning.

I'd rather be anxious than blissfully unaware my kid ran into some trouble. They start secondary at 11, they're not that old, and some of them travel from far.

Which is precisely why the failsafe shouldn't be pro-actively checking on an app.

parents are free to drop their kids, I wouldn't expect the school to hand hold them once they start secondary. It's a parents job, not a school role.

Kids all have phones by year 7 at the latest for that reason anyway.

It might have been different in the past, but everything works around what we have now.

This isn't a hand holding function. This is a safe guarding safety net. As I said, my school phoned me in short order after accidentally marking my kid as absent. They weren't waiting for me to check an app and just hoping he hadn't come to harm.

We get push notifications on an app around 1030. I guess you could turn them off and not know if that suited you. I'd prefer to know and not have to actively check an app.
We had a couple of small issues at sixth form where I thought DS was meant to inform them of stuff (dental appointment, illness, etc.) but that wasn't good enough. I found that out pretty quickly.

I’d definitely be raising this with school. We would get a call from the attendance team by about 10:30 at the latest if they were not in and we hadn’t reported it.

Our app shows attendance and I might check it’s accurate every now and then when looking for something else but definitely wouldn’t expect to check it each day to make sure she’s arrived safely.

We had a couple of times with my DS when they called me to say he wasn’t there but turned out he was. He had been taken to other rooms etc instead of registration. A few minutes of panic the first time.