Noone picked up my daughter and school didn't ring.

[Cantheowneroftheredcorsapleasemovetheircar]

On Thursday my daughter was supposed to be picked up by my sister as my husband and I were both working. She finishes school at 3:20pm, she's 7 and is in year 3.

At 4pm I was on my break at work and called sister to ask how DD is.

Sister bloody FOROGT to pick her up and wasn't even in our home town. She was about an hour's drive away at her new boyfriends house.

In a panic I hung up on spluttering apologising sister and immediately rang school to find out what happened to DD. They just casually said "yeah, we've got her, she's in after school club"

At the time I was too busy arranging for someone else to pick up her with only 10 minutes left of my break and relieved she was safe to think much more on the fact that the scholl hadnt informed me so I just said thank you to the school and said someone would be there soon.

Would you complain to the school or at least mention it that noone rang me or DH to say she hadn't been picked up? If I hadn't rung sister I wouldn't have known, and what would have happened when noone arrived at 5pm when it closes?

They also charged me and I could have avoided this charge or at least got a lower charge if I'd got her picked up by 4pm.

wrong thread

You are moaning about the charge? Fucking hell.....

How do you know what their procedures are? How do you know their SOP isn't putting the child in the Afrerschool Club?

Im guessing most parents dont have sisters who forget to pick up their niece so they usually have capacity?

Not to let your sister off the hook but did you remind her or just ask her a week in advance and then not get in touch again? I have a few people who help me with pick ups and drop offs and I always remind them the night before/morning of the pick up because I know how chaotic/forgetful humans can be!

Parent should absolutely be called if child isn’t collected. And if a parent can’t be reached then the emergency contact should be informed. What if the parent had an accident in way to school? Or a heart attack at home? Etc… there’s every chance that at the end of afterschool club there would still have been no one there to collect DD.

They made the right decision moving her to after school club so the teachers could go home, but a mistake was made not to let anyone know she had been left at school.

Several hundred pounds from the outrage it had caused one would presume….

Your child, your responsibility - not the schools.

School offices at the end of the day are manic. They have parents appearing for all manner of stuff from serious to nonsense, meetings with parents and often other agencies, there can be priority things to deal with such as child protection etc.
So a child who is late being picked up with no other concerns might not be top of the list to deal with. They likely would have called you before ASC ended. But what they did was make sure she was safe until they could get to calling.
Your sister sounds awful!

If they can't use a diary/calendar, they can't be in charge of a child, can they?

It’s easy to forget something when you’re not accustomed to doing it. Kinda like parents leaving their kids in cars. I think you should have reminded your sister the day of, the night before, something, to ensure she didn’t forget to pick up her niece. If you reminded her, sister didn’t want to pick niece up because her plans changed. If you didn’t remind her, you are partly to blame. As for the school, kindly ask for the school policy in situations such as this and thank them for taking care of your daughter.

Well said, you are so right...

Well, pay the bill. Be grateful for asc. Your childcare is the issue.

Spot on. Sensible points getting lost as usual on AIBU in the rush to berate the OP.

Also there’s the distress caused to the child. A phone call just after the end of school resolves things that much quicker rather than the child stuck there at the end of ASC still wondering what’s happened. Ten minutes after the end of school and the child’s probably thinking ‘Auntie Susan’s late’. 2 hours later and they could well be thinking ‘why haven’t my parents realised Auntie Susan hasn’t come? Maybe something’s happened to them’.

The school did everything they needed to do,they kept your child safe and accommodated then at late notice. You are lucky they take that approach, one of my daughters schools do not put children uncollected into after school club. They keep them separate and change parents £15 for every 10 minutes they are late. That soon focuses parents minds into ensuring they collect their children on time.

Schools are busy places not childminding services, this chaos is caused by you not them.

Exactly, the OP and some others appear to think they are the only family in the school and the only time this has happened.

This is mumsnet citizenry. No good deed goes unpunished. Esp if said good deed was at school

But she wasn't at asc for 2 hours. It's was just under an hour when op called. And may be school had tried to reach her. May be they were making arrangements. In ant case I think the sensible advice is for op to thank the school, ask for uncollected child.policy and move on in life with more reliable childcare

I'd ask a bit more.

Did DD know who was picking her up? Did she know you were both working?

She could easily have said, "Mum and dad are working late today" and they have assumed you wanted her in after school club.

Actually I think that's really good. If you are for example,e stuck on the motorway and going to be late then surely it's better your child in inASC occupied rather than sat at reception with staff ringing you constantly and threatening social services if you are more than 10 mins late

I'd be emailing the school a big thank you. They looked after your DD when your arrangements failed. It sounds like a sensible approach to automatically default to after school club rather than have to go spending time chasing parents who don't turn up for their DC. You're lucky to have such a flexible school.

The school day is over, the front office staff are leaving themselves

I know she wasn’t at ASC for 2 hours. But the point being made, the whole point of OP saying that she’d have liked a phone call, is that it was her phoning her sister that alerted her. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known child was even at ASC.

But I do agree that OP shouldn’t go into complaining mode, they kept the child safe and would continue to do so no doubt, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong in requesting a phone call while at the same time apologising that her family member brought the situation about. OP can do both at the same time.

It’s possible they were just about to call her, but it was gone 4 and they hadn’t. I don’t think it’s likely they tried to call her. They would have said that, and I don’t think OP would be writing this post if there was a chance she’d missed a call.

Hello

I dont know if you're still following OP, but at our primary school there was a big problem with people picking kids up late (as much as half an hour in some cases).
Eventually school got fed up with providing basically free babysitting in the school office, and trying to track down mum/dad/gran/whoever so sent out a communication to say any child not collected after 15 minutes would be put into ASC and the parents ipay account charged. There was no mention of this on the website/in the policies.

This is a med-large (approx 600 pupils) busy school in E. London though for context. My children have long since left primary so not sure what the current arrangements are but it could be possible your school has a similar plan in place?