Son missing 4 weeks of school- AIBU to have expected some sort of contact from them?

[SecretBeans]

My son is in year 9, 14yo at a super selective grammar school. So of course they are very hot on attainment, keeping up etc.

DS has an operation next week and he will be off school for about 4 weeks. He will be “well” but unable to go to school physically.
I got the op date mid December and sent all the documents to school. Heard back quickly back from attendance officer who said all signed off. Didn’t hear anything back from form tutor. It was coming to the end of term so whatever. Assumed I would hear something back after Xmas.

Still haven’t heard anything from form tutor. Even a quick call to say hope the op goes well, we will/will not send work home, or even “actually your son needs to gather work to do” or just anything really.

At the end of last week DS (at my request) asked her to call me. She said she was working on it and would phone me.
The operation is now in a couple of days and I have not heard from her or anyone.
At parents evening yesterday not a single teacher knew he would be off (except the PE teacher). They were all bit “oh” and hastily started making notes.

I have just emailed her again and copied on HoY which feels a bit “snitchy”.
It feels a bit shit really and like the school don’t care about him.
AIBU?

Clearly the school have not shared the information with the relevant members of staff which is poor management on their part IMO!

You did your bit in informing them in December of an impending absence due to surgery…….at the very least someone should have said what the next steps would be for DS to catch up on and keep on top of his school work.

Piss poor attitude on the part of the staff……I hope the surgery goes well for your DS.

The form tutor saying 'hope the operation goes well' might seem polite and supportive but ultimately they're very busy and them saying it won't make any difference.

I'd assume in the days leading up to him being off the teachers would give him work and maybe then speak to you about accessibility in terms of how soon he might be able to be back in.

But again I'd imagine you wouldn't know until after the operation has happened?

If nobody speaks to you or him then just speak to the attendance person asking what is protocol when someone is absent for this many weeks.

Yes, it's all a bit unhelpful, isn't it? Ideally the school would have a point of contact or someone to liaise with parents when something like this comes up, whether that's a head of year, SEN coordinator (probably not relevant in this case) or a form tutor or directly to reception.

If you normally would contact the form tutor then they should either have dealt with it or told you what the correct reporting procedure was, rather than just let the information drop into a black hole. Even if it's "he needs to tell his teachers individually" or whatever. It might be down to individual subject teachers how they handle setting and marking work, but OP isn't psychic so someone needs to tell her how it works.

Hopefully the surgery will go well and he'll be back to school and able to catch up quickly.

She has…

They are probably waiting for him to have the operation and gauge how he is recovering and, if I were you, that’s what I’d be doing too. Once he is feeling better, request work from them if you want. However, you may find fatigue post op may be an issue. I actually don’t think 4 weeks in Year 9 is a big deal. Year 10/11 then maybe.

My advice, chill out and see how your son recovers.

I don’t think you’re being unreasonable.Whatever you post on here, there will be some harsh replies amongst the few helpful ones. I hope your boy’s surgery goes well.

I’d be surprised as a form tutor to receive an email about this and would not expect to have to act as liaison in this way. I would expect this to be dealt with by school attendance team and/or Head of Year. I would say ‘I hope it goes well’ to your son, not you, and I would say assume that he would be in touch with his teachers when he knew he was ready to work after the operation. I’d expect that he would access work that is shared on whatever system the school uses (Teams, Google Classroom, etc.) if he’s up to it. I’d then expect, as a classroom teacher, to be helping him catch up when he is back in school. Having said all of that, if you asked them to call then they should have. (It just would probably have been a bit of a pointless conversation, other than to make you feel better.)

He’s not actually missed school yet so they won’t do anything, partly because operations get postponed regularly. Once he’s been through the surgery and is capable of limited home schooling get in touch with his school for work

He hasn’t even had the op yet, calm down.

I would also have expected some sort of acknowledgement. Or I would have until I had a similar issue. Send in emails, and absolute crickets back.

If a child has a big op coming up (like your DS) or has another medical emergency, a short response acknowledging and advising next steps from the school perspective seems to be reasonable expectation. I know teachers are busy - but their workload increases when for every one issue I have to send them 10 emails to read and clog up their inboxes to get one short reply!

It isn't completely clear from your posts exactly who you emailed. Normally things like this would go through the Head of year rather than the form tutor, and it isn't part of her role to be emailing you with niceties about hoping the operation goes well and so on. It wouldn't normally be her role to coordinate work collection either. I realise you are talking about a grammar school so probably a very different intake from at my school, but at mine absences like this are a grey area and parents take the lead if they want work to be provided as many would be outraged at the idea of their child being sent work when off.

I also don't understand why you asked your son to ask the tutor to ring you. Why don't you just email her or ring the school if you want to speak to her rather than expecting your son to be a go-between? If students say to me, 'My mum wants you to ring her,' (seldom happens) I ignore it and wait to see if the parent rings because in my experience such messages are unreliable. I think you need to communicate better with the school to be honest but also be realistic - he isn't even off yet!

Knowing what schools are like, I'd contact the subject teachers individually, tell them that he will be off for 4 weeks but may well be able to study during that time, and can they tell what units they are planning to teach at that time? So if in English they are studying Mice & Men or whatever, he could read it/watch the movie etc. He could look on BBC Bitesize or Oak Academy if he knows what topics to research. Maybe the teachers use Google Classroom and there might be links on there. He probably knows some of this himself, or could ask .
I reckon if he's not well enough to go to school, you could focus on cultural capital, ie films/books/youtube/musuem learning sites etc.

Your focus needs to be on your son and his health.

I would not even care about education right now.

I would actually be disgusted if I told the school my DC was going to have an operation and would be off for 4 weeks and they mentioned school work!

Let the poor boy have his operation and recover in peace.
It may be that he’s up for doing school work with a couple of days or it may be a couple of weeks.

Just focus on the op, forget about school and see how things go.

If he’s in a super selective school I’m pretty sure he’ll cope with catching up on his return. He’s also only in year 9, so time-off now will not affect his GCSE results in 2 years time.

As he’s an extremely intelligent / academic boy already, you’re in a great position to not worry about his studies for this short period of time. Just focus on the OP and the recovery.

I had an emergency operation over the new year when I was in year 11 which meant missing 3 weeks of school. My parents specifically asked for work to be sent home as they knew it was important not to miss too much as I was doing my GCSES.

One teacher sent something home. I had a few teachers moan about my absence. One of those told me I could have just come in and got my coursework. Except I couldn't because I was struggling to walk due to my operation

Attendance Officer here. ESH. The attendance team should have provided the information to your DS’s teachers. That said, it was a few months ago when you let them know and teachers can miss/forget things even if they’ve been informed (particularly if it was before Xmas).

However, equally, it should be you proactively contacting the school in the run up to his absence asking about completing work while he’s off. Also, it’s a secondary school and your son is 14. He can also let his teachers know he’s going to be off and ask about work himself.

It just sounds like a mismatch in expectations. You’ve told the attendance officer he’ll be off, she’s recorded it, job done as far as they’re concerned. It’s more likely you’d want contact before he goes back (and then maybe with head of year rather than form teacher?) to make plans for his return, because while he’s off there’s not really much they can do, is there?

These teachers are damned if they do, and damned if they don't!

I agree and he has no idea how he’ll cope with his recovery.

It would be better to have the op and when he’s feeling up to it, contact the teachers for some work.

Until then he’ll know what he’s been learning about so can just use bbc bitesize to carry on.

At this stage in Y9, I’d want to be sure he is able to get his Options in on time, and not be overlooked because he’s off.

I agree that your expectations are far too high. It really isn’t a big deal to schools or staff that a pupil is having an operation yet you seem to expect a personal call to check in or to say that they hope it goes well. Why?
I wouldn’t expect a call if I told DD’s school something similar. You’ve sent in the relevant absence information so nothing else needs to be done.

As your son is 14 I'd expect him to talk to his teachers himself about what work he could be doing while off so he doesn't fall behind (as 4 weeks is a long time, he could very well fall quite far behind if he's not keeping up with his schoolwork once he feels up to it - my son might have to be off for two weeks to get his tonsils out and his teacher made it clear he will need to do his schoolwork at home during that time so he doesn't have to catch back up when he returns) so I would tell him to do this. If the teachers don't want to set any work beforehand, which is understandable as it can't be known yet how soon he'll be up to doing work, then he can contact them once he's up to it, or ask classmates what they've been doing and do his own catch up work.

What is your desired outcome here @SecretBeans ?

Do you want them to give some attention.

Do you want them to send on extra work?

It isn’t very clear from your posts what you are looking for except that the teacher who doesn’t necessarily actually teach your son for a subject, does she/he? Responds back to you.

Write an email with your explicit expectations and see if they can be accommodated. There is no need for these phone calls.

Also couldn’t this have been raised with the teachers at parent evening?

How is your son, OP? Hope he recovered well from his op and back into school