Incident at school - come and give me your thoughts.

[Newnamez]

DD is 12 and in yr7 (first yr of secondary).
On the last day of term before Easter she came home and told us that during the first lesson that day 2 'older girls' (she thinks yr9) came to the class (which had a stand in teacher that day) and asked for her by name and said she was needed at the school office by the Head teacher. She went with them. The girls walked ahead of her whispering.
By chance a TA that DD likes and chats to came out of a room and saw the three of them and asked the girls where they were taking DD. The older girls said 'the office' and the TA said i'll take over and they ran away. The TA shared with DD that one of the girls is her (TAs) cousin and said she was a ''little shit'' !! TA took DD to the office and no one had sent for her. TA took DD back to class. That's the bare bones of it. That is literally all i know.

Now, i hear about this at 6 that evening from DD and get more horrified the more i think about it. I emailed a head of year level teacher that evening. I heard nothing all easter holiday which is fine, but i heard nothing from anyone last night either. (yesterday 1st day back)

Ive told DD not to leave class unless an adult has come for her from now on.

Im going to ring the school this morning to ask to speak to someone in person about this.

Am i wrong or is this quite worrying?! How did the girls know my DD s name and where she'd be? Where were they taking her? Why were they wandering round the school? How are they going to stop this happening again?

What would you do/say?

TIA

Just reading the thread and don’t have any more advice to that already given, but goodness me, that made me go cold reading your OP.
You were absolutely right in contacting school. Don’t let them fob you off. x

Wow. That is totally unacceptable!

Please do push for a face to face meeting - and I agree that safeguarding should be involved too.

Document everything that happened; date/ time/ lesson/ teacher / other girls names / form etc who hatched this despicable plan. Why on earth were those two wandering around school and not in class anyway?!

I really would not let this slide. I am glad your DD is okay.

Maggie i won't let this drop. I want to speak to someone face to face about this. I am old school and hate all the emailing to be honest. I have a yahoo account which plays up half the time and i get in a bit of a tizz about weather anything's been even sent and received at the mo! I like to actually sit in front on someone and exchange eye contact. Old gimmer 🤣

Wrt to TAs language - honestly it's not up there on my list. I don't care why she wasn't with her 1:1. Maybe the child was off sick?

DD is a normal kid. Normal height, white, brown eyes, long straight brown hair like most of her mates. She's loving and has friends. Her name is slightly unusual (old fashioned) and our surname is hard to pronounce. An irish name. Not one the girls could have hit on by accident. We're in England.

How would a supply teacher know the names if 2 random older girls?

Just to point out. All the posts we see on here about schools not letting their child go to the toilet during lessons and teachers say it’s a safeguarding reason please remember this as an example. At my school we would have multiple incidents like this everyday if we didn’t limit them to break, lunch and between lessons when staff are on duty. We have some teachers that do let students out because they are worried about the backlash from parents and I would say 50% of the time there is an incident.

They likely asked to go to the toilet.
Think about how many threads there are of outraged parents when they say that if their child is told they cannot go to the toilet in class that they should just walk out anyway as it's a basic human right.
This is why schools generally have toilet passes for those who need it.

Yes i keep thinking this as well. What fun is there in getting DD to the office and then running off?? And office would have seen them !

@Newnamez meet your sister! Face to face is absolutely the way to go, though I would make sure to take notes of everything and follow up with an email outlining what was discussed. Cover your bases.

I agree that the TA is nothing to do with you and it's not your job to get to the bottom of it. That poster has already said it's all made up so I'd take the advice with a grain of salt, tbh.

☕️👍 sister 😊

The TA is still part of it though as she should have followed up the incident. She should have logged it factually with what she saw happen and this would include the girls names.
For example she would have recorded it as such:
I heard a noise in the corridor and noticed Jane Smith and Alice Jones from year 9 walking down the corridor with Megan Adams in year 7. I stopped them as they were out of class to ask where they were going. Jane and Alice said they were taking Megan to the office. I said I would take her (as per school policy students don't normally accompany another student to the office) and Jane and Alice ran off laughing. I took Megan to the office where we found she had not been asked for so she returned to class.
Action: I have spoken to Mrs B head of year 9 to let her know my concerns of Jane and Alice being out of class and asking for a year 7 child to go to the office.

I think she probably did. And that's how they've spoken to the girls already. I mean she'll know that DD would have gone home and told us - so would have been daft not to have reported it herself. My email that i wrote friday night (and didn't go out of my email account till Sat morning 🙄) could also have been the reason that they got spoken to. But i recon the TA said something.

Then perhaps when contacting the form tutor say thanks for informing me that the girls have been spoken to however due to the nature of the situation (DD being taken from class) then I would like to know what action the school is taking in terms of safeguarding and what the school policy is regarding children out of class.

I think you are right to keep following it up, and the school needs to tighten its practice around allowing kids out of class etc.
But I also wanted to say that this still may just have been a stupid prank.
When ds was in year 8, the year 8 and 9s were allowed to help the new year 7s. (this is in September at the start of the year) if a new year 7 was lost, the year 8 and 9s were allowed to take them to the place they were supposed to be and then be 5 minutes late for their own lesson.

On the whole it worked well, created community etc etc.
Except there were a group of year 8s (including my ds) who thought it was really funny to take the year 7s to the wrong place and then run away, and get to be late for their own lesson and not get into trouble. needless to say I had something to say about that to ds.

Hysterically funny apparently. So there could be something like that going on, target year 7, make them look silly, run away laughing.

Not good enough

I wonder if this is some form of 'tiktok challenge' at the school

I would also like to know how come those girls were out of class

Either they think it would make her look stupid or they weren't going to the office

Ex teacher, ex safeguarding lead here.

You’re not overreacting @Newnamez . You’ll never know whether it was a harmless prank or if the girls had planned something sinister. That isn’t the issue; the issue is sloppy school management.

Have a face to face meeting, ask them to put in writing how they plan to tighten up school policy to prevent this. If you phone reception again, always ask for receptionist’s name. If you feel they are stalling, mention including Chair of Goveners going forward. School have an obligation to attend Governors meeting, usually the Head attends if the Governors receive a complaint from a parent that hasn’t been dealt with appropriately. This will rattle them, but they sound complacent.

A school local to me went into lockdown a couple of months ago, due to a student attacking a younger student, just walked in, attacked student. Victim taken to A&E, thankfully only minor injuries. Made national press. Better to over react than think “If only.”

Good luck.

I know, I just don't use that function and don't want to just for one thread

Are you actually serious? Your post is just completely ridiculous. Do you realise that TA would need about I’ve been support people to write out all the instances that happening in a day with the detail you requesting? It’s clearly a school where children wander around? That’s the way it goes in some schools.

completely agree. Most of these types of threads are people that just need a good night of sleep and a cold glass of water. This is different.

I don’t think it’s weird they knew her name or what lesson she was in.

However, what were they doing out of class? Why did a supply teacher let her leave with year 9s? In what world would that be home someone was summoned to the office? And indeed, what the hell was their plan?

I suspect the reason you didn’t hear back on day one is that it is just so bizarre it probably/hopefully got escalated internally to get you a good answer?

It's very possible that they spotted the OP's daughter in the classroom - every single classroom that I've worked in has either had a window set in the door or (in new builds) a window to the corridor.

More than a year ago I did supply in a school where there was a dreadful problem with children wandering around, often looking for victims. I'm not exaggerating - I was hurt stopping one boy from being beaten up by another.

Bullying at the school was so bad that some parents went to the local press to complain after the LA failed to act.

I had a room opposite two of the toilet areas. Kids were standing in the doorway of the toilets, openly vaping. I'd phone the office and be told to contact my HoD (who was - of course - trying to teach in her own room), when what I needed was a senior manager to come and remove the miscreants.

I agree. Not in a million years would anyone have thought that two 10 year old boys would perpetrated such a terrible crime yet it happened.

Children are murdering children in or out of school, something that we rarey heard of in the past. But its happening..
Who thought a teenage boy would arm himself with machetes and murdered 3 little girls? It happened.
What if those two girls decided they wanted notoriety and planned a heinous crime?

The bit that worries me is that they knew her name,but she didn't know them.

Teacher AND parent here.

While you might not like emailing, the thing that it does is provide a paper trail (well, a record if not actual paper!).

IF the school don't deal with it as you'd like, you then have evidence.

Please use the key word 'bullying' with them in writing.

Also the fact that the girls were out of class 'unsupervised'. That this is a 'safe guarding' issue. And that by allowing students to do this unsupervised during lesson time means the school was lacking in their 'duty of care' to your daughter. These terms will flag to them that you understand their legal obligation to your child (you might not understand it all, but they sure as hell will).

As others have said, there are procedures they should follow.

Agency Supply teachers are lucky if they are told where the staff toilet is and what time lunch is, let alone familiarised with school policies, procedures, and who SLT are