Teacher hand delivered certificate usually given out in class.

[howmanycorners]

I don’t know what to make of this, dc is in primary school and every week someone gets a certificate.
Suddenly I saw my child’s teacher walk past the lounge window at about 8 pm and post a certificate through the door.
Aibu to find it a bit strange and wonder why she did this having had to look up our address and purposely drive to our house when all certificates are handed out in school and she would see my child in the morning?

School records?

bit invasive that she was suddenly walking past our open window to the front door.
teacher walks to front door, then.

it did feel a bit invasive that she was suddenly walking past our open window to the front door.

Do you also feel invaded by the postman, Amazon and people dropping takeaway menus through your letterbox?

I don’t think she has ever met Dh as I do the school runs and it’s unlikely she fancies me as she is about 20 years younger than me although I have just had my hair done.

Seriously though no, there is no possible reason I can think of that’s untoward so I will go with the majority and assume she is a keen young teacher who just went the extra mile.

I still think it was a bit unexpected as my other 2 went to the school, even I went there and it’s not something you usually see, so yeah maybe I did wonder if it was likely she was checking out a suspicion she might of had and I couldn’t think what.

Why should she? Those people haven't gone to the trouble to go and look up her address, neither do they have any intimate knowledge of her child.

Obviously “driving past” can include driving past the entrance to a cul de sac!

Lots and lots of schools send the teacher round to the child’s house for a home visit before Reception starts. You do know that in primary the teachers ask the kids all sorts of personal questions about their home life all the time (and kids also volunteer such information unsolicited)? Things like whether they share a room, have a garden, any pets, who lives at home with them, what they did at the weekend - it’s a combination of establishing a rapport, safeguarding and finding topics to talk about for learning purposes.

I recommend you watch the Oscar-winning film Weapons OP. I will not spoil it for anyone who has not, but perhaps your child had mentioned an Aunt Gladys…

Exactly- they are strangers so should feel more invasive.

Yes, I know it's only one the bases and the reason we've been talking about that one is because obviously none of the others apply. Accessing an address to deliver a certificate isn't to save somebody's life, or to comply with a law, because it's in the public interest or a contract exists. You might want to hypothesise that the OP has previously given explicit consent for her data to be used in this way, but she won't have done. Please think about it...do you really believe
that any school would explicitly seek consent to
use address data for the purpose of making
unarranged, undocumented, non urgent visits to pupils' homes? As has been pointed out on this thread these kinds of visits could potentially leave teachers very vulnerable indeed, and there's no way on earth any school would build that into their policies.

Why? The teacher obviously has a reason for doing it. She wouldn’t have gone out of her way to hand deliver something for no reason. 99% likely she’ll have a perfectly normal reason to have done it and it’s a total non event.

It doesn't work that way.

They aren't people with a safeguarding role who might be calling about something the child has said or done in school. They are regularly at the house and are unlikely to be having a good snoop about where a particular child lives for either personal or safeguarding reasons. They are people doing their expected job at their expected time.

The fact that they are complete strangers with no connection to the family makes them less invasive, not more.

That only makes sense if you think that the teacher was there to snoop.

And the 1% who don't have a perfectly normal reason? I don't think we can assume all teachers do all the right things, always, for only the right reasons.

I expect she’ll say she was passing and thought it would be a nice thing to do - will the OP suggest she should not have accessed her address for that reason - I doubt it. So it will be a non event and the real reason will not be shared.

Is this an entirely impossible, could never happen scenario?

No. But neither is it the default.

Don't you understand the point that yesterday evening at the time she turned up nobody knew she wasn't? There was so logical reason for her to hand deliver that certificate.

In fact it denied the child their moment in the spotlight at school and denied the rest of the class an example to celebrate and emulate.

I think the default that the teacher just thought it would be better to drop it to the child's home is 100 times (or more) more likely to have been the reason. Sadly we need (and have) laws and professional standards which also protect against rare and malicious circumstances.

As a teacher I can think of no possible reason to go out of my way to post a child's certificate through their front door when I can give it to the actual child in school hours.

Unless there is some big back story here there is nothing normal about teachers delivering class certificates in their free time when they will be seeing little Billy in person next day.

Don’t you understand that we have no way of knowing the wider context of the teacher’s actions? And OP did not even ask her.

You could consider whether a school would ask for consent to use addresses to deliver stuff, I guess.

Many years ago I had a terrible bout of thrush. This was in the days when you needed a prescription for treatment but when I arrived at the chemist I found it was half-day closing. I was desperate so I scribbled a note and dropped the prescription through their letterbox. About an hour later my doorbell rang and it was the pharmacist with a box of Canestan in his hand. He had brought it round out of kindness knowing that I needed it. I was so very grateful and thought it was a lovely thing for him to be so thoughtful. Not for one second did I think he was stalking me or over-stepping his professional boundaries.

We don't need to.

We need only to understand that when turning up completely unannounced the parent had absolutely no way of knowing whether she mistakenly thought she was being kind, was on a valid safeguarding information gathering, was on an invalid information gathering or was a crazy mad stalker.

And the fact that she could have been any of those things, and broke the law obtaining/using the address, is all we need to know.

You could, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find any school which has that built into a policy. It's just not a routine part of schooling for teachers to deliver things to pupils' homes. What would they be delivering that couldn't be more efficiently given at school? I know that no teacher ever came to our home growing up to deliver anything, and no teacher has ever come to my home to deliver anything for DD. It's not normal.

Thought so!

And you didn’t ask her because you don’t want to hear the answer and bring more attention to it whatever the suspicion could be.

As you said, just 3 weeks to go, until he gets a new unsuspicious teacher and this can be forgotten.