To think this level of injury at school is concerning?

[halfeatenspaghettihoops]

DD is in Year 1 and has been coming home with various injuries - mostly by falling which I’m not worried about - but nearly every other child has been having head bumps with other children, at least once a day. The teacher had a stack of incident forms at collection last Friday. Parents are becoming increasingly concerned as to how there can be so many injuries in a classroom where they are sitting down more and playing less. It’s happening both inside class and out on the playground.

Is it normal?

Are they actual bumped heads with a red mark and a lump, or is it children whose heads touch fairly lightly and they like the drama of going to first aid and getting an incident form?

I do think sometimes the forms are sent home over very very minor ‘bumps’. Things that a parent wouldn’t even put an ice pack on.

I agree with @purpleflurplethat, especially with heads, schools can send home notes over very minor things. My DD had a note last week that she’d bumped her head - I asked her about it (she’s 7), and she was completely unbothered by it, said it hadn’t hurt. They’d put a little paper wristband on her (like the kind you’d get at a festival) that said “head injury” I assume so that if she’d thrown up or been dizzy etc later, any staff would instantly know she’d had a head bump. But honestly if what she’d described had happened at home I’d have barely noticed.

Agree with the PP. My niece came home with a head bump sticker when I was looking after her last week. When asked she told me she had tapped her pencil on her forehead while thinking. A member of staff saw this and gave her an ice pack. I mean I'm glad they are being careful but...

This isn’t typical in my experience.

That’s what we’re not sure about. One of us were told recently that school has introduced a new policy to report all head injuries by phone, so they are probably very minor but just covering their backs. However one parent was told their child had a bump but was fine, which turned out to be a fractured skull!

School staff have to cover their own backsides these days.
Most parents are perfectly reasonable, but there are always one or two and that's why it's necessary.

Is it “just” incident forms or are there actual visible injuries? Maybe the staff are overzealous with the incident forms? When my eldest was at nursery they sent home an
incident form even if the mark had gone by pick up.

They've potentially recently had an issue where something wasn't properly reported so have tightened up.

Some of the injuries have been visible but others not. I assume it is just to cover their backs but I still question the amount of injury happening compared to Reception.

Well there's your answer then.
They are obviously being more vigilant about every slight head bump since the skull fracture incident.

I used to work in a school where the new policy was to send any child with a head bump to the school nurse- private school with an actual nurse in her own building. Two little girls deliberately bumped heads because they wanted to see what it was like there !

Sounds like hyper vigilance rather than negligence to me!

Also, 5/6 year olds in year 1 are still pretty accident prone especially when you cram 30 of them into a small classroom and they all lack spatial awareness so unless there’s some reason to suspect they’re being whacked deliberately about the head or forced to play dangerous games or something, I would assume it’s been a response to the skull fracture incident and move on

@halfeatenspaghettihoops both my kids had, without fail, an accident slip everyday from reception to year 2. Kids are clumsy and at that age tell the teacher about every bump they’ve had. The teacher sends them to the office, for cold compress on the invisible bump, and writes up a slip.

They grow out of it by the juniors.

It can actually be hard to tell sometimes. My dc once opened the car door on to their own face. Small red mark, still sore but not agonising several days later so we went to urgent care. Hairline fracture !

Schools have to report all head bumps
new first aid guidelines state not icing injuries like head bumps so that a swelling can emerge and we can ascertain how bad it may be

children are clumsy and staffing ratios are decreasing due to lack of funding eg my school have one dinner lady and teachers now have to staff lunchtimes, before we had three and teachers could do other work

Well that's the reason then isn't it?
They're now taking every minor bump seriously in case it's serious!

well yes, a child getting a fractured skull at school is serious, esp if school passed it off as a minor bump.