To report theft at school to Police?

[valhala]

Long story, but, DD2 (12 years) has been bullied since starting new school in January. She reported the various incidents (several kids, both verbal and physical bullying) but little was done despite my meetings with school so one day she lost it and lashed out. Of course she was in big trouble at school and home for doing so though I do sympathise.

Because of this and her wary, defensive manner, school think she MAY have SEN (mooted the idea of Autism Spectrum). They have also identified a learning problem as although shes quite bright and very articulate her writing speed is so slow they feel she will need help/a scribe for exams.

In May they promised 1 to 1 support with someone to do craft and to talk to at lunchtimes and after school club but despite several pleas from me in writing have failed to deliver. Likewise an offer for her to be seen by an Ed Psych. Tomorrow I will deliver an official complaint about this and the fact that they have not answered questions put in writing many times about her strengths and weaknesses, what tests they have carried out, what they intend to do next and so on.

She reccently asked me to take her to the doctor to "ask for sleeping pills" as she cannot sleep - hell for her, me and DD1, as are the temper tantrums and bad behaviour which I experience when she is under stress. I took her although I knew of course he would't prescribe anything, but hoping he could back me/get the ball rolling with ed Psych/encourage her to go to CAMHS, which she won't do etc. The doctor has since contacted the school nurse to see DD and we await that opportunity (nurse has tried but DD was off, refusing to go to school having been hit by another pupil at the time, to be fair).

DD came home today to say that her phone had been stolen and that 2 other pupils told her they had seen 2 boys who have a history of bullying her smashing it up on the school field and picking up the remains. We went to the field this evening and found a couple of parts of her phone, which I brought home with me.

I emailed the Deputy of this huge school before I went out, and he wants her to give him a statement tomorrow though she is very scared of returning, especially without a phone to call me on if there is further unpleasantness. I have told her she must go in and that this is the only way to get any form of justice and the matter sorted.

I am so thoroughly pissed off with the school ignoring not only her complaints of bullying but my attempts to get answers from them in order to help DD. I am also concerned that they are suggesting that she has SEN - which would explain why she is reacting to the bullying so badly as to be excluded for a day last term - yet doing nothing to help and thus exacerbating the problem. The school also know that she has been a victim of vile verbal abuse and threats from a parent in a past school and that she has no faith in teachers to keep her safe as a result and have been aware of this since day one.

So, if the school do nothing about the phone incident, given that they have failed to implement the help they offered or answer my questions, some of which date back to February, AIBU to call the police and report the phone incident as a crime?

AFAIK, a criminal offence committed within a school is treated the same as a criminal offence committed in any other place. Therefore you are completely justified in reporting any and every assault, attack, threat or theft of which your DD is the victim - and I think you should do so.

Valhalla

You have my sincere sympathy as the mother of a child who at 15 was so badly bullied at school that he ended up in an adolescent pyschiatric ward for 6 months.

My experiences tuaght me that:

Schools will rarely (if ever) admit they have a bullying problem. they are far keener on trying to get the parent to think they bullying is only 'perceived' rather tha actual abullying.

They will rarely suspend a child - the 'punishmnets' were totally inadequate as they were in the case of the 2 boys who bullied your daughter.

Schools will attenpt to hide behind their 'Anti-bullying policy' which usually amouts to nothing more than the statement "We don't tolerate bullying" and no firm action.

Once a child is singled out by for bullying many more of it's classmates will join in the bullying.

Schools are totally ineffective at stopping it - the only solution is to change schools. As one teacher admitted to me "We can't be watching them the whole time they're at school, so incidents will happen".

I offered school the chance to take action against children I named as the bullies (as who school knew were causing the problem) but they declined, so i reported them to the Police - which is what you should do. Just because anti-social behaviour occurs in the school grounds rather than a public street doesn't mean it should be taken less seriously.

And keep writing to school relating the incidents (and keep a cop). Those letters should remain on your child's school file and will be useful evidence should you need to initiate legal proceedings against the school - which we eventually did.

Best wishes

It is the only school accessible to us, I'm afraid, and although I have home-ed in the past I'm not in a position to do so at present, practically, financially, location-wise or health-wise.

Oh sugar, sorry for the repetition, I'm in the middle of last minute help with homework demands!

valhalla can only echo what Wet August said - i have a child who was bullied though school aswell and i seriously thought by the end of it that it was ME with the bloody problem.

get yourself an SEN code of practice as Wetty suggests.

if she has SEN then all the more bloody power to your elbow -

my son has aspergers., if i knew then what i knew now id just go in and fire bomb the lot of them.
dont spare the horses. i really would be trying to find a school with a slightly more sympathetic approach - if such a thing exists. if not then gem up on your rights and play them at their own game. best of luck.

I have heard so many people say that they have been made out to be/made to feel that they or their child is the problem when their child is being bullied its worrying.

One of my DDs biggest faults is having ginger hair FFS, which causes her no manner of unkindness. Teasing she can deal with, being called a ginger slut/bitch she can't.

I think that it all boils down to the school not accepting that she has suffered assaults and threats/being called effs and a c/abuse in a previous school by a parent and was totally unsupported by the school in question. As a result she, a child with some strange ways of dealing with people in the first place, can't cope. Instead of taking that into account and following up the concerns about possible SEN the current school appear to have made a big boo-boo in allowing the bullying to go unchecked and now that it has got to a stage where she is being hit and spat upon as well as stolen from, they are unwilling to admit they have screwed up and were bulldozing ahead by continuing to put their heads in the sand and blaming DD.

An email from the Deputy this evening continues to blame DD for not reporting bullying to staff (but she is, FGS!), and for reacting badly but at least he has put in writing that the SENCO will work with DD to help with her problems in relating to other students. Not perfect, but a start.

I'm now going to reply to that email and ask just exactly what SENCO proposes to do and when. Lets see if I get an answer at last as this is what I have been repeatedly asking for months!

dont want to be negative but monitor this really really carefully. the school will tell you anything to make it seem they are dealing with it.

i had a very stoic aspie who took it all on the chin (what are the school doing with regard to the ASD question ?? are they getting her assessed? have to say her sleep problems sound VERY familiar)

in my experience they just gave me the runaround until he wasnt their problem any more. keep a really close eye on things. dont be afraid to make some noise.

I coulld have written your post myself valhala - even down to the fact that my son has ginger hair which attracted the abuse your daughter has also experineced.

Kids note that other kids are 'different'. You mentioned a possible autistic spectrum disorder - that's another condition that singles out a child as 'sifferent' and because a child with an ASD is usually poor at understanding social situations they are even less well equipped to deal with bullying than your average child.

As the mother of a ginger-haired + ASD child (as mine son is) you need to be on to school and if necesary, the Local ed Authority) constantly.

A child can only take so much - you need to be really vigilant and pull her out of school if this doesn't stop. A GP cert will mean that the LEA have to provide home tution while she is too unwell to attend school. You'll find that faced with the cost of home ed the LEA will start to take the situation seriously.

I hope things improve soon.

Greetings Bish (vicinatutu)- much have a natter soon. P.S. "Wetty" is brilliant, I didn't think of that LOL

WetAugust, your comment about not understanding social situations is SO accurate with regard to DD and something which I have pointed out in my email to the Deputy tonight.

DD will be 13 early next year - she can't comprehend the difference between name calling such as "Ging-er" and more serious bullying and doesn't understand what to report and what to ignore so she takes offence and complains bitterly about it all. She also doesn't approach people in the accepted fashion - for example she tells everyone at the bus stop our full address and that I have had a serious illness, that her dad doesn't bother with her and DD1 and will hurtle up to kids in the playground regardless of their age/sex/relationship to her or lack of it, and grab them by the neck. To her its in fun, to her peers offensive, an intrusion into their personal space and plain weird.

Schools seem to have seen less of this, presumably because in the past her schools have been small and well supervised and she has been relatively contained and "under manners". Now she is in a huge secondary and almost let loose amongst other kids who think she is peculiar, and her red hair is just the icing on the cake to them.

Thread hyjack alert - apologies to Op...

(yo! wetty! good eh! lol

yep would love a natter mrs. was wondering where youd got to....text or email me when your free and we can catch up! my account on RK went poof...i am no more on RK except i went and relisted as miteBme so i could pm!

hope your well, and all is going smoothly in wetty world...

weve had a few "issues" again with college but am staying very much on the ball - lessons learnt from last year.

really wish i bumped into you more often on here! take care x)

sorry OP....as you were!

valhala - it often comes to a head in secondary school where they are not as "cushioned" as in a smaller primary setting.

make a list of all your concerns and get yourself in for a meeting with the head and SENCO. dont let them play your concerns down. they will try.

oh bloody hell, not the ginger thing still? I had abuse as a child because of having ginger hair - where the fuck does this come from? as soon as people hit their older teens and twenties, they're all bloody dying their hair, usually some shade of red - so why the sodding hell do they have to make any child whose hair is naturally that fantastic colour a fucking MISERY??

Sorry. It brought back memories. I also had glasses, freckles and was clever - spotty foureyed ginger swot was my usual name but they varied. Thank God I wasn't fat as well.

Isn't it time the whole anti-ginger thing was laid to rest?

Glad the head took it seriously and yes, you should definitely report it to the police yourself, although they should have done it too - but if YOU do it, you know it will be done properly.

VicarInaTuTu, no apologies needed, hijack away!

I have explained to the deputy in my email tonight that I am anxious to meet with the SENCO and Ed Psych as proposed but that the reason I didn't accept the appointment last week was because I am still, after many months, awaiting answers to questions such as whether the school have tested for Autism spectrum or if not whether/when they will do so, what DDs strengths and weaknesses are, whether the tests that they HAVE carried out were purely academic or not and whether they were conclusive and exhaustive etc. I have said that I feel its unreasonable for the school to expect me to attend such an important meeting thoroughly unprepared and lacking in knowledge. I added that its impossible for me to give it my best shot in a meeting which at worst might be my only chance to get an Ed Psych referral and at best be the first and thus groundbreaking conference with the school on this specific issue if I don't have the chance to educate myself on the subject, take advice in advance from other professionals, know what is sorted and thus irrelevent and what still needs addressing or know which further questions to ask.

In short, I am anxious to meet with SENCO and have indeed been offered to do so, but having asked for the answers to the above questions for months and given the school a deadline to reply last week so I could confidently attend that meeting, I still haven't had the answers, hence I didn't attend the meeting with SENCO because I felt that I would be doing DD a disservice unless I knew what the hell I was talking about!

FFS how more clearly can I put it to the school... as Churchill put it, "give us the tools and we will finish the job", but the school are resolutely refusiing to give me the bleedin' tools! Aaaargh!

Thumbwitch, oh my word do I understand! Not only is DD ginger but very articulate, reasonably bright despite her inability to act "normally" with her peers, and having been home-ed for part of her life more aware of and interested in things in which her peers have no knowledge.

This is the kid who loves history and all things Roman and sword and sandal, who knows the ideals of the major political parties and who can name the PM, past and present... and who dares to have an opinion on which of these is her preference! She doesn't however know her Gucci from her Burberry and neither does she give a toss so she is, as I said, "peculiar".

Well, yes, I grant you, she is... but she is one of the few kids I meet in this much-acclaimed, high-ranking school who will open a door for you or thank you for doing the same. I just wish the school would see these things.

This is an odd area where locals have a catchment area choice of two schools and DDs has always been considered better in academic terms (and behaviour and discipline, would you believe) and it is always over-subscribed. As I said much earlier in this thread, the school gained a lot of sympathy and lashings of money following their involvement in a dreadful tragedy involving two local children and it seems that they now, a few years on, consider themselves superior because of this.

Valhala Come 'down' to the Special Neds Children part of Mumsnet where you will find many other parents with the same concerns as you re ASD.

You don't have to wait for school / Ed Pysch to suggest and assessment and only a Clinical psychologist or Paediatrician can diagnose it anyway - so a visit to your GP asking them to initiate a referral for an assessment will be much quicker and by-pass the edu-people who have little interest in undertaking an assessment for fear of what they may have to fund inthe way of support.

Best wishes