Can the parents be prosecuted for truancy if a child bunks off year 7 classes to attend year 11 classes

[GPT3]

If a child thinks that her schoolwork is ‘too easy’ and persistently walks into year 11 classes instead of the year 7 classes that she is supposed to attend, is that legally classified as truancy?

Assuming this is at an average-sized comp, how do they know where the year 11 classes are?

This would be truancy. And annoying for the year 11s
She has a timetable, pupils are expected to follow their timetable. You can't just pick and choose what lessons you attend, you can't sack off maths for PE for example and you cant sack off Yr 7 lessons because you want to attend Yr 11

I haven't worked in secondary for many years but when I did, if this happened I'd be tutting and sighing and saying "X, can you go to where you're supposed to be." If they refused I'd be getting their head of college/year to come and remove them.

However bright a child is they need the knowledge they build up to access GCSEs. I guess at a push they could start y9 or 10 early but no one could skip into y11 as they'd have missed most of the curriculum.

I can't imagine any situation where this would really happen though

This didn't happen

Lol. What if the DC in question 'is' a prodigy? She goes on to solve world hunger and cure cancer?
Her 'little people, big dreams' story could start with 'little op always knew she was different. She would escape the walls of the year 7 classes to embark on a journey to the more challenging lessons of the evelenth year mentors'
By year 8 she was working full time as a local politician...etc...etc'

Eleventh*

Yep because obviously if you find year 7 too easy the automatic step is to take yourself to a year 11 class. Either a complete brat or has been told to do that by parents who think they are dealing with the next prodigy. Big heads all of them.

Of course it didn't.
I've no idea what the purpose could be, but sometimes people haven't been in schools since about 1987 and have no clue as to how they operate.
Not a clue.

Peak mumsnet!..

I'm a teacher - leaving aside the bizarro world of y7 into y11 - truancy is more about if the child has put themselves "beyond the care of the school." This might be by leaving and reentering the school site, refusing to follow instructions from any member of staff and being out of lessons full stop. Parents are then often asked to come and collect them.

It’s called being a disruptive twat

I don’t think a child hiding in the toilets during lesson time is truancy actually. OP is asking about a legal issue, and legally, truancy is absence from school.

A child hiding in the toilets, or sitting in the wrong classroom, or indeed climbing a tree, or sitting under a table during lessons, or throwing spitballs, or hiding in a cupboard, etc etc, is a child behaving badly at school, and it’s a school internal discipline issue.

OP if the school is threatening to fine you because she’s in the wrong lesson then you need to work with the school to address your child’s bad behaviour, I’d suggest in the morning you escort her to a teacher and she has to stay with that teacher until register etc. Basically if she won’t voluntarily go to the right lessons then she gets escorted from lesson to lesson and doesn’t get breaktimes 🤷‍♀️ If she’s so clever surely she can accept that skipping year 10 = fail GCSEs?!

I’d also suggest you discipline your child. If my kid did something like that she’d first lose access to TV/internet/gaming/friends for a week, and then if the bad behaviour continued I’d escalate punishments until she stopped being so naughty.

And yes lessons can be boring. So can work. Childcare. Homelife. Many things. I spent a lot of my school lessons doodling and playing noughts and crosses just for some kind of stimulation. Boring is not an excuse for rule breaking, and the earlier she learns that, the better. I’m so bored right now that I’m writing to strangers on the internet, but that doesn’t mean I can go trespass into the Ritz or Centerparcs or wherever takes my fancy.

You make some excellent points, @CharlotteOH, however, the school will not record this as truancy, nor will any prosecuting authority.
Such an instance would be recorded as late to the correct yr7 lesson and possible disruption of the yr11 lesson.
Anyway that's all theoretical.

Or is this child being 'encouraged' by their deluded parent into thinking they're an academic genius. Said parent probably told little Henry/Henrietta that they're capable of Yr 11 work. So the little brat is obeying instructions from deluded parents. I can think of two parents who would do this.

The registers only allow you to record certain things. You couldn’t, even if you wanted to (which nobody ever would), mark a y7 as present in a y11 lesson or indeed any other lesson at all for the simple reason that they’re not on the register. And they’re not in the lesson where they should be so will get an absent mark - even if, again, the y7 teacher was for some weird reason ok with the whole thing, you can’t mark a student as present unless they’re in the room with you. So they are officially absent at that point. The other codes would be for medical issues, exams etc and they’re all recorded centrally and with the agreement of the school.

I take it the Year 7 hasn't started secondary school yet.... if so I'd wait and see if they're brave enough to disrupt a totally different lesson full of 15-16 year olds and a bemused or highly irritated teacher.

I'm interested to know if this is coming from the child, the parent or a journo...

And good luck to little Sheldon finding a seat in a year 11 classroom. Ours are planned like a military campaign.

I know. I was just thinking about seating plans.

No. Cheeky perhaps but being bored & wanting to be stimulated isn't bratty.

Taking yourself off into another class uninvited does sound pretty "bratty" to me

@dworky - there's "stimulation" enough. Believe me.

There isn’t a year 7 in the world, no matter how clever, who is ready to stride into a year 11 classroom and just take part in the lesson. I have certainly known y7 a whole could understand the content and do the work, and even participate in the discussion etc, but there’s no real reason to skip ahead like that. It’s not in their own best interests. I do think y7 lessons can be pitched too low for the brightest and they find them tedious after primary school. That’s a real issue, but just taking yourself off to another lesson is definitely not the way to go about it! Plus in my subject, KS3 lessons are almost certainly more interesting than KS4 ones just because of the exam content.

Rory Gilmore.

Y11 haven’t even been there since May

Also doing exam skills and past papers since about April.