I took my yr3 dd1 out of school on Monday because she's scared and asked them to come up with a plan of action. The school are ignoring me! Now what?

[Wills]

I'm not terribly good at succinct at the best of times and at the minute I'm really really upset so goodness knows how I'll be. I'm going to try listing events as points.....

Moved house 2 years ago (about 100 miles) to a new place where my husband and kids father has to commute a long way but quality of life far better for kids and for us at weekends.... Had third child, our first boy.

dd1 doesn't like change and she was murder all through this period.

started her at an infant school expecting big trouble. Instead the school welcomed her with open arms and she flourished.

Didn't get into the junior school where most of her class went but did get her to a jnrs were two of her friends did go.

Excluding the first week I don't think there has been a single week that she's been at the juniors where she hasn't come home crying.

Often the focus of her upset changes. At first with reluctance I started approaching her teacher hoping that they would be able to help her. Things just got worse and worse. Eventually I began to feel completely ignored by the teacher as an overbearing fussy, pushy mum who should learn to ignore her children (sorry just using some of the words that have been directed at me although never in one sentence). At this point I bought in the head who I found initially I really liked. He listened and promised to help. Nothing changed and in the two months of waiting it became more and more apparent that dd1 is being verbally bullied. Finally I went back in and had a very firm but extremely polite conversation with the head again. He suggested that my dd1 is only needed because I've had 3 children and not enough time to give her. That I'm probably being too pushy because as a middle class mum (you'd laugh if you saw me) I obviously want her to go to grammar (not if it wont make her happy!) etc. I mentioned the bullying to which he said that he himself had 3 girls and that girls were bitches and that I should encourage my dd1 to get on with it.

Life with dd1 is really really hell! She's violent to her siblings, moody, stropy, tearful and extremely angry.

During the spring break I begun to see glimses of my old daughter back.

Monday morning before school and 20 minutes before we due to leave just as I'm starting the where are your shoes and coats etc she bursts into tears and says her tummy hurts. Feeling that her fear of school after the break was probably worse than facing it I pushed her in. Got a phone call at 2.00 to tell me to pick her up as she still had tummy ache. She'd cried all day, she'd spent 2 hours in the sick room. Told the school before they handed her over to me that I didn't feel this was an illness but due to her being petrified of school and that I really needed their help in putting an action plan together to allow her to come back to school. Took dd1 home where she calmed down, played on the trampoline etc. At midnight she threw up once. The following morning she was fine until school run but pains went by mid morning and she was fine again. Then suddenly just before I needed to pick up her younger sister she threw up violently and then stayed in bed until this morning when I gave her medised thinking it would calm her down. Have been to see gp today incase it was a bug and they can't be sure its either a bug or stress so are treating both with diorlite AND junior anti depressants. She was impressed with medised and has told me to continue using that as well.

Absolutely no word from the school.

What I want to do is pick my entire family up and run away to another country and hide. What I need to do is keep it together and help my daughter. Suggestions please

go and see the head of the school she didn't get into to establish whether a move might be possible?

think you're doing the right thing asking for a plan of action. get an appointment with the head, take notes (take someone with you)

if no joy, contact governors and LEA too

Can I just ask you to clarify
'Have been to see gp today incase it was a bug and they can't be sure its either a bug or stress so are treating both with diorlite AND junior anti depressants'

Has the GP put your dd on anti-depressants ?

poor little thing

Is home ed a possibility, even temporarily? Because frankly your best bet is not sending her back to the school and putting it in writing that they have not addressed her problems despite repeated requests they do so. If you work and can't gt time off, a paid childminder would be a good temporary solution, better than sending her to a school that just isn;t right for her (anywhere with a presiding ethos that your own DC don;t fit into is the WRONG school, whether it's your sporty child suffering somewhere with a hugely academic attitude, or a sensitive, artisic child being bullied at a sports-mad hearty establishment.)

What is her behaviour like at home and school? What is happening to make her come home crying?

Could you try to build on the existing friendships she has at school by having a sleepover or a party so that she has something to focus on and even show off about. Also establish another new friendship group outside of school by joining a club or something to boost her confidence.

Before I had my children I was a teacher and sometimes a parent would come in to talk to you about bullying and why their child may be being bullied and sometimes you would KNOW why but you couldn't say. Things like a bad haircut, shoes, being overweight are reasons that children are being bullied - obviously this is awful but children are awful to each other. When I was at high school I was picked on for not being allowed to watch 'The Bill"

Also, I would try and get her into the other school like Twiglett said. At least get her on the waiting list for when somebody leaves.

Thanks everyone! OK the infants that she had gone to we'd sent her to because they had a space not because we were close BUT it turned out to be just the right place for her. However when applying to juniors of course we were subjected to distance so she's 13th on the list. The local school to us is also a good one but again no spaces. Whilst I would love to move her most of the schools round here are full. The school that isn't is very very large and part of me wonders whether some of her issues are down to feeling lost in a big school.

She goes to brownies which she adores and has friends there
She used to go swimming but the teacher had to leave and she's on a waiting list of another one.
She does gymnastics and loves it.
She goes horse riding and loves it and has friends there too.

During the spring holiday she was either at friends from her school or they with us about 6 days out of the 14.

As for the bullys.... funnily enough.... about 2 weeks before the end of term as a special treat I took her to have her hair cut. She'd been pushing to have it cut for ages so I took her for a treat to cheer her up. Unfortunately this just seems to have given the bullies another area to tease her about and it seems to have been the final straw for my dd and has shattered what remained of her confidence. But she doesn't talk to me about the bullies, she speaks to my mother. I think she finds the intensity of my emotions too hard.

It would not hurt to phone up any of the schools in your area and just check to see if they could accomodate her now. Things change very quickly.

Have you considered private?

Private would be an enormous stretch and take us from slightly uncomfortable to very uncomfortable but in the end we could do. But we'd have to pay for at least the next 3 years as I wouldn't want to have to change her yet again.

OMG- It sounds like me in juniors- so much sympathy for you and the family. I was nine when my father died, so family had to move, move schools, become shorter of money all at once.
One thing that my mother did for me was to find me a tutor to give me a couple of hours extra schoolwork a week- although the main focus (unbeknownst to me at the time) was to build my confidence, starting with tasks I found easy (fractions etc) and discussing them in depth with an adult that was not a family member. My lovely tutor talked to me like an adult friend and encouraged me to think about non school topics, play chess, non school books, music.
I know it sounds backwards to seem to give her more work in order to help her, but really it was the adult encouragement that helped me if you see what I mean.

I agree and had started to do that but other things seem to be going faster than I can keep up. Which is par for the course when it comes to my kids .

Hi Wills,

You now need to write to the school along the lines of the letter I posted, or try this one, which has also worked in the past. Don't go and see them again - make this formal, and also put a time limit on putting things right - i.e: you expect to see an improvement by half term.

Send it to the class teacher, the Head, the Chair of Governors and the LEA, and tell the Head that you are contacting the latter, and I imagine something will happen really rapidly. Below are extracts from my letter to DSs school, hope it helps, and big hugs to you and your dd.

'I know that children say stupid things sometimes, which they find amusing, even if those on the receiving end don't, however two things disturb me here. Firstly, I know from experience in schools that comments like this can swell out of all proportion and rumours start that cause great distress to those concerned.

I know that the theory is that x should be able to laugh off comments like these, as well as the names he gets called regularly such as 'geek' and 'nerd', but he is finding it increasingly difficult to do so. I have seen children both refuse school because of constant low level harassment, and become increasingly isolated when they do attend. I am not prepared to let this happen to x.

I hope that the school will take an extremely dim view of these comments which constitute sexual bullying, and which I find unacceptable; and that action will be taken to combat this in line with the school's anti-bullying policy.

your poor dd i think my ds is a bit older but my ds was off school on and off (mostly off) for 8 month this started with migraines he was very depressed he was 9.he started to have panic attacks when we were near school saying he would stay in his bedroom all day,eventually it all came out he had been being bullied by 4 boys but the school didnt believe him so i changed schools it has been the best thing i ever did i have ds back and hes happy,i you asked her if anyone is being mean to her

Hi Scarey, glad you found the thread. Meant to put a link from the old one to update it but its been hectic and inbetween looking after a sick child, a toddler and trying to run a part-time business I've been fighting an amazing urge to play on the wii as that doesn't mean I have to think or do anything. iyswim! Today she got up bright and cherpy and I was sooo relieved but the school run to drop off dd2 saw her drop down again but perk up at home and demand food. I gave her a dry bowl of cereals (it was a compromise she wanted cereals and I didn't want her to have milk). The day was great until I had a call from a friend who basically goaded me into tackling her whether or not she fancied going back to school next week. She been curled up on the sofa with a sick bowl ever since! We have an outstanding meeting with the head and her teacher arranged from about 5 or 6 weeks ago. (we turned up to a teacher parent conference to find the teacher was on a course ). Anyway, following your sort of advice scarey I phoned the lea and asked them what the first step should be to making this official. They said to take in a letter tomorrow listing our concerns so that's what dh and I are about to do.

Sorry Bigdonna didn't mean to ignore your post but pressed enter too fast. Yes during my short chat with her this afternoon I asked her if there was anything she found scary at school, offering things like the corridors or the books or maths (knowing full well that she's frightened of playtimes but not wanting to put words in her mouth). She admitted to finding some people scary at playtime. I asked her what they said and she gave me one example which I then tried to discuss how she could respond to next time but I'd lost her she was moving back to the sofa to curl up.

maybe she can be referred to camhs,she does sound very similar to my son.He was ill at first but bullying made it worse and the stress brought on his migraines,we have only had one headache since january.i didnt send him to school i was threatened by a fine but if you go by your gut feeling you will do the right thing for your dd.good luck let us know what happens.

Wills - has your GP put your daughter on anti-depressants without a referral to a chld psychiatrist or a child psychologist or at least yout local CAMHS unit???

This seems a very unusual course of action for a GP and I would suggest you go for a second opinion somewhere - is there another Gp in the practice you could see just to talk through the issues?

We are seeing a child psychologist next Friday. Thanks to my mother we are seeing them privately otherwise I think it would probably take months. Sorry this is a very long saga and I was trying to be succinct - something that I'm not normally renowned for! My dh of course thinks that it will all be resolved next week following on from seeing the psychologist. Pah!

Hi Wills, just to let you know that we have been through a very simial thing with DS1 when he was in year 4. He als had moved, new baby in house etc. To cut a long story really short, we took him out od school to HE, started him at the local Judo club, saw a child pshycologist (our doctor was brilliant and got us in really quickly). We Kept along the lines of the nat curriculum for HE and was brilliantly supported by the LEA who came out every few weeks to make sure we were going along the right lines.
THe up shot is. He started his new school in Year 5 (He is year 8 now), He loved it. He now fights for our county in Judo ( brilliant for confidence)he is online for taking some GCSEs early and has lots of friends.
I just wanted to tell you this and show my support. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

similar*

Hi Wills, I'm glad that the LEA are taking you seriously, and that you have started the ball rolling. From my experience of this as a parent, the school will try to brush this aside and hope you go away. From a teacher's point of view, I always took bullying seriously, unless I knew for a fact it was just a bit of needle between the kids in my tutor group.

Does your dd get a new teacher for next year? This might help if there are issues with the current one, and then she only has to keep trucking until July. Once you make this official with the school, they have to do something, so hopefully this will get the head's finger out pronto.

Let us know how it goes, and chin up.

Hi to all,

Thanks for all your help. I thought I'd give you a quick update and then ask your thoughts about the follow up. I feel I wrote an absolute humdinger of a letter to the head based on your input and on that of a friend of my mother who I hadn't realised was a) a SENCO and b) one of her boys had been bullied at school and they had had to take him out so she's been through it. I must say I was soooo nervous by the time it came round to the meeting. I get like that before any conversation that might or might not be confrontational. But ..... they were receptive. I think my dd1's teacher was gueninely shocked, but not the head who of course I've informed about my concerns at her being bullied before. Funnily enough I entered the meeting more angry at the teacher than the head who only took over the school in September last year and I thought was just being supportive of his staff until such time that he had been able to evaluate them all properly. I came out of the meeting feeling that the teacher would do all she could to make dd1's life there better. BUT fundamentally dh and I both agree that that school is not the one for our daughter. We hope that this will buy us some time to find another school for her that will suit her perfectly.

In the meantime.... dd1 has had a miraculous recovery today (and before anyone feels that she's been shaming she's been very very ill including messing her self Thursday night and being so weak she slept through) ugh! Today she's eaten her food and kept it down in 5 whole days and has been chirpy and settled etc. My dh had been a little bit skeptical that she hadn't simply had a bug but after today and her reaction to whenever he's even vaguely got close to the subject of school has left him just as shocked as I've been feeling. So..... The school are desperate to have her back into school asap lest she become school phobic. I sort of agree with this principle. They're happy that she go back possibly the first day for just an afternoon but the head is adament that the sooner she is back into a regular routine the better. My concern is balancing her mental health i.e. starting to re-build her confidence by showing her that school is not scarey etc with that of her physical i.e. she is extremely worn out and I'm wondering if this is too fast and whether finding her feet at home for another week might not be better? This will also get me to Friday when we are meeting the child pshycologist for the first time and will get his professional input as well.

What are your thoughts on this.

hi wills my heart goes out to you i have been through this,at one point i felt i was drowning.but as soon as i told my ds he did not have to go back to school his mood changed,he stopped feeling sick all the time and the panic attacks,migraines lessened .the school did not support him and he had no confidence in it.we tried him going in library with me for 1 hr every day,then he changed class and came home lunchn times and stayed in at playtime.he was still frightened of bullies.i phoned another primary school on the friday we went to see on the monday and they let him go the next day,he still had panic attacks going in and said he felt ill but the staff supported me so much.they believed he had been bullied.i know my ds and myself felt we hadf a weight lifted off our heads for all the support we got.so if you find another school that has a place ask if they can take her straight away.He was still on registar at old school but going to new school until the forms for transferring came through.good luck hope shes happier at a new school,has her mood still lifted,does she know she is going back to school.As she is younger it is probably easier to stop bullying.my ds was in yr 6.best of luck

A good book to get is 'School Phobia, Panic Attacks and Anxiety in Children' by Marianna Csoti. It has a section in for the school which you could copy for them and lots of ideas.I have a similar problem with one of my ds's but we are lucky that our school's Headteacher is more supportive and has helped us when we have asked. There are threads on school refusal on the SEN board also that you may find helpful.