Schools duty to provide work

[ninetofiveeveryday]

My 15 year old son has been off school for two weeks now, with a broken bone. School say they do not provide any school work.
Does anyone know if this is right or if they have any duties? He is diagnosed autistic and bright, and getting very anxious about missing work. We’ve bought some work books which he is doing a bit but he’s concerned about the subjects he’s missing and school have washed their hands of it. He is likely to be off around a month though he’s now saying he wants to go back soon though it’s too early.
any thoughts would be appreciated, thank you!

No, if they are off sick, they are off sick

Lolol

ask for or look on the school website for the curriculum information. most schools have a list of sorts that they post online or can give to parents. at the very least they can tell you what book or play he us doing in English.....

Shouldn't he know what book or play he is doing?

I'm sure this is well meant, but it did make me laugh out loud. If the child is lucky enough to attend a brand new building (with a working elevator), this may be an option (if the OP has the extra money). But most schools are old, crumbling and not fit for any purpose at all, let alone access for a disabled pupil.

Even if they have an elevator, do they have push button or automatic doors? Are the doors wide enough for a wheelchair? Can he safely navigate the corridors without some arsehole grabbing onto his wheelchair and trying to push him into a wall (or stealing it, so they can "have a go", when the child is seated in class or gone to the toilet)? Are there proper disabled toilets on every floor? Are the turning circles for rooms, corridors and bathrooms wide enough for wheelchairs? Is there room in the classroom for a child in a wheelchair? Can he manually transfer from a wheelchair to a standard chair or the toilet? How will he get himself to/from school? Even when parents drive, it's not exactly a walk in the park getting someone with mobility difficulties (who is probably also in pain) in and out of a vehicle and lifting a wheelchair in and out of a vehicle. Are there slopes on the school grounds that he has to navigate? If so, I'll bet my home on the fact they won't be compliant with building regs and will be far too steep for a wheelchair user to navigate safely.

The best option is for the parents to approach the Local Authority, advise that their child is off school ill and physically unable to attend and ask for education support. The school won't (and doesn't have to) pay for a tutor, but the Local Authority has a duty to ensure that full time education is provided, regardless of whether the child is physically able to get to school or not. It is the school's job to notify the LA that a parent and child need help, but it seems the school in question is useless.

I don't understand how the school can have a policy of no pots on the stairs, but then no alternative arrangements! Kids break bones all the time, this must have come up multiple times before and I can't believe the rest of the kids all just sat and did nothing.

He’s not sick in the sense that he has an illness. He has an injury that makes it difficult for him to be mobile, but has no impact on his ability to learn.

How is he managing stairs at home? Mine had 2 separate broken legs in his time at secondary and it was agreed that if he could manage stairs at home he could manage in an emergency in school (lift to use day to day).
Otherwise he was still expected in as soon as he could manage post op (think he had about a week off each time). If he hadn’t been able to potentially manage stairs in an emergency he’d have had to do all his work in the SN base away from his mates and he didn’t want to do that!

By managing stairs at home I mean he sat on his bum and sihuffled up or down!
He got out of each class 5 mins early and got a lift pass for the duration of crutches. The hardest part was rejigging our work to pick up and drop off every day as he obviously couldn’t walk to school.

@C152

thanks for your comment.

yes my post was well meant.

I’m also disabled myself and have taught for twelve years from a wheelchair so I have plenty of personal experience of getting around both my school and other schools (I was also an advisor for maths) in a wheelchair.

sure, most schools don’t meet any kind of standards for accessibility. But crutches are a bugger to get about on and personally I did find a wheelchair easier.

obviously the op is welcome to take my advice or not as she chooses

You could just your your GCSE textbooks, or find online equivalents? There's so much stuff online now, and kids often prefer independent learning. I respect if you don't want to risk leaving him online unsupervised, but you could print out or download some things.

This thread is illuminating. I had no idea that there were schools in the uk that couldn’t accommodate a student who couldn’t navigate stairs. That is insane to me. I’m shocked the right to an education doesn’t requires retrofitting everywhere.

My school can’t accept students in wheelchairs as they wouldn’t be able to access large amounts of the site.

The buildings are really old, there is literally no way to make them wheelchair-accessible.

I'm a teacher and as far as I'm aware, it's not legal for a school to not have a lift. We have three lifts and if even one breaks they call out an engineer and it's fixed within two days. They also get spot checked once every three months since they are so important. There are teachers who also need them for mobility reasons. I don't know a school in my area that doesn't have several disabled pupils. In my old school, the one and only lift was broken and an S4 pupil was in crutches, I had to move every S4 lesson to a room on the ground floor for over a week to accommodate the pupil. Was a pain but it was only fair. As for people saying that teachers cannot provide this work, it is our job. I wouldn't and don't provide it for kids who go in term time holidays(and many do) but any child who is off for medical reasons and wants to study will be provided with work and often given teams calls as well. I have done that for many pupils who were off long term. The unions will tell you it's part of your contract. My advice would be to ignore the school and go straight to the head of educational services. Make a formal complaint and document how many attempts you've made to contact the school and every reply you've had. If this was a Scottish school, they would be in a lot of trouble. But I think we are better about these things.

I'm a teacher and as far as I'm aware, it's not legal for a school to not have a lift.

Trust me, my school does not have lifts and there is literally nothing anyone can do about it, apart from demolish the school and start again.

Schools are required by law to be accessable. It's the equalities act that came into effect in 2010. In theory, a parent could take on a local authority if their child was being discriminated against and they would win. The LA would have to offer at the least an alternative nearby school for lessons but what they cannot legally do is tell a child they cannot get an education.

Well yes, the child can go to a different school. No one is saying that they can't get an education, they just can't get one at my school.

Could they let him access classes via an AV1 robot? They’re more often used to help with reintegration after emotional based absence, but are used in this sort of circumstance too

There are many schools in the U.K. that cannot accommodate students who cannot do stairs.

the school I worked at had lifts and was wheelchair accessible but it was the local hub for students with wheelchairs and most of the schools in my county were not wheelchair accessible and students who lived in their catchment areas came to us because we were the only wheelchair accessible school for quite a long way.

schools are not required to have a lift.
local authorities are required to offer an education to all students but it does not have to be in their local school and for any student who uses a wheelchair it is very unlikely to be their local school.

Ask for the topics and you will easily be able to find work online. Surprised the school doesn't have TEAMS or Google Classroom where they post work as standard.

Many schools don’t have lifts. Even when a school has a lift, it may not work. This is a problem at the moment with schools either waiting a long time for parts or not having the funding to make the repairs. This has been in the news previously.

Some schools have blocks with multiple staircases, and two/three rooms off the landing on each floor. The staircases are fairly steep and narrow for the amount of traffic on them at lesson changes. Some schools have been retrofitted, but for some blocks there is just nowhere you could put a lift.

There are loads of options:

• swap as many lessons as possible to ground floor classrooms
• put him in the library (or SEN base or other supervised ground floor space), ask staff to send a pupil down with work for him
• livestream lessons to library, or at least send down the powerpoint
• If they can do it without putting pressure on anyone, maybe there might be a responsible/bright pupil in each of his classes who could take on the job of taking worksheets and their notes down to the library for photocopying after each lesson, and briefing him so he can work one lesson behind (when I was at a school we just asked friends what we'd missed)
• provide some sort of basis for self-study - it might be different for different subjects, but if they can at least provide a note of what topic they are working on, and provide (or recommend) a revision guide and a textbook, he can probably make some useful headway, especially with some internet access as well.

I expect they've sent you some statistics at some point about the effect of missing n days of school on their likely GCSE results. Throw them back at them.

Have you any idea of the physical condition of most state schools in Britain? They are falling to bits!

Since Building Schools for the Future was cancelled in 2010 it's been very much make do and mend.

My school does have lifts to all areas although DD got stuck in one when on crutches and it took quite a while to get her out (she was thrilled 🙄).