Year 1 class allocation and complaint, teachers, governors, what are our chances please?

[hollybungalow]

our daughter goes to the village school and is in reception, it’s a great school and we haven’t had many reasons to complain. Until now.

We found out they were mixing the classes the day they chose to do it last week. This isn’t standard practice for them.

Our hold was placed in a class with no close friends and unfortunately a child from another class who has bullied her in an out of school setting. As they are separated currently we didn’t raise with the school as we didn’t know they were going to mix classes.
Our child feels things deeply and there has been a significant change in behaviour. She is convinced she is on her own and without friends because ‘no one chose her’ and it’s heartbreaking for us all.

Other than this i asked the teacher about how they allocated places and she shared who our child had chosen and honestly i was surprised who she had picked, one girl she knows but the other she has never mentioned.
The same day we got her school report and it wasn’t hers, it was for another child in her class with the same first name. Then the choices made sense and to me it’s clear there has been a mix up.

i raised with the head teacher and shared the out of school bullying and the view (backed up by the other parent) that we believed there had been a mix up. He is firm there are no circumstances what so ever (including physical bullying) that would cause him to change a child’s class. His view is that whatever happens ‘we work it out’

I didn’t agree and have raised a complaint with the governors and trustees.
Can anyone give me a view of how likely you think we are to succeed with our complaint and get our child moved class? ( there are 3 in the year and we would take any other than this one).
because of the timing, the only option we have for september is to put her in the class with the bully, keep her off and be fined or move schools. So keen to know how likely we are to succeed or if we chalk it up and get her in another school.

thanks x

She is my only child so i don’t have a benchmark to say if this is disproportionate. She does feel things deeply and form strong attachments. I can soothe her but i think when she is tired, alone or bored then her mind wanders to it and she comes for a cry and a cuddle.

I am anxious about it naturally but we have tried to keep our conversations away from her and have been using some books recommended to us to help her deal with change.

No mental health or ND issues on our side

i thought there was no harm in preparing her given it’s happened before. It was a suggestion from a another poster to give them the tools to deal with it and i thought it was a good one

thank you so much for the recommendation, just started reading it and is really helpful already!

A few people seem to be downplaying the bullying, in particular the caterpillar incident. This isn't just a normal bullying incident.

An emergency hospital visit is scary at this age. At any age. And something like an allergic reaction is far more difficult to understand for young children than something like a broken leg, which makes it all the more frightening. Add to that, someone did this with malice. I doubt they intended the physical harm they caused, but the child almost certainly was trying to torment your daughter, an intention your daughter will be fully aware of.

Regarding the allergic reaction and hospital visit in isolation, I know a few children who had hospital visits due to allergic reactions. Some of them had emotional responses that lasted years, including fear of doctors or unusual pickiness when it came to eating. I think your daughter's reaction is completely understandable, even if it might be at the extreme of what could be expected.

So we have a traumatic incident that was caused by a peer, and she is now facing the prospect of spending every school day with that person WITHOUT her support group. How is she meant to grow her confidence and resilience and build new friendships when she is feeling fear every day? She is being set up to fail.

Also, I was bullied, and nobody advocated for me. It didn't make me resilient, it made me distrustful and taught me to bury any emotional distress deep down and not ask for help. Something that I've managed to partially unlearn but that still affects me.

You can't stop bullying, but authority figures including parents not advocating for children does not teach them anything apart from how to suffer in silence. If OP doesn't even try to improve things, how can she think there's anything she can do?

When you speak to HT later do not ask what they are going to do about the ‘bully’. The child hasn’t bullied your child in school and even if they had they wouldn’t be able to tell you.

Focus on your child, try and be factual and not emotional. Explain about the incident at sports club and how that had impacted your DD.

And if there are incidents with another child at school, don’t approach the parents, it never goes well

If you sign up your DD to martial arts they are taught only to use their martial arts skills in certain places. Wouldn’t be impressed if she used her moves in the playground

Absolutely unhinged.

There are a million reasons a child might come home with the wrong report. You've assumed that the most likely reason is that their teacher can't tell the difference between two children. It most definitely isn't...

I hope you can get this sorted OP.

My severely autistic DS1 was separated from all his friends after Reception, and our multiple requests to put him in the other class were completely ignored. Unfortunately for him there wasn’t a happy ending. I heard years later from his 1:1 LSA, long after we’d left the school, that the headteacher had actually agreed that a bad decision had been made and he’d been put in an unsuitable class. However the head had a blanket policy of never going against her teachers’ decisions, even when those decisions weren’t in the child’s best interests.

I hope your DD can move classes, and if not, that your outcome has a happy ending.

@hollybungalow how did the meeting go?

How was the meeting?

well strap yourselves in it’s been a very eventful day!!

First up the meeting with the head. I can confidently say i think he is a knob 🤣
We arrived and he basically spent ages telling us how experienced they are, how much effort goes into the mixing (this is fair), how well every child adapts blah blah blah for like 20minutes without us speaking at all.
He acknowledged the admin error but said it didn’t change anything and was a random mix up not be concerned about. He said even if they had known about the bullying it wouldn’t have had an impact on their mixing choices.
We asked a bit about what dynamics they were trying to manage and how this impacted their choices specifically in relation to our child. He didn’t know.
We asked if there was any other support available and he offered us an SEN assessment 🙄
So once we had clarified there was nothing on offer we said ok, thanks.
At the end he asked about the specific bullying concerns and asked for details and names. We shared the incidents but not the name. He said their view is that it’s not bullying because short bursts of several incidents with then gaps in between demonstrates that they can co exist together in the same space.
So we left pretty deflated. But that’s not the end!!

Why didn't you tell the head the name of the child involved? How is it in any way helped to have the meeting without sharing the one piece of info that could actually help them manage the situation and support your daughter.

At this stage its like you actually want the drama rather than the resolution.

Left the thread hanging too.... Drama over substance this one.

The main "support" id want is for them to keep a very close watch over the other girl. But you won't tell them who it is... so no wonder they are offering SEN support, they can't do anything else, youve made it about "supporting" your dd rather than the alleged bully.

I really can’t imagine the governors get involved at this level. They will back the HT.

If Girl A is allegedly bullying Girl B, it's Girl A that needs "support" ie man-marking, extra conversations, maybe time-outs in the sen support office etc. It's not Girl B with the issues.

If you won't tell them who Girl A is, their hands are tied. I think you've made an error of judgement there, and that will have undermined your argument a lot.

Bizarre not to share the name of the alleged bully. How on earth can the school proactively monitor this if they haven't been given all of the info?

Given the severity of your dc's reaction and the school refusal etc, a SEN assessment might not be a bad idea, as there might be neurodivergence or other factors contributing to the situation?

This is not a strategic issue so it’s not going to be discussed at a governors meeting but it’s a complaint about the head and the governors have to listen to it via their complaints procedure. I think the head cannot admit to a mistake if they have mistaken the children. I would have made it clear which dc my dc had listed.

I don’t buy the bullying incident. DC were 4/5 and most dc have not developed sufficiently to target another child repeatedly and intent. They just are not fully recognising that their actions or words are not acceptable. At 5/6 this child can definitely leave this behind and it’s a storm in a teacup.

I don’t believe dc have firm friendships at 5 either. Most get along with anyone and it’s fluid. I tend to agree with the head in that. He’s obviously got his talk sorted out for grumpy parents on class reorganization but my argument with the governors would be that it’s based on another child’s preferences. You need to be sure about that and know your child’s preferences. That’s the strongest argument here and you need to know what remedy you want.

Threatening to leave weakens the case: it clearly demonstrated your dc doesn’t have close friends if you are prepared to leave them entirely. So I would stick to the school mistaking the dc and also accept friendships are fluid and dc at 4/5 are not bullies - they just need better supervision and will grow up. I would have named the child but out of school means the school has not observed this. What did the child do? Bullying is prolonged and systematic and if your child has shared a playground with the other child and not had any issues whatsoever, the bullying claim is dubious.

The OP definitely enjoys the drama. Ridiculous not to have named the other child.

I would be changing schools if you’re that convinced that the two children were mixed up. It’s very common in classrooms that there will be multiple children with the same name so how hard is it for them to have a reliable system for not mixing them up? The fact that they don’t have a reliable system is particularly concerning.

Plus it is a data breach as someone else mentioned.

How utterly ridiculous - if you’re not prepared to share the name, how would you ever expect them to sort anything?! The mind boggles.

Sorry my DD woke up in the night so i didn’t get to finish the story.
trust me i am here for my child not the drama.
We thought not sharing the name would help us get the outcome of moving her class which was our ideal outcome. maybe we were wrong? we’ve obvs never been in this situation before.
Happy for my child to have an SEN assessment but what happened next makes me feel more confident that there’s no issue there and it’s just them deflecting the problem.

Anyway after the meeting with the HT one of the teachers gave me a call (it’s a job share and she does thursday friday so we mainly been speaking to the other teacher) and asked me to come in.

Well she was lovely and made me feel much better. Long conversation but her main points were

she admitted they had mixed the children up and apologised
She shared that they have had a nigh number of children with SEN been diagnosed this year and they needed to spread them out and this had specifically impacted her close friendship group and that some needed extra support in one of the other class that has extra assistants and is smaller
She said she doesn’t think there any SEN with my DD
She said they knew the split was rough on DD
She said the new HT that’s starts in September is someone she has worked with before and will entertain moving children’s classes and work more collaboratively.
She then offered a whole host of support, extra transition time, managed small group work with her friendship group from the other classes
She said if we hang tight for the first month with this support and if it didn’t work out she would come to the new head with us.

i mean they should promote her to HT!!

we left feeling like maybe we could make it work BUT it’s gets better!!
As we were leaving we saw the parents of the child we have been concerned about walking into the office.
Then later that day on the new class whatsapp those parents posted that sadly their child won’t be joining our class as they don’t have trust in the school to manage her needs and so they are moving her!! 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

bloody ecstatic 🤩

And yet you didn’t think it worth mentioning any of this ,at any time, to the school, but continued to send your child there without comment, knowing they would see the other child daily, would share assemblies, playground space and minimally supervised lunch times with the other child.

Is the current HT retiring or getting a promotion? It often seems that the headteachers which are unpopular amongst parents (and staff) as they make singular (poor) decisions will move on to higher posts before the proverbial hits the fan.

@Whyhaveibeencutoutofmamsnot OP has said they are becoming CEO of the Trust.