School sends letter complaining about attendance of a pupil who died!!!!

[Milliways]

Terrible mistake to make!

Said she would not be allowed to attend the school prom!

Here

Utterly unbelievable isn't it. Those poor parents

Diabolical.
However doesn't suprise me that Crapita is involved this fiasco.
The poor parents

Unfortunately this doesn't surprise me at all . Very sad for the family though

in fairness though should stuff like this make it to the news?
it always seems like a bit of a witch hunt for what was so obviously an honest mistake.
i do feel for the parents, but it's not like someone in the school said to a colleague "here you know that dead kid, they haven't been in school in months, get on to the parents as it's becoming a problem and they can't come to the prom if this continues."
someone obviously forgot to update the school register and then the computer automatically picked up on the name as it hadn't been removed from the system.

I feel very sorry for the parents to lose a child so young and then to have this happen.

I also don't like the sensationilism in the thread title with all the exclamation marks.

You are right about it not being a deliberate mistake but it does happen too much . I didn't have any of these problems from a school as my son was too young but it is awful how many companies who seem to know as if by magic that you have had a baby and send you all sorts of nonsense don't seem to take any notice when your child dies.

The devistation of having to phone a company 2 or 3 times and have to explain again and again that you want them to stop sending you stuff is so hard . And bloody awful for the person you are ringing as well .

Must have been a terrible shock for the parents, this is what happens when you let computers do jobs.

Poor family.
TW sorry for your loss.

shocking, should never happen

BUT it has happened and the parents will not accept the school's apology

I don't understand that

but didn;t the deputy head sign it (obviously not focussing on the name) I can;t beleive that they have so many puipils die that he wouldn have recognised the name if he'd looked at it properly.

I can't imagine that the deputy head reads every letter he has to sign

at my DD's school, there are about 1400 pupils

that's a lot of letters

what made me roll my eyes was the people who designed the school computer system said "changes would be made to the firm's software to make sure the mistake was not repeated." when obviously any computer is only as good as the information put into it and the people using it. Blaming a computer system is rediculous, they still have to be maintained.

oh I assumed only truants were getting letters which surely would be a significantly lowere number?

Kew, I imagine that the deputy head gets lots of letters to sign every day and it was with some other unrelated letters

Maybe the PA should read them? I guess someone should

"but didn;t the deputy head sign it (obviously not focussing on the name) I can;t beleive that they have so many puipils die that he wouldn have recognised the name if he'd looked at it properly"

well it said he had 150 automated letters. so he didn't write or dictate the letters, he was just given the stack of letters that had to be signed for truancy. as i said earlier the mistake was made when the dead child was not removed from the computer system.
it's an unfortunate accident imho end of. what does going to the papers and refusing an apology achieve?

The thing is, the girl apparently had been taken off the system by the school correctly according to the instructions given to them by Capita - it was a fault of the way the sytem was created that that didn't take her off the MailMerge function.
Presumably this is because even the records of dead pupils are meant to be kept somewhere in the system - for example they might be needed if parents wanted to take action against the schol or local authority. But it seems the MailMerge is set up to work from the database which includes these records, instead of from the one the current register is based on.

The question of whether the letter should have been spotted before it was sent is a separate one & depends on a lot of factors, most of which we don't know.

We've had an email this morning about this (I work at a junior school) & Capita are working on a patch for the system to stop this happening again, so it's obvious it was a fault in the system.

I think it would be good practice for any school for the deputy head to check the names on this particular kind of automated letter, as it also can cause great stress for children with serious illnesses/chronic health problems etc. It is not an unusual situation. They should know that.

Obviously, a child dying is an unusual situation, but most schools must experience from time to time a child whose attendance dips below the 80% and where there are strong reasons they should not be sent this letter. Sorting through a pile of 150 letters to find the names of one or two students that shouldn't be sent the letter can't take more than 5 minutes if you are aware of the problem and have a list- or how slowly do headteachers read these days?

TBH - that is not a software error it is sick

It is human error and they need to develop a system to take a pupils name of everything if they leave the school or pass away. Instead they blame an inate object.

Well, that's the point ivykaty - the current system doesn't take the name off mail merged letters, but schools are not told this and so there was nothing the school could have done to stop that letter being produced. As I said above, the question of whether it should have been spotted is a different one, so in that respect the software thing is a bit of a red herring.

However, Capita have now produced a patch (which will be available to download tomorrow)that does take the name off mail merged letters, ie they are developing a system to take the pupil's name off, so they have addressed the problem.

150 pupils who are playing truant?

Is that a normal truancy rate?

I think it is a great example of how badly schools communicate with parents, tbh. All that rhetoric about treating each child as an individual, coupled with all those standard letters...

I think it's very sad, but I'm not sure that it's really a news item.

And the school have apologised - what exactly is it the parents want them to do now?