what the most hilarious and groundless parental complaint you've ever fielded?

[HanneHolm]

I have heard of one parent complaining a member of staff wasn't singing in a parents assembly.

Parent left message on voicemail to say child had been ill and was going to be off school. 10.30am and child and mother turn up 'he didn't want to miss spellings and he's feeling much better now'
Ok then says I and proceed to take child through to class. Meanwhile, parent is signing child in and says 'oh yes x is feeling much better now, he was last sick at 1.30 this morning so he's fine now' errrrr sorry? 9hrs ago? Child has to be retrieved from class and sent home for 48hrs.
Few hours later phone call received from other parent complaining how dare we send child home and actually they had got times wrong and it was 1.30 previous morning
Funny how child had disclosed 'Mummy will be so angry - told me i HAD to be back at school by Wed as she has to be at work'

This thread is comedy gold! Glad it's not just my school, think I've dealt with most of the complaints on here (often come via solicitors, nice area)

Personal favourite is probably the parent who responded to being issued with the 'Persistent complaints and harassment' leaflet (after a 4 year bullying campaign against a member of staff) by..... Making a complaint!

I'm not a teacher thank fuck it sounds horrendous and you must have the patience of saints but I do enjoy a peruse of the minutes of the class rep meetings with the head from school.

My personal favourite: apparently the French teacher is not French enough. An ability to speak fluent French is not sufficient for some parents in year 4, they require her to actually be born and bred in France too.

A recent one. "Little Darren has a sore leg. He is not to run around in the playground under any circumstances and you will probably have to stop him because he forgets that it hurts." When I suggested that he might be better staying in, "He has a right to fresh air. He is to go onto the yard!" Mum wasn't best pleased when I pointed out that the best person to stop him running was him (Year 6). Incidentally, his leg looked perfectly fine when he was using it to kick lumps out of the other children.
Others from this year include:
Can I make up the lunchtime pot noodle?
What am I going to do about the missing pencil from Cornwall?
What am. I going to do about the nit problem in my class?
Can I ring every morning to try and get Timmy to get up and come to school on time? When I declined, I was apparently very unreasonable and obviously didn't care about his education...

Parent who had removed their child from another local secondary school because 'they don't support her' and brought her to ours. Girl (15) has attendance of 55% at other school and a record of awful behaviour. She quickly starts being absent at our school and behaviour is dreadful. No SEN.

Parent asked to come up for meeting and says it would help if I (and only I would do because the othet staff 'don't support her') went to every class 5 minutes before the end of the lesson and walked her to her next lesson and stayed with her for the first 5 minutes to make sure she was there and settled.

I am a Curriculum Leader, look after a year group of 200+ and teach 22 lessons. She told me I was being 'unreasonable and unsupportive' to say that was not something I could do. She said I was 'a selfish person with no humanity' and she wrote to the local authority about me and moved the girl to another school- where the girl did not attend either.

This happened at the school my mum works at:

Class were studying healthy lifestyle choices, and this particular day has been provided with the ingredients to make a vegetarian pizza in class. I remember doing the exact same thing when I was at the school almost 20 years ago, taught us a bit of basic cooking and got us all to try some vegetables. So this year, a parent of one of the children complained that, as a meat-eater, she was being discriminated against, and complained to the local paper.

Wowsers, getting a tattoo at school what are the parents thinking

One of our boys was late to registration every morning so I called his mum. She suggested his form tutor collect him from the car park every morning and couldn't understand my refusal to ask his tutor to do this. He was 17.

When I was doing my newly qualified year I taught ict. I was called to a meeting with the mum of a yr9 girl. I duly attended wondering what it was about the Oct lessons that were worrying her. Mum told me 'she's picking her option subjects and I don't know what to put, you need to fill in the form"

I asked if her dd wanted to work in ICT? She answered no, she wants to work with animals. I felt obliged to point out that I wasn't her form tutor or a careers teacher. Yes, Mum knew that - please just fill in the form cos it's nearly the deadline.

I felt out of my depth but did it. Apparently she works in kennels now, so all's well...

Know this is an old thread but some of you teachers deserve a medal.

Best one I've come across was an irate email from a parent expressing disgust over us offering pony rides at a fundraiser. Even though the stables were coming equipped with shovels to remove any poo, the mother was concerned that "remnants of faeces" would contaminate the playground and that her little angel might catch something. She demanded we write a risk assessment for it, and would only be placated with several reams of academic weblinks showing that the risk was negligible. The fundraiser was on Friday, it rained ALL weekend and she was still into the Head on the Monday wittering on about the "dangers" of particles of poo.

I know this is an old thread, but I'm in knots laughing at it.

I had a child who racked up a serious amount of absences, which the parents insisted were essential "family days". As far as I could tell, family days involved sitting around the house. They were always miffed and complaining when I wouldn't mark her in on those days - eh no, because she wasn't fucking in!

And then there was a member of staff who had an complaint lodged against them at the start of the year. Their crime? They were "too short to be a teacher, my darling brat child couldn't possibly take them seriously, what a joke, etc etc". Thankfully the principal told them to do one, but holy fuck

Another parent insisted to me that their child was not to be taught Irish (compulsory subject) as, and I quote, "I don't give a fuck about that". They were quite aggressive about it, and I had to cut the meeting short as a result. I continued to teach Irish, and took a lot of petty joy in making sure every report home gave a very detailed and specific rundown of how they were getting on in it.

Oh, I could go on for years....

😂 at 'don't give a fuck about' Irish. A bit of me wishes that was enough to get DS out of it. He has ASD with maximum resource hours which could have been taken during Irish, plus he's not Irish so doesn't have to use it for points in the unlikely event that he goes to university and there's no chance that he'll be a teacher, politician or guard. And, most importantly, I genuinely think it's a total waste of time having spent my entire school career being taught it but still knowing practically nothing.

Oh, I'm very aware a lot of parents feel the same way. It was the aggressiveness and behaving like he could just click his fingers and have it dropped that got on my tits. He continued to be a... difficult character...right through that child's time in the school!

And having been a resource teacher, I had a lot of parents who wanted their exempted kids getting resource hours during Irish. I do see where they're coming from, but it's often not feasible.

Oh, that's reminded me of another one - the parent who took their child on holiday in term time. It was over a month iirc.

The parents sent an email in for the resource teacher, asking when the child's missed resource hours would be made up, and that as she had a duty of care to their child it needed to be at a time that suited them, so after school or preferably the weekend...

The vast majority of parents are lovely, but Christ, there's some cracking stories out there.