Teacher hit me

[AdaUserName92]

So my son just started nursery, he is 3 and this was his settling in week. Everything was going well until the last couple of days he done home and said his teacher and another senior member of staff hislt him and threw him. On those two days he came hone super angry and change in behaviour. I've withdrawn him from the school. Has anyone had such experience and reported to ofsted and safeguarding bodies? What was the outcome?

You need to ask in a calm manner as to what happened. Then decide.

Whilst children should be believed there sometimes needs to be, particularly with younger ones, a degree of interpretation and untangling.

My mum (92) is, sadly, effectively a 3 year old. She doesn’t make things up but events get combined, past events merge with the present, names, details get changed as she is relating something. She’s honest in her own way but not always accurate.

The skill is non suggestive questioning, detective work etc.

If the OP’s child has been thrown then there will be bruises and a fear/reaction to going back to the nursery.

My oldest when he was about 3 told everyone he was God. He seemingly quote bible stories despite having never even been near a church. I was a SAHM and with him 24/7... it really freaked DH out for a while.

As weirdly as it started it stopped, he has zero memory of it.

We never did find out where he sponged that stuff up from.

I freaked my mam out by asking her about her childhood pet, describing them and then drawing the exact layout of her childhood house.

I don't know how I knew that either but I swear I have MEMORIES of visiting that pet that died 15 years before I was born. No photos of them and no one really talked about them. I had the whole family convinced that I knew stuff I had no possible way of knowing and we never did find an explanation.

Kids say really freaky shit sometimes and we are experts at story weaving.

When I was 3 at nursery the whole class was lined up by the nursery teachers and given the choice of being spanked on the hands or the bottom by a plastic cricken bat. That was the activity for the afternoon. I was too embarrassed to tell my mum what had happened in case she punished me for being naughty. I never told her what had happened. These kind of things do happen in nursery. If your 3 year old says he has been hit - believe him.

Please speak to the nursery that's only fair .my nephew when 4 announced the teacher had lined him and another boy up on window still and punched them out the window .
I can't even remember what the right story was but we still like to tell him about it now
Hope you get to the bottom of it all

That was the afternoon's activity? It sounds vanishingly unlikely. Maybe you were as confused as op's toddler appears to be.

Honestly, in 2023 it's highly unlikely a teacher would risk their job and reputation by hitting a child. The 'threw' part of it sounds particularly unlikely. I would investigate thoroughly before automatically believing a 3 year old.

Kitfish was that a longtime ago by any chance? When corporal punishment was in schools?

With the greatest of respect most teachers are 100% enhanced DBS checked and given the thousands of teachers - I’m not saying none are abusers - abusers seek out any profession GP, scouts etc where they can get close to children but it is highly rare for a teacher to assault a child - even more rare is for another teacher to be involved.

How have you approached it ?

Have you had a meeting with the head of the nursery to explain the concerns and if you aren’t happy feel free to complain to ofsted and the police where needed.

my daughter is a highly articulate pupil who was speaking fluently and I mean fluently eg did you have a nice day mummy? What did you do? Aged 2. She does not have a vivid imagination.

Aged 4 when I picked her up from her lovely primary school - I’m a deputy head or was at a huge secondary at the time - the headteacher at her primary they very nicely asked me to talk to her with my daughter.

my daughter had told her teacher that I had hit her as she couldn’t read the challenging reading book sent home and had ‘put her in the cage’ instead.

In front of the headteacher I asked my daughter to demonstrate on me how she had been hit - she gently patted my shoulder and said ‘there there it’s ok I will put a note in the journal’ and I then asked my daughter to explain the cage.

‘the big black thing in the garden with the net, where you strap me in’ ok I said and what did you do ‘I jumped up and down’ otherwise known as a trampoline. Context is everything.

To believe your child is fine not to let those you accuse be able to talk to you normally and explain is not.

imagine I had been accused in a confrontational manner by my daughters HT and not been able to put my point across.

if you are accusing someone think carefully this is mine and other people’s entire lives. I have been accused twice of hitting in child fortunately in both cases cctv proved the child was lying - it wrecked my health and could have destroyed my career.

if you are accusing someone allow someone to give their side. If you have concerns - contact ofsted and follow the complaints procedure and safeguarding procedure.

also bare in mind the reality - teachers are leaving in droves due to false allegations, complaints from parents, workload, pay - none of that excuses the bad apples amongst us. Speaking as someone who was punched by a 14 year boy and still suffers back pain from it nothing happened to that child - he was suspended and back on my class two weeks later I however suffer from it daily.

Equally the Lucy Letby cases shows abusers live amongst us - I don’t know if your child is telling the truth or not but

• please follow the complaints procedure, the nursery will have one.

Ah wise up!!

3 year olds aren't renowned for their factual recall. Because they are 3.

The sensible and adult thing to do would have been to ask what did happen. But clearly this little darling has been hoisted firmly on the "my son can do no wrong" pedestal.

Extremely foolish and immature over-reaction.

Was that in the 1970s?!

You do know that teachers find unreasonable parents like you and the OP the most difficult part of their job???

I'm amazed we have any teachers left at all.

Yes. It’s getting much worse. Teachers have commented upon this on threads and those I know irl. My neighbour is a university lecturer in his 50s, about my age. He cannot have any kind of friendly relationship with the students beyond what goes on in the teaching rooms. No friendliness or cuppa and a chat. Constantly policing of language. So different from when I was a student in the late 80s / early 90s.

I would find out what happened first before reporting. Kids at this age mistake accidents for purposeful actions. I bumped into a child last week, he asked why I hit him. Kids playing tig on the yard come crying because someone hit them (tug them). Find out before going all guns blazing as if this is false and you report it then the teacher has a good case to take legal action against you. If it is true then by all means take action but - FIND OUT FIRST!

Even then it sounds very unlikely, more like a dream.

A teacher colleague was accused by a child of throwing a huge concrete planter at him. The parents believed him and reported it to the police. The teacher had to go and be interviewed at the Police Station even though they knew it would have been physically impossible for her to move it an inch, it would have taken heavy machinery.

A parent came to me and said her child had told her she'd been on the naughty chair (we didn't have a naughty chair) because she had done some dreadful thing. The mother wasn't cross with me she just said she wanted to know if her child was misbehaving. But it hadn't happened, the child never misbehaved at school. It took quite a while trying to convince the mum that the child must have dreamt it.

Small children have a vivid imagination and can find it hard to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Yeah because it's not lying, they can't tell the difference between fiction and reality.

I feel like this as a university lecturer. I’ve had two episodes in the last 12 months of students saying I’d said x when I know I hadn’t.

I can fully believe a 3yo can lie. Not being malicious, they just have a vague grasp on reality at times. I can remember dds teacher telling me once that Dd had told her all about our exciting weekend when we’d done xyz. None of it was true. Maybe he didn’t like nursery that much as it’s so new and this is his way of expressing his unease? Possibly even half hoping that you might withdraw him from nursery if he says this.

It's perfectly common to lie at that age, or misinterpret.

It's unusual for an apparent adult to suggest breaking people's faces (!!!!) based on the unlikely allegations made by a 3 year old, for which there is no evidence.

You're not the type of person I would want to associate with, frankly.

But hey, do it and see how that works out for you. Prosecution for assault, I'd wager.

Classy response...

No one can advise you as you have left a massive portion of your story out. If you fill in details some MNers might be able to help.

What's that, Skippy? You haven't spoken to the nursery yet?

If you have established this did happen. Then surely you contact the police and who ever oversees nurseries such as the LA, Care Inspectorate if in Scotland. Ofsted in England. There was a nursery practitioner struck off the SSSC register over the summer after being found guilty of assault in court.

It sounds like you don't want him there and are grasping at straws. Children say these things. They're not lying - at least not maliciously. They've exaggerated or mixed up.

This first paragraph doesn't half remind me of the warnings on the front cover of GCSE papers about reading the questions properly. It's taken me right back to 1994!

Very true.

Chances are good that the basic concepts in the story are accurate - there was a throwing and a hitting and it's wrong. To me, that's a solid curriculum for the settling-in week at nursery! It's the specifics of who did what to whom in what context and what the outcome was that is likely to be horrendously garbled.

Yes! Posting it on a chat forum is something else 😂