School reported daughter's dream to social services, should I complain?

[Maya2233]

Hi, I need some advice. My daughter, she just turned four, is in reception.We have a very loving and beautiful relationship i never even shouted at her. I love her so much. Never had any complaint in nursery or never anything of any sort. So what happened is I went to pick her up today and the head teacher, she called me on the side and it was during the carpet time that she mentioned that mummy hit me on the head. the teacher who was there, was not the class teacher. class teacher was absent. She was another teacher. So she took her to the office and there my daughter, she said the same thing and then she said that it was a dream. So what they did is they reported this to the social services. I am so cross at this as she did mention that it was a dream. And when I went to pick her up and I asked her, the first thing she said was that mummy, I saw a dream last night that you hit me on the head. So I am so unhappy about this, and I don't know how to take this forward, because how can you complain this thing to the social services? The social services didn't even contact me.I don't know why would they bother about a dream. But I am so upset about this. Do I have any rights to complain about the teacher? The class teacher came today she was also surprized and said i know you guys and i am so sorry about this and i will handle everything.

She's not lying, she's a small child confused about a dream.

But the question is where the filtering should be.

Just passing everything to SS doesn’t necessarily help.

By analogy, plenty of terror attacks happen because intelligence agencies have too many leads and not enough signal to know what to prioritise.

Does an SS worker have more info than a teacher to make that kind of judgment?

Occasionally, yes. Usually, no, and one more “this child indicates potential abuse by parents” just adds to the haystack in which the needles get lost.

Teachers are only supposed to report not investigate or make their own decisions. That's the protocol, you can't just decide to do things differently.

No, ooh have no right to complain. As you love your child, be thankful that she is part of a system that seeks to protect her and that doesn’t take her 4yo word about dreams as gospel.

Awful response

OP - school is following due process -
don’t make it awkward- acknowledge it’s a stressful thing, but you understand how safeguarding works

The teacher has far more context than the SS worker in almost all cases.

In almost all cases, there will be no SS file, and they have never met the parents, the child, or anything.

The difficulty is to design a system that works in the fraction of cases where there are repeated red flags from across different agencies, without burying SS in busy work, almost ensuring insufficient time to devote to serious cases or to delve deeper when something looks really wrong.

But the teacher isn’t able to do anything are they? It’s no different to me phoning SS and saying “I’m a bit worried about my neighbours child, she said she had a dream her mum beat her up” how could that be “filtered”?

Your reaction to this is incredibly suspicious.

It’s not at all- she’s embarrassed and hurt.

Your way may or may not be better but teachers have to follow the safeguarding policy.

Most likely is it will end up logged as NFA and nobody ever looks at it again.

But for some kids there will be something going on and they are trying to tell someone. So with no evidence it would be logged as NFA. But it will be there next time someone reports a concern, or there's an injury that doesn't add up, or the child makes another disclosure, and it might make the difference to how that new concern is responded to, and in turn help a child who really does need help.

Yeah I think we're violently in agreement, basically it's the "almost" of your sentence that is doing all the heavy lifting.
To be honest I'm sure there are better systems but until AI takes over (god forbid) this is the best we have.

Does that really work though?

Because given what children, and real life, are like, there are always going to be decisions. Unavoidably and always.

The school asked the child about it a second time, so they’re already investigating.

I know in the past few months at some point I’ve tapped my child on the head with a Metro to remind him we’re getting off at the next stop, in a crowded tube.

Father struck child on head with an implement in a public place, child confirms incident, confirms this is not the first time. Father seeks to downplay incident, seems to think this is normal behaviour.

Report or not? No judgment allowed.

Not too violently I hope : )

They're doing their job. If it's a one-off and she never says anythung like this again, then nothing more will come of it. They have to log it to build a picture in case there are other things which crop up in future. When things like this aren't logged and services don't speak to each other, chuldren slip through the net and die as a result. It happens time and time again. You have no grounds for a complaint.

Not the same. Or is it? I didn't think they recorded on a child's/adult's record if a bag had been searched? If you know for sure they do, as in certain people who go to an airport have it recorded their bag was searched, when the vast majority don't have such a record, then ok.
It makes me worry that parents will be afraid to take kids to hospital if they're ill, if they're scared of being accused. When 121 children were removed from their homes because of those false allegations (Dr. Marietta Higgs and Dr. Geoffrey Wyatt), apparently some parents became scared to engage with authorities, so what worries me is that children could come to harm because decent parents are afraid of being falsely accused.

I think they have to investigate what a child said. It may be nothing but in another case the child may be at risk. They will investigate and it will be fine.

This was a child saying a parent hit them, very different from a child being taken to A&E.

Look at it like this. School must report everything. If you didn’t hit DD you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s better they report things that are nothing to ensure they don’t miss the awful things that can and do happen to kids.

class teacher was inappropriate saying ‘she knew you’ first rule of safeguarding is it could be anyone

No, of course you shouldn't complain. The school did exactly the right thing.

Of course you don’t get to complain about it. It’s safeguarding.

But if you were a neighbour you would filter. Unless you are reporting everything that could possibly be a red flag.

That would be every neighbour’s child’s every bump and scrape. SS would collapse and that would not make anyone safer.

It’s hard to make rules for these things. One decision is always “is the stupidity of an inflexible rule going to be worse than the stupidity of some people’s judgment if we leave it to them to judge”. I guess I think that teachers are on average reasonably sensible professionals, plus they have the first-hand knowledge.

TLDR, I have 3 kids (well one is now 18 so doesn’t really count) and I agree with you that priority shouldn’t be given to children as people without children still deserve the time off. But your comments about them not knowing the date and not giving them an advent calendar are ridiculous. maybe your niece doesn’t know the date but most kids do know as they are told the date in school every day and like everyone else have an understanding of time passing.

I don’t think your post makes any sense.

im talking about reporting my neighbour for the exact same comment as the teacher did- dreaming of being hit

neither I, nor a teacher, Would report a scraped knee to SS.