I live in a small village and my son started in the reception year of our village school in September.
At end of October my son and I had a conversation that went like this:
(I’ll call the other boy BoyX so as not to use his name)
My son: BoyX let me play today.
Me: Doesn’t BoyX normally let you play?
My son: No never
Me: well that’s not very nice, why don’t you just play with someone else?
My son: BoyX tells me he’s the boss, he decides who can play and he says nobody is allowed to play with me.
The problem is that BoyX is a big character and appears to in charge (the boss) of the boys in the class and is purposely excluding my son from the group (it is only a small class - so only 7 boys in the class)
I’m ashamed to say that at first I didn’t take this too seriously. I just thought, this is how kids are - you know friends today and then not the next and then friends again! But over the next week my son kept telling me more hasty comments from BoyX so I made an appointment to see his teacher.
To my surprise she said she’d been aware of this issue for over two weeks and they were working with BoyX on his behaviour.
Of course I was upset so we arranged a meeting to discuss what to do. In this meeting they gave us a list of things they were going to do to help - for example putting the boys on a group task to help them to bond and class activities to encourage team work. We then met two weeks later to discuss the results. The teacher talked very positively about the results, but from what my son tells me nothing has really changed. He tells me that he has no one to play with in the playground and so plays on his own and the TA confirmed this. So I’ve been back for another meeting with his teacher and in this meeting she said that nothing new needed to be done because the problem was sorted and suggested my son was making up the comments from BoyX to get attention from my. But I don’t believe this to be true. Yes my son is attention seeking like any other 5 year old but I don’t believe he’s using this to get attention.
So I feel very frustrated with the school I decided to contact my next nearest school and it turns out they have one place free. They have offered this place to me and I now have 10 days to either accept or decline the space. But I’m in a quandary with what to do. My feelings are:
This other school with the free space is a big city school and to get there I’ll have to drive through a high traffic area where as at the moment I walk my son to school. Also the other school is huge, overwhelming so, 75 kids in just the reception year! Plus the catchment area is vast and includes some troubled areas. But on the positive side we do already know some lovely kids that go there so I know my son will have friends from the start.
I’d really love to know all your thoughts and help me out of this quandary. Thank you in advance xx