Probable fine for low attendance after genuine illness.

[Quietlife333]

So,
Cut a long story short youngest ds of three has managed to catch every bug going since September this year. This is not usual for him, he is otherwise well normally but has had tummy bug with the runs, serious throat bug with temperatures, vomiting bug and a really bad cold with tummy pain. His attendance was just above 90%
School reported us to welfare officer who said it’s fine I can see he has been genuinely ill. Also that attendance is going in the right direction now but next time you must provide evidence.
So DS was absent again for two days after picking up another bug at school very bad cold running nose bleary eyes tummy pain sneezing and coughing.
Our G.P will not provide evidence to be given to schools to account for children’s absence as policy.
I’m pretty sure we will be fined. But there is not a lot I can do other than send a sick child into school to avoid a fine. Which I’m not allowed to do by school policy.
Has anybody else been in this situation and how did it pan out? Frankly if they fine us I’m planning to recoup the costs by opting out of paying for any school trips. Until I cover the cost of the fine. I don’t think it’s fair to penalise parents for keeping genuinely sick kids home from school and while I don’t want to do this I don’t see anyway around it.

[pikapikachu]

MPs are the ones who have created a policy where children should be in school 95% of the time without making sensible exceptions like children who have regular hospital appointments. Schools push this bollocks because of OFSTED and there are lots of parents who help them play the rules. For example get your child marked in at morning register. Take them out of school 10 minutes later and go to a hospital appointment. If they are back by afternoon register then statistics-wise they were at school all day.

It's the same with term-time holidays. I think that many will add potential school fine to the cost of their holiday as it's still cheaper than school holidays.

[youarenotkiddingme]

Email to confirm that you had understood correctly what was discussed.

Keep it brief and actual. Eg

Dear HT,

Please confirm I have understood the out come of the meeting in xxxxx with xxxxx correctly.

The school and la accept x was absent on the following dates .... due to illness.

The school state the la informed them to mark as unauthorised but the LA say this is your discretion.

Can you confirm that you accept x was Ill but you are marking him as unauthorised absence just because you can and due to safeguarding - when you have no safeguarding concerns?

Please confirm that in future you expect my child to attend school regardless of any illness they may have and infection risk because GP do not provide sick notes for children and you only accept these to authorise absence.

Regards.
Xxxxd

There's nothing a school or HT likes less than a paper trail that shows their behaviour is unreasonable and unjustified in their own words but they've decided to go ahead and do it anyway.

[Quietlife333]

youarenotkiddingme-
I wish yours was the email I sent.
I had already emailed them today to reiterate my points from the meetings and spell out on black and white that the absence doesn’t meet the criteria. I will follow up with your template if I don’t get a reply early next week.
And you are right it’s very easy to be woolly and unreasonable in a face to face meeting- not so easy in black and white.

[ASauvignonADay]

I'm a bit confused about what's been said - school marked the absence as unauthorised as per their policy (is it a LA school? I would guess that they've followed LA policy and that is what they mean by the council says rather than literally?). Someone from the LA said it is the heads discretion, which it is but he head will use this following the LA or academy policy (whichever applies).

The law is clear but also not clear. Yes illness is a defence, but the onus is on the parent to prove it. So the head does not have to authorise it on your word, if there are concerns around attendance.

In reality, if you did it pay a fine and pleaded not guilty, IME a judge would likely go with the illness as an acceptable justification for the absence. We would not issue a fine or go for a prosecution unless we'd met the penalty notice criteria (number of unauthorised sessions) using absences that the parent had not stated were due to illness.

[ASauvignonADay]

Please confirm that in future you expect my child to attend school regardless of any illness they may have and infection risk because GP do not provide sick notes for children and you only accept these to authorise absence.
This is not what the op has stated was said at the meeting. The council stated that other types of evidence would be sufficient, not a sick note which every knows GPs won't want to/shouldn't have to provide routinely.

[Ledkr]

It's ridiculous. Some children are not will. Than others. Some have a lower tolerance for pain or discomfort. Some have better immune systems.
My dd1 never got ill but dd2 seems to get every cold going.
The last two days she is so blocked up that she's blown her nose till it is red raw. Her head and face hurt from the blocked sinus's and she's generally floppy and lethargic.
I didn't send her for 2 days and she lay on the sofa the whole time and hardly ate.
She seems a bit better today so I sent her in and at 9.30 got a call to ask if she could have some calpol.
She then had to do outdoor pe in the cold and drizzle and came out looking worse than yesterday.😥
Surely people feeling forced to send in snotty sick kids makes it more likely that others will catch it.

[youarenotkiddingme]

But my point with school saying they will accept other forms of evidence (GP apt card/copy of prescription) is that in most cases you won't visit GP or have prescription. So school are saying child has to be in because you can't prove they are ill.

[ASauvignonADay]

@youarenotkiddingme it's not saying child has to be in if they're ill. It's saying the child is having a lot of absences and therefore they want some verification. I doubt they're asking all parents to provide evidence, but those who've reached a trigger point.

By the way, I do this for a living and agree it is an imperfect system. But I genuinely don't know what schools do radically differently in the circumstances and system we have to work with. Lots of children are kept off school for no reason, or have ongoing health issues which aren't investigated, or who there are safeguarding concerns around. Lots of people also take term time holidays. Lots of people also feed their children rubbish diets and let the stay up all night on their phones and wonder why they're in poor health. This isn't everybody by a long shot but it is probably more than you think.

[bananasandwicheseveryday]

It is unfortunate that parents of children get caught up in this, however, you are, imo, angry at the wrong people.
Our school has recently had our OFSTED inspection. In all areas, except one, we were seems outstanding. Unfortunately, that one area is attendance. Because our attendance is below the target set for us, not by us, we cannot be graded outstanding. OP, you might be different, but how many threads on here do we read where parents are concerned about their child 'only' being allocated a good school and not an outstanding one? It is, unfortunately, the case that many parents make their final decision about which school to choose for their child based upon the league tables and OFSTED outcomes. The people to complain to are the
successive governments who implemented and continue to maintain this system.

As for ducking out of paying for school trips in order to recoup the cost of a fine, if enough people so this, all that will happen is that trips will be cancelled. We've had to cancel several trips over the past year or two because not enough parents have paid.

[youarenotkiddingme]

Sauv i do get that. But how do you get evidence of a cold? Basically school are saying if they don't need a GP or medication prescribed they won't authorise absence. So in effect I see this as school saying the parent can't decide / judge if the child is ill enough for school and that they expect them in if not GP visit worthy.
And if you use the emergency GP clinic to get appointment card they threaten you with letters and warning for abusing the system!

My sons old school still unauthorised and absence even though we were going to GP and did go to GP that day. ds had threatened and attempted suicide. School felt that he had no reason to be anxious and therefore he should be school.
He'd had a knife pulled on him the previous day which instigated the situation.

But boy was excluded for 2 days. So therefore ds should go to school and forget about it

[ASauvignonADay]

Does a child need to be kept off school because they have a cold.. I wouldn't dream of having a day off work for a cold!

I think it was wrong in the scenario you mention with your ds. That should have been authorised, but then we don't know what information the school had.

[ASauvignonADay]

And there will be extremes as with everything and they should absolutely be challenged if you don't agree. I'd expect to be challenged if I made a bad judgement and would learn from it.

[youarenotkiddingme]

Well as school rang me to tell me it happened they knew it had. They also had the voicemail to say ds was unwell and I was taking him to GP.
DHT then rang me to say they wouldn't authorise as they didn't believe ds needed to see a GP. I was and told them then what ds had done. He just said well school still dispute ds has anxiety and so wouldn't authorise. He'd ALREADY had a dx and referred to primary MH service for CBT and they'd been informed and had copy of report.

But going back to what I said I think we agree. You are saying you wouldn't keep a child off for a cold. Some parents will and some children will be unwell with a cold - too unwell to attend. So it is a choice to either face a fine or do as school expects and send them in whilst infectious. I don't disagree with btw. The system does suck. But it seems it's hard for the parents to ever be in the right if the HT can decide to mark as they chose and has the authority to say a parent is making a wrong decision - even when they clearly are not!

[Quietlife333]

I have joined the parents union and the against school holiday fines and penalty fines organisation on Facebook.
They have a wealth accurate law based information.
What I had a problem with was-
1 The school know and believe that my dc has been ill.
They have verbally confirmed this in the meeting both the head and the welfare officer say there is no question over my honestly concerning his absence.
2 they have no safeguarding concerns. Both the head and the welfare officer were at pains to reassure me this is not a worry for them.
3 The head, knowing and accepting that my DC was genuinely ill has insisted on marking the register unauthorised because attendance is low and in his words he can’t juts make an exception for people like me.

1. School policy states unauthorised absence at their school consists of 5 consecutive days or unreported absence or erratic absence.
   

The two days lately that were marked unauthorised do not qualify under these rules and the other illness absences have been accepted as genuine by the school and so are not erratic.
And so
Actually marking these to days unauthorised even though we are close to the low level of 90% for attendance is illegal. The head knows that dc was ill for all absences and the two absences he has marked as unauthorised, and had confirmed this to me staff and council. The Mark by law has to be sick .The register is a legal document and must factually reflect the situation of a child on that day.
The onus to provide proof would indeed be on me IF the head had cause to question the truth of what I was saying. He doesn’t. And he has told me this in front of a member of office staff and the council welfare officer in our attendance meeting.
So. I have already asked the school to reverse the mark. Before I was aware of the law. If the mark isn’t made right as sick. Then I will be sending the above info along with links to the legislation where it is very very clear that child can not do this is cases where they know and have said they know a child is genuinely ill.
Check out this site anybody who has attendance issues with a school and join the parents union.
www.facebook.com/groups/320889104722130/

[Quietlife333]

Sorry about the typos.

[youarenotkiddingme]

And marking unauthorised because attendance is low - isn't even a thing!

[Quietlife333]

I am a good parent.most people are. We know when our child is unwell enough with a virus or heavy cold. Temperature the runs or vomiting. We know if our child needs to see a doctor and we know the massively over crowded and underfunded local surgery does not need the likes of us calling for appointment cards and appointments for coughs because they are dealing with serious issues that actually need their attention. We are fully able to decide if our children should go to school and this is what really angers people. We are doing the right things and yet we are treated like the minority of bad parents who for whatever reason do not do the right thing. Protecting the minority with such a blunt instrument will always cause offfence.

[Quietlife333]

I really can’t spell this morning.

[DancingbytheRiver]

Ask the GP for a copy of the log of the visits of your DC in the las 12-18 monthsZ you are entitled to see what they have on record. That should be proof enough to the school?

[ASauvignonADay]

Depends how you look at it and how you define "most". I just looked at some of our data and only 30% of parents had been contacted for a meeting regarding attendance (the point at which you'd start asking for supporting evidence). So in that sense, most parents are trusted to make those judgements.
Some there's been no need to have much contact again after an initial meeting as either attendance improved, or they provide evidence (not always - we're not expecting parents to drag children to the GP unnecessarily but if there are that many absences that it seems unusual, we do) so there's no challenge.
Some just do not engage and we do not feel a lot of the absence is genuine for various reasons. These are the cases that end up in court.

[youarenotkiddingme]

Sauv agree there are some who don't. But what we are struggling to get our heads around is

A) why a HT unauthorised an absence when he accepts a kid is ill - just because he can and
B) in my case when evidence was provided that child was absent due to GP appointment they can still not authorise it because they don't believe the child has the problem the child took them to the GP for. Even though his notes back it up and a referral to another agency was made by the GP.

This isn't about whether attendance is or is t high enough. It's about the fact that parents making choices about their children isn't deemed acceptable and actually the HT has the final say about whether a child should be in school or not.

[Quietlife333]

Sauvignon- it seems though when you look at the legal wording that parents should only be asked for supporting medical proof when there is a genuine doubt over the veracity do the illness- basically if you think the child or parent is lying. Also I will try and attach the guidance for G.P.s. They are basically told not to provide. They aren’t contracted to do this.

[Quietlife333]

This is part of the post I found on what G.P’s are Contracted to do.

[ASauvignonADay]

@youarenotkiddingme
Point A - I understand the head's reasoning here, he is sticking to their policy, but he could have changed it to authorised. Hard to say as I wasn't in that meeting. Is it unfair to believe some parents on just their word but not others? Hence I think he is trying to be fair?
Point B - I agree with you. That absolutely should have been authorised and I'd challenge it.

[ASauvignonADay]

@Quietlife333 but that's open to interpretation anyway (the bit on whether there is doubt about whether it's genuine)

Re your post about GPs - the onus is still on their parent.