How does your school differentiate kids with same name?

[CastleTower]

Just to be clear, this is all very lighthearted, and I'm just wondering what your school does.

My eldest started school recently, and it turns out that someone in her class has a sibling who will be in her younger sibling's year, and has the same name. So let's say two girls both have a younger brother called Noah the same age.

Normally I'd assume they'd be (for example) Noah A and Noah B but they actually have the same last initial too!

It's not a name with any obvious nickname or shortening, so that's out. I suppose one is blond and one dark...?

We and the other parents have all had a good laugh about it, and no one is feeling hard done by or anything. But I was wondering how you would go about differentiating in this instance? Just full first name + last name at all times? Has anyone had this at their school?

Surely the only way is to have a nickname based on your surname. Cotty, Raddy et al paved the way...

We had two girls with the same first name and last name. The other girls referred to them as ‘thin Suzy’ and ‘fat Suzy’. Kinder times we live in now.

I'm a teacher (secondary) and the kids often sort out nicknames/diminutive among themselves and tell you what they want. They generally prefer that to the surname initial IME.

I had a class with three Edwards, and they're Ed, Edward and Eddo (no Eddie, their choice).

Similarly I've had Alexander, Alex and Ali.

My dd had the same name as a girl in her nursery class and they were called (not their real names but similar) "Anne with an E" and "Ann without an E" which is a mouthful but again, seemed preferred by them to surname initials! I guess it helped them learn to spell their names!

I know this isn’t quite the same but I worked in a small organisation with a woman who had the same first name as me and her surname had the same initial as mine so, to differentiate, we were known as Sarah Ca/Cr*

*names changed

There were 5 of us with my first name in my class at primary school. We got nicknames based on surnames. Eg Smithy, Shepsy, Robbie (v imaginative)
It never bothered me, and made life considerably less confusing!

My son has a very common first name and so was always known as, for example, "Tom P". In reception he thought his name was spelled tomp!

This is often how it goes in my experience, which is always why I laugh to myself when people bang on on the baby names board about needing to avoid the top 20 so there aren't loads of them at school.

Any time I have had a duplicated name in my class (really not that often and sometimes quite unexpected duplications, as you're found) I literally just call the children by their name, while looking directly at them so it's obvious who you are calling. I've never understood the need for Name A and Name B. It's like having colleagues with the same name, people just call them by their name. You wouldn't call an adult Dave L (for example) so why do people think we need to do it for children? I was always just called by my first name at school, despite there being another in the class some years, and it was honestly not confusing. That's why I don't get why some people make such a big thing about it.

In written notes, I'd do name and initial, but verbally I'd just call them both by their name. I've been teaching for over 15 years and have never needed to resort to using surnames verbally in order to differentiate.

This. We had 5 Ashley's (different spellings and both male and female) in one year once. We used surnames. It's quite common to have children with the same first name.

When I was invigilating exams there were two girls with the same first name and surname. It was quite an unusual first name too.

I was one of two in my class at secondary with the same first name and surnames starting with the same letters. On the first morning the class teacher said she'd use the short version for one of us and full version for the other, and the asked the other girl what her preferred version was. She took the shorter one which is what I'd also been known by my whole life, and I was so incredibly shy and overwhelmed by the big new school I could hardly speak let alone say that that was my name too! So I was known by the long version of my first name by everyone at that school for the whole five years I was there, and to be honest it felt like I wasn't really myself until I left five years later. For many other reasons too (it wasn't really the right school for me at all) but that very first interaction pretty much set the tone!

They use their whole name and then when they make a Mother's Day card they sign it
Love from Tommy Smith.

This is true although I used to try and stop them.

We had this and a maths teacher with a squint. That's when it really gets interesting.

My daughters class had 2 Bethany's - not their real name

So the teacher did
Bethany Green and Bethany Yellow
^ the colours were the colour of their PE team they were in for class

Want I was at school, I swear every other girl was called Sandra. Surnames were used. One of them and I are still good friends at 60 but I can't think of her as just Sandra even now, she's still Sandrasmith 😁

This has got me thinking there’s not a lot of double names in either of my dcs classrooms. My ds’s class has two Dylans and they are Dylan A. And Dylan B. My dc both are the only children with their names in the whole school, and their names are very normal.

Teachers would use full names in our school.

In one class we had two children both called Amir, but one was spelt Aamir. Over time Aamir was verbally identified as two A Aamir, which gradually shortened to Two A. All well and good until the day we had a supply teacher in

” Where is this child called Tooay, I’ve checked on the register and there’s no such name, but the other children keep mentioning him”

First and initials for surname so Joanie WS and Joanie BD for example.

One of my close friends from Uni and I had the same name so a third friend declared we were both to pick a shortening and that would be used. Yes, she was (is) bossy lol so say one of us is Alex and one is Lexi. Very weird when we were then around Alex's friends and no one else ever called her that. So "oh who's side of the wedding are you here for?" "Lexi!" "Who?? Are you at the wrong wedding?" *Not a real example

Hahahaha yep my child does this, cards to family members signed eg Olivia G. I’m like darling they’ll know which Olivia it is!

In my dc's case they became Noah Ba and Noah Be! They thought it quite funny.

I would have assumed initial too but actually DD always refers to the children in her class with duplicate names as (for example) Oliver Smith and Oliver Jones - so they must go with the full name even when it’s not the same initial.

Without being outing my nephew would introduce himself as Jackelle as he thought that was his name (it was Jack L) and I used to work somewhere with two Paul’s except there were no Pauls, there was simply Smithy and Brown (their surnames) if someone came by and asked for Paul we would be very confused 🫤

I once worked with 3 Dave's. Usually you could work out which was meant by context, but I did once have a college say the following to me: "Dave says can you check with Dave that he's done X and if so set up a meeting with other Dave about it". Needed a bit of clarification on that one!

There were 3 of my name in my year but we all had the same surname initial. So it was just full name if we were in the same class.

When my DC were little they treated the surname initial as part of the name - so for example writing a Christmas card ‘Dear Tilly R’ , or talking to them when the other one wasn’t there “Tilly R look at this!”.

There were four Katherines in my year at secondary. They all spelled their names slightly differently but sounded the same. They got together in the first week and sorted out names between them. IIRC they ended up as Katherine, Cathy, Kate and Katie. Our teachers were generally very formal, and would never use nicknames, so the girls would have been known as Katherine P, Catherine L etc. In this case, however, they respected what the girls had done and used the chosen names in class.