What do teachers think when return slips are handed in late?

[bonkers20]

I ALWAYS send in reply slips/consent forms/school trip money etc on time.

Now that DS is in Secondary school the responsibility to actually hand the slip in lies with him. He's pretty good, but sometimes things will stay in his bag for days, and occasionally beyond the last day to reply.

What do teachers think? That the parent didn't give it to the child in time or that it's been sitting in the child's bag for a while. Or maybe they just don't think about it at all!

While I'm here, I have to say I think secondary school teachers are brilliant. I was so impressed at my son's first parent/teacher night.

Relief that it's finally in.

They assume it is in the bottom of the child's bag, btw.

I think "That's why I set the return date a week earlier than I actually needed it"

For a couple of things ds1 just managed to get a place on a trip, because he handed in the slip the next day at breaktime, instead of first thing in the morning!

This concentrated the mind and he generally gets stuff in on time.

I do some admin at secondary school for trips and stuff, often you have to chase up time and time again for a particular group of students. It's frustrating.

It's par for the course, tbh. The only problem comes if the slip's SO late the child can't get a place on the trip and then parents get annoyed - of course I can understand it if the child's forgotten to hand it in but often there's nothing we can do about it. But we don't think anything about the parents - secondary school teachers are super-busy people and likely to be those parents too

i run guides and we have some chronic late-payers and slip returners... we discuss between ourselves if we think it's the child or parent because we feel bad for the child if it's the parent..

usually if it's also a parent who arrives late for pick ups or forgets to pick them up at all we blame the parent - in these cases i stop nagging the child and just call the parent direct cause it's not fair on the child really otherwise.

I assume child has not passed it on to parent.

As far as trips go, we cannot legally take them without a permission slip.

I just assume everyone is busy....or very disorganised :)

I have often wondered how this system could be improved. There has to be a way! It's so cumbersome and time consuming.

I often wish I could just deposit £100 with the school for it to take as required and come back when it needs some more! That's flippant, I know, but there has to be a way and a decent system could be sold to schools countrywide!

Parents that lag behind, probably still would need chasing, but the organised parents would be taken out of the system altogether.