What is a ^good^ reason to miss school?

[ComradeJing]

My SDC are 11 and 14. SDC not in secondary yet and won't be for another couple of years due to the form system in their country.

SDD has just had her report and yet again has been flagged for poor attendance. She has missed about 16% of the term so far according to her report. Missing 10% of days = educational risk according to the report. SDS will have the same as his attendance has probably been even worse.

So, what are good reasons to miss school? Anything from normal days, end of term to school trips.

I'd love to know others opinions so that we can have a think about SDCs absence from school within a bit more context.

schoolnurse seems to be making rational sense about illness and school.

The clue to my rational sense about illness is in the name!!

Any day with a Physics lesson.

Metabilis3 I am sorry your dd is ill and I understand your points about coughs especially as you say in your area there ere significant health risks around coughs however you are saying in one sentence that anybody why sends their child to school with a cough is risking the health of all those around them causing all kinds of problems and upsets that people don't think about when making the choice to send their children to school or not (and I agree with you, my dd was at risk of needing emergency life saving treatment when ever a cough and cold bug went round, we have had too many ambulance trips and hospital time for bugs that are not a huge deal to other children) but then in your next sentence you talk about how your dd did a music exam with a winter gastro bug, what about the other children there? What about the examiner? You put them at risk of getting the bug without knowing how badly this could effect them or if they had underlying conditions that could make this type of bug very serious.
You have undermined your own argument and contradicted yourself. It them comes across as you see that other people are not as important as your dd are. The children who have been in school with a cough may have had an exam that was very important for their future for all you know, you say that the piano exam wasn't even that important to your dd! You then get short with somebody else who suggested that since you had already in your first post gone into detail about the fact in some cases a cough is a genuine and responsible reason to miss school it wasn't really necessary to go into the same thing again in a second post when the OP had already acknowledged your point. It all together points to a quite self-centred attitude, funny when your whole point you seemed to be trying to convey was that people should think about others when deciding it an illness is worthy of missing school.

Anyway, I am really hijacking this thread and I apologise, for some reason Metabilis3 really put my back up with it's hypocrisy.

To the OP, most of the reasons you list would not be considered reasonable excuses for missing school, I would if you can speak to your DSC school to find out if they share your concerns and if anything is being done to address the issues and take it from there working with the school. In an ideal world you could also speak with the children's Mother (or primary carer) to talk through the issues but I get the feeling from your posts that this wouldn't be a very productive.

She didn't have the bug the day she took the exam it was 48 hours after her last um, expulsion. But she was still unwell in the sense that she was weak and tired. She wouldn't have been allowed at school if she had been.....exploding.

The decision as to whether or not to keep a child off school is always fraught with difficulty. Parents are under pressure from schools to achieve a 100% attendance and also off course with younger children staying off school often effects mums ability to go to work. On the other hand our children lead much busier lives than certainly I did and many are under considerable pressure to do well whether it be academically or in other fields. So many are doing extra curricular activities after school or being extensively tutored at often an early age and expected to do loads of prep as well. Other factors also effect children boys in particular often have sudden growth spurts which is also seems to be physically tiring for the body. We see many children who are just exhausted especially at this time of year and this exhaustion lowers their resistance to infection and they get the usual upper respiratory infections D and V etc etc and of course we are seeing more and more mental health problems.
As parents we need to empathise more and at times cut our children a bit of slack. Im not advocating they take days and days off school but the occasional duvet day especially at the end of a busy term year is not going to have a negative impact on their academic outcomes.
Finally "coughs" always cause considerable anxiety in parents GP's A and E dept walk in centres paediatricians see hundreds of children with coughs and anxious parents. Coughing is a natural process we are meant to cough and the vast majority are caused by secretions in the upper airways irritating but not life threatening. Parents waste an absolute fortune on cough medicine but you will find it is rarely used in the hospital setting and never in the case of serious chest infections/pneumonias. When we use it is to give a child the impression that we are doing something and in this case it is very effective but it is basically just coloured flavoured sugar and water honey and lemon is cheaper and equally effective!!

My DS2 is severely asthmatic, and this school year has spent 2 full weeks in hospital, has had 3 D&V bugs, each meaning no school for 48 hrs, and then had Norovirus and was off for a week, and another 2/3 days at a time for astma too severe for school, but not enough for hospital admission, abut 3 times this year.

His attendance as stated on his end of Yr report is 89%. With a chronic, long term health condition that has been particularly bad this year, AND lots of D&V bugs going round the school, and Noro that ended up with the school needing to be deep cleaned...

I'm probably slacker than most about allowing the odd 'less ill' day - say, one or two per school year - but mainly because ds has very good health and is damn lucky. It only takes one substantial illness to get below 95% but 86% is really poor.

Having said that, this is for your dh to take up with the children's mother, isn't it?