School refusing to call me when DD had a headache

[misscph1973]

Yesterday my 14 year old DD was in the medical room at school for 40 min. She had a headache, and the first aider gave her paracetamol. After 40 she was no better, but the first aider would not phone me, as she wasn't ill enough. My DD ended up texting me, I phoned the school and said I was going to collect her. When I arrived I was told that my DD was not allowed to contact me and that it would be marked as unauthorised absence. They suggested I get a note from the doctor if I want to pick her up in future against the advice of the first aider.

Surely they should have called me and let me me decide if my DD is ill enough for me to come and get her?

Typically, whilst school medical officers have to do first aid courses, they actually spend far more of their time dealing with children who come to them with anything from symptoms caused by anxiety, ocd, depression, an abusive home environment, stress headaches, panic attacks, hormonally related headaches, period pains, a desire to get out of lessons they don't like or detentions they don't want to attend, non-specific viruses, vomiting and diarrhoea, mild rashes and embarrassing symptoms they haven't told their parents about or their parents wouldn't take seriously... or things their GP would not take seriously, but they are still worried about... and they generally get no training on any of this. They also have to deal with children who might have quite serious or chronic medical conditions with extensive healthcare plans - eg children who may get genuinely dangerous headaches and who have shunts in to prevent a life threatening build up of pressure on the brain, or children with serious heart conditions, or children being treated for cancer. One thing they do end up with, though, is a lot of experience of young people's problems and personalities (and the personalities of the children's parents when having to deal with them!).

Don't know about qualified nurses. But ds secondary does have 1! Ex a and e nurse from a very well known hospital.
She's emailed his consultants and everything on his behalf.

Love that woman!

Have no idea if this is commonplace or not!

But my point is a first aider or pastoral care worker are t medically trained to diagnose headaches or cause.

They are just humans making judgements like a student or parent themselves can.
But with a little more bias to statistics!

youarenotkiddingme - yes, they are just standing in loco parentis. Your child's secondary school is very lucky to have an experienced nurse on site! I suspect that is rare, unless a school is lucky enough to bag a nurse who is going for a job with a massive pay cut and no requirement for medical qualifications just so that they can work term time only; or who is refusing to get involved with non-complex headaches!!!

Unless it's actually a migraine and she's vomiting and can barely see, she needs to take some paracetamol and get on with her day

This isn't AIBU but some of you really don't have a clue. If only all headaches would magically disappear with paracetomol! And within 40 minutes. If only.

Headaches are an unpleasant part of puberty and it’s often a new thing that a child hasn’t experienced before this stage. It should be taken seriously.

The difference between a child who’s not feeling well and one who just wants to go home ought not to be difficult to determine. If I’d been treated like that by the school I’d speak directly to the Head.

Unauthorised absence as a phrase should not be used like that. If ones child is ill at home for a day a sick note isn’t needed. If they feel ill at school they should be taken seriously

mastertomsmum - what makes you think it is easy to determine between someone who is lying about a headache and someone who has a headache??

40 mins is not long enough for the medicine to fully take effect. YABU. I'm sorry but 96 percent attendance is not a good attendance - in realist that's a lot of time off school.

Walkaround - I think school staff are usually quite canny. I also think one has to weigh up the pros and cons of sending a child who says they feel ill back to the classroom.

mastertomsmum - except in this case they felt the OP's dd had flouted school rules in order to manipulate her mother and the mother disagreed. So not so canny according to the mother.

I agree the school reacted badly by saying it would be an unauthorised absence - instead they should have explained normal procedure and why children texting their parents against all school rules is exceptionally disruptive and inexcusable (the dd was not dying or in danger, she was sitting in the school medical room coming to absolutely no harm whatsoever). The OP's reaction to her dd's flouting of school rules was also unbelievably unhelpful - to announce you are coming in to collect your dd without discussion is just rewarding the bad behaviour and undermining the school's behaviour systems, which are in place for a good reason. The dd's willingness to flout school rules quite so rapidly and text her mother behind the back of the person responsible for her also indicates a child willing to be frankly quite obnoxious. If the dd's headaches are so appalling, the school should have been informed in advance of their seriousness. As for 96% attendance and the OP not keeping track of when and why these absences have occurred, that's kind of indicative of someone who has absences for a variety of fairly minor and trivial reasons, which might be clearer to the school which can see the pattern than to the mother, who apparently doesn't keep track of what, when and why, but assumes that 96% attendance really good.

Oh for goodness sake, texting her mum is not obnoxious, inexcusable or exceptionally disruptive. What ridiculous language to use.

Oh for goodness sake, secondary school medical rooms have big signs up in them telling children they are not permitted to use their phones in there to call their parents - precisely because of the disruption caused by children bypassing normal procedures and phoning to ask their parents to pick them up (often on the back of absolute bollocks about what has transpired that resulted in them being in the medical room and what the medical officer said to them, as the children who most often do it are the ones with after school detentions, or missing homework, or high levels of unauthorised absences, or their least favourite subject next lesson). There is absolutely no way the OP's dd would not have realised she was breaking school rules. So yes, she was bloody obnoxious. Also, the school receptionist is not permited to allow children to leave school unless they know this has been permitted in advance by the child's head of year for a known reason. They will be in so much teouble for alloowing a child to leave unexpectedly with someone even if they claim to be the child's parent. This is for safeguarding reasons. It causes merry hell when people turn up unexpectedly, demanding to take their child home at once, as the receptionist will have to find someone with sufficient seniority and knowledge of the child's circumstances to confirm whether it is OK to allow the child to leave with the random person who has unexpectedly turned up claiming their child is more ill than the school thinks they are.

I think I am coming at this from my own experience. My son's school is big on pastoral care and it's clear the approach is different. I see that ringing/texting the parent without permission was wrong but probably indicative of how unwell the child felt.

I see why high attendance levels are set but I often hear parents complain that they got a letter when their child was away ill for something quite serious like flu etc. or being kept at home by 48 hr rule on sickness more than once in a term.

You can be big on pastoral care and still refuse to phone a child's parent until you have had a chance to speak to the child's pastoral support officer so that you can establish whether there is anything behind what might well just look like a child making a big fuss about a headache in the same way the other 30 children with "headaches" and no other symptoms that turn up that day do... If the child goes straight to their parents, they make it impossible for the medical officer to do their job properly. After all, who wants to phone a parent about a headache assuming it is purely medical and then find out they ought already to know about the death in the family/bullying/detention that might be the real cause, thus upsetting the parent because the school is apparently ignorant of pertinent facts that have already been passed on? Not all school procedures are there just for boosting attendance figures. Sometimes they are there to ensure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing before decisions are made.

There is absolutely no way the OP's dd would not have realised she was breaking school rules. So yes, she was bloody obnoxious

It is not obnoxious to break a rule! What tosh. Do you realise how daft this overreaction sounds? (A silly question, you clearly won't, considering the increasingly dramatic replies you are making to this thread.)

sufficient seniority and knowledge of the child's circumstances to confirm whether it is OK to allow the child to leave with the random person who has unexpectedly turned up claiming their child is more ill than the school thinks they are
Schools are educational establishments. They are not staffed by medical professionals. No 'first aid' course makes any teacher, TA, administrator or other non medical member of school staff no matter how senior that person is- qualified to assess illness. Attitudes likes yours make it so very hard to support schools and teachers. You are professionals doing a job. You are not all knowing. You do not have PR. You need to get off your high horse and realise that this over the top, zero tolerance approach is a poor one which helps no one.

If you think that a child in pain 40 minutes after taking pain relief is 'obnoxious' for texting their parent to say so, I can't take anything else you say seriously anyway. You really do sound daft.

I think kids (and parents) flouting school rules because they think they know best is pretty obnoxious behaviour to be honest.

Schools' have processes in place for a reason, not just to personally piss off the OP and her PFB.

Headache alone unlikely cause for a call initially, if headaches are frequent or there is a condition causing them you can specifically ask them to call you, also some schools only give paracetamol with a letter of permission first hope this helps

Why would phoning your mum when your Ill ever be deemed obnoxious?

I’d have done the exactly the same.

Calling a parent because you haven't got your way at school seems pretty clearly obnoxious and recalcitrant to me.

The child in question had a bit of headache, they certainly weren't desperately ill. If one of my kids had called me in similar circumstances I wouldn't be pandering to them by rushing to pick them up.

If I had reason to believe there were circumstances the school nurse might not be aware of I would speak to the nurse about that directly. I wouldn't undermine the school's authority by flouting their procedures.

icannotremember - do you not realise how equally daft you sound to claim that only a medical professional can decide whether or not a headache is serious enough to contact a parent about? I also fail to see why you quote my comment about safeguarding and then go on to talk about medical professionals, anyway. Do you not understand what the term safeguarding means in schools? A receptionist is not allowed to just send a child home with a person who was not expected to come in to collect them because in a secondary school in particular, they will probably not know if the person is who they claim to be, nor will they have access to the child's file to let them know whether there are any relevant safeguarding concerns about them (ie issues within the remit of the school's designated safeguarding lead, head of year, pastoral support or even social workers and police). Have you not ever wondered why you are expected to inform the school in advance if, eg, your child has an appointment or music exam or whatever and therefore needs to leave the school premises at a particular time and will not he expected back until another particular time? Did you think it was merely so the school could harangue you about attendance? It is more than a receptionist's job is worth to let a child leave the premises with someone via reception without checking it is OK to domsomwith senior staff, first. It therefore does cause merry hell if the receptionist is taken by surprise by someone turning up claiming their child is ill when that is the first they have heard about it, and the usual procedure of ensuring alll the relevant facts about the child are known before the parents are contacted has been bypassed. The result is generally senior members of staff being pulled out of teaching lessons or meetings to find out what is going on and give the receptionist authority to let the child go home - something that could have been achieved with far less disruption if the child had not intervened to try to speed things up for what was not in any way, shape or form a medical emergency. This may seem ott to you, but when a school can be closed down for failing a safeguarding inspection due to having inadequate procedures in place to ensure children are properly safeguarded, you are not going to find low paid members of admin staff being willing to bend or break the rules on this.

Besides, the OP is not medically qualified to assess her child's illness either. As the school asked for confirmation from a doctor that her child's headaches were genuinely serious, I guess you should be happy, then, given the high esteem you appear to hold medical professionals in.

NB my personal opinion based on what I have read is that all parties behaved badly on this one - everyone got unnecessarily confrontational by the sound of things.

PCohle wasn’t a bit of a head ache though was it? I can see your not very sympathetic to your children.

I know my dds well enough not to take the piss with school. If one of them rang me to come and get her I’d go. I know there df would too.

If my child said she was in pain I’d believe her over her school every time

The only thing to expand on the headache the OP has said is that "my DD has had recurrent headaches and one resulting in a migraine recently". So I'm not sure why you think this was anything worse than a bit of headache. Having one migraine ever doesn't make all your headaches (even if recurrent) magically awful.

I'm very sympathetic to my kids when they are actually ill. A minor headache is something you need to crack on with.

I've never disagreed with my kids' school's assessment of their health.

Why do people confuse caring with pandering. Honestly, collecting a child from school who feels unwell, even if it is 'just' a headache, is not pandering.

People seem to think, not just on this thread but generally on here, that we should all leave our children to suffer various things, so we are not 'pandering'

I go with the pretty normal understanding approach 🤷🏻‍♀️

But if the school had already given pain killers what more would you do at home?

Do people genuinely come home from work to what, lie in a darkened room for a normal headache (not a migraine)? Would that actually make you feel better rather than cracking on with your day and distracting yourself from your head?

School attendance is important. I only let my kids miss school if they are genuinely too ill to attend (and obviously not infectious).

Good parenting isn't just letting your kids do whatever they fancy and teaching them it's ok to ignore the school if they feel like it.