Daughter being excluded from prom

[user1471497170]

My daughter is year 11 and sits GCSEs next month. She has struggled throughout the whole of secondary school with friendships, MH/school anxiety, behaviour and approximately a year ago almost got sent to pru. She has never settled in school. However she has made significant improvement, not on any behaviour plan, is revising hard and should pass GCSEs and do her chosen subjects in college.

She has autism, anxiety and some physical health issues that are likely linked. Getting her into school is a struggle as she feels unhappy there but we make the effort and her attendance is good.

Although much improved her behaviour score is not high enough to meet the 90% prom threshold (reminders, uniform points and gokng to toilet when not permitted). She was informally told this week the final decision is that she will be excluded from prom.

Now all the girls have their tickets and she is beside herself. They are all making plans and talking about dresses and she now feels unable to continue going to school due to feeling so distressed about this. She is worried how she will cope with the sense of exclusion having to keep hearing about prom in school and assemblies

She's now at home. I have written to the school and submitted 2 complaints over the last 2 months however I have not received a satisfactory response. There has been no communication to me from the school about their decision or how they will support those excluded. Please can someone advise how I can escalate this further and if possible externally.

Or bad behaviour in this case.
There is far more to this than the OP has mentioned.

I'm harsh but I'd say it's fair enough. If her anxiety/autism/ health issues have prevented her attending school then surely she also can't manage prom...
Seems like a normal consequence for persistent unacceptable behaviours. You both must have known the school operates this policy?
Teach your daughter now that rules apply to her and might not be too late to save her future.

“I’d just turn up with her. What are they going to do realistically?
id also go to the local paper about it”

This is hilarious. Every year you get a story like this in the Daily Mail or other mainstream newspaper about a kid excluded from prom along with standard sad face photo and 99% of the comments are absolutely SCATHING against the parent and the excluded child. Just Google a story at random. You can only push parents, students and staff too far. Everyone is frankly just sick of some kids.

So many students and staffs lives are made miserable for years by some students but they are powerless and forced to be around them/teach them because its the law, let them have one night of not having to be around students who have made their lives hell/compromised their education significantly/drained so much time, resources and goodwill.

All staff volunteer for this for free and outside contracted hours. Lots of the money towards it comes from staff or parent donations. Most staff won’t attend to chaperone or supervise or run it if there aren’t promises that certain students will be barred. They don’t want a safeguarding or behaviour nightmare. Most venues and insurers won’t touch it either unless explicit assurances that known troublemakers won’t be in attendance.

And people know fuck all about the behavioural incidents the student has been involved in. The school does have this information and has made its decision accordingly.

For an autistic kid, 90% attendance in Y11 is extraordinary

OP didn't say her DD has 90% attendance, @Robotindisguise, but that she'd fallen below that threshold (and we don't know by how much)

We don't know what led to the PRU referral either, and whether school share OP's view that there's been significant improvement since

We don't really know much at all beyond the fact that DD's been refused prom and they're upset about it, but still the armchair lawyers pile on ... and then some wonder why chaos ensues when such young people reach the workplace

This

Legally schools have to make reasonable adjustments for disabilities. So my son could attend his prom, despite less than 90% attendance, because he spent Y9-11 going in and out of hospital due to crohns disease. Had they tried to exclude him it would have been classed as disability discrimination.
Depending on the reason for the OP's dd's behaviour points, excluding her from the prom could also be classed as disability discrimination.

On the face of it being excluded from prom because she needed to go to the toilet is pretty fucking outrageous. I’d be screaming in anger at the governors if it was my DC.

Do you really think that this is the case?

Do you honestly think that's why she has been excluded from prom?
Seriously, do you really think that?

I'm very knowledgeable about masking. If it helps, before becoming a teacher I worked in clinical neuroscience specifically in the area of autism. So, you see, I really am very knowledgeable about masking. For example, it doesn't always come "at great personal cost." It's actually very worrying that people seem to think this. It suggests that autistic people can't behave 'normally' because they simply don't have the spoons to do this. And that kind of thinking is the actual discrimination.

Re: Asking to go to use the toilet, I can tell you now that all children who are assessed by their GP or Ed Psych as requiring a toilet pass are given a toilet pass. You don't end up on the road to PRU (which are hellishly expensive themselves) because you've got a weak bladder and your teachers are horrible. This isn't what's happening here. The current secondary I've worked in for years has never had one single child whose period has leaked through their clothes, and we've only dealt with one Y7 wetting himself when he got too caught up in PE. I know it's super fashionable at the moment to say this is totally widespread and a national scandal, but it isn't, it's some made up crap circulating in Facebook groups. It's unsurprising, given that we're living in a 'post truth' society that we've fallen into the trap of thinking if you say something often enough it must be true.

It’s. Not. About. Attendance.

Okay, I'm gonna try and be realistic here.

Schools have to enforce the correlation between students attending prom and their attendance.

I mean, if you don't go to school often enough, you're therefore not considered a part of the school community enough to entitle you the privilege of going to prom.

It's like being an employee, constantly being off on the sick and wondering why you didn't get invited to the Xmas works do.

I understand she has MH issues, but I guess this is the reality of these situations.

90% attendance does seem a pretty harsh attendance cut off though, I don't agree with that.

But I do absolutely agree with there being an attendance enforcement in line with prom invites.

Some people on this thread seem to think that an autistic child can’t possibly be badly behaved and it’s always their autism causing the problem, never their own behavioural choice. When does this stop? When they turn 18? 20? 25? If an autistic 18 year old stabs and kills another human being, is that simply their autism acting rather than them? This is a dangerously slippery slope.
It’s this thinking that has got society into the state it’s in

Wise words, @Pricelessadvice

Even allowing for delays in diagnosis I was surprised to see that the National Autistic Society reckon it affects between 1-2% of people ... surprised because, to read threads where children have been subject to the least correction, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the vast majority

You are correcting a poster when you haven’t read the OP yourself! It’s not about attendance at all, but about a behaviour score!
Although much improved her behaviour score is not high enough to meet the 90% prom threshold

Once more. It’s not abput her attendance. Rad the OP at least. This constant misdirection is making the thread unreadable.

The OP says the behaviour is reminders, uniform points and going to the toilet
so yes, that is what we are being told.
if there is more to it and the OP has not told us everything then the whole thread is pointless 🤷‍♀️

I'm sorry, what?

What is her reason for being denied prom then?

Ah right, behaviour score.

From the OP Although much improved her behaviour score is not high enough to meet the 90% prom threshold
Behaviour score. Not attendance.

Oh well, that's kinda tough then.

My dd has a toilet pass due to heavy periods. So she can get to the toilet. But some children may not have a toilet pass but still have a heavy period there and there. If they dont have a pass they cant go so thete would be a risk of leaking.

My dd leaves school once exams are done . Yet about a month ago they asked for another letter from the GP. Gp was not impressed and said the school shouldn't be asking. He did write a note Byt on the note he also added they should not be asking and they should be allowing children to go to the toilet.

So reminders - which the OP has ignored several requests to explain and could mean that she has to be told to do/not do things repeatedly before she complies (and these things coukd involve safety) uniform and ‘going to the toilet when not permitted’ which coukd well be code for leaving class without permission and wandering the halls.
So not in any way ‘because she needed to go to the toilet’ once or twice.

You're right, cardibach; that was my silly mistake, though the point about us not knowing how far below the threshold she is still stands - as does whether school have the same view as OP about claimed improvements

As PPs have said these things are staffed voluntarily, and at a couple of local secondaries they've stopped them completely because the hassle of appalling behaviour and threatening parents simply became too much
This led several such parents to approach alternative venues with a view to running it themselves, except that word gets round and - knowing what was coming their way - the venues refused

They are not discriminating, they are treating all children equally. We need to stop making excuses for bad behaviour and I say this as a mother of three, two had sen, one on the spectrum.

And that is why we have out of control young adults that think they can do as they please because they have parents that do as they please. Not doing this child any favours, just setting her up for a life of chaos and bad feeling.