To call in sick due to back pain/personal problems and miss parents evening

[Billynomatesmemate]

Firstly I want to say that if tomorrow wasn't parents evening for my year 10s I wouldn't give it a second thought and would be calling in sick. I have had a horrendous half term with some personal issues with partner which meant he left for a while and managing toddler on my own exacerbated an already strained back.

Every evening after work my back feels terrible, like chunks of it feel frozen and I can't stand for long - ofcourse a full day of teaching makes it worse. No one at school knows what happened at half term. Tomorrow I have back to back periods or teaching and then a parents evening with a difficult year 10 class who I share with an unqualified cover supervisor - I actually teach them less than half the time but as the qualified teacher I will be expected to do all parent meetings. If I wasn't in pain or hadn't had the awful toxic type of arguments with DH over half term I would suck it up and get on with it.

Any teachers out there who have had to miss a parents evening? Are the repercussions bad? I've handed in my notice anyway and they were not exactly my number one fans before that either...

What would you do?

Your health comes first OP more importantly.
If you are not well to be in school then dont feel bad. Speak to your HoD and advise them - they should be able to speak to the cover supervisor and ask them to step in for you - although they’re not a qualified teacher (not sure why they’ve got permanent responsibility for a class) they still will be able to give information to parents essentially like a TA would and if there are any concerns from parents then this can be noted and fed back to you so you can get in contact with parents?

If you are in that much pain, call in sick.

The HoD can either get the cover supervisor to do parents eve or put up a sign/send a message explaining you are ill and will contact parents when you return (you can do an email - copy and paste, and tweak as appropriate).

I assume since you resigned that you have another job for Sept- don't worry about an absence impacting that, it won't.

As an aside, please see a physio for your back! I have back issues (upper spine) and my physio is worth his weight in gold when it flares up. If you can afford it, go private - mine is about £40 a session.

I missed a year 10 parents evening this year as I had a splitting headache. It happens.

I created a mail merge email to send out to them all when I had time. Generic waffle. Personalised few sentences. Generic course content info and good revision resources. If you are good with tech it didn’t take that long.

Or you take the view that any parent that really wants to hear from you will be in touch. Which hopefully won’t be that many as most assume (correctly) that no news is good news.

Put baby to sleep around 7ish and fell asleep, back still in pain and I'm still with baby...plan was to have hot bath to ease pain but I was so exhausted I only just woke 10?30pmish just as baby wanted to be settled back too.
Thank you for the suggestions about a generic email and I can also add details on how I'm happy to have a phone conversation with any parents that would like to discuss further. My class is quite small and I suspect few would turn up - the stupid school linked the cover supervisor as their teacher on the booking form so I cant even see who booked - and yes I have raised this twice since Jan but no changes made.

I actually don't have a job lined up for Sept, I'm considering either a change from teaching or a break as I'm starting to think I've been experiencing burn out but that's another story.

There should be SOMEONE else there who knows the students enough to cover for you. I know it's easy to say, but no one should work through injury or serious pain. If your school knows you're a good worker, they'll understand and cover you without prejudice. Everyone will survive.
If you won't still be worrying about it in a week, a month, or a year, it's not that big.

Make sure your email states they can contact you if they have concerns. They quickly add up and you need to conserve your energy.

But if you are approaching burn out and your back is in pain then go to the doctor and get signed off. You can’t pour from an empty cup etc. You need to look after you first.

Thank you.

In the end I did decide to email in sick but I did not feel well enough to get on my laptop and start tweaking lessons or creating cover work so I gave suggestions to my line manager on what to set them and directed her to where printed copies of stacks of booklets where as a back up. I always worry that calling in sick makes me unpopular with others but I haven't called in sicks for months despite often feeling quite unwell.

Sometimes you think you can get through just one more day but often that one more day - especially if it's a long one - will take everything out of you and you'll pay the price the next day.

Local GP is a locum and not v helpful with writing people off sick. Will just self certify for a few days and then countdown to summer!