Other school admin/receptionists…

[PrincessPotato]

Do you find you’re lumped with more and more pastoral/‘first aid’? I’m so sick of kids being sent to me with tummy ache ostensibly for first aid, or to ‘sit quietly for a couple of minutes’…getting them back into lessons then becomes my problem. There’s a new policy in place that’s going to make this x5 worse come tomorrow 😫😫

Our staffing levels are dire across the whole school and there’s just no-one to mop up low-level behavioral concerns. None of my team get a lunch break, tbh we’re lucky if we manage to eat at all, I don’t personally feel particularly appreciated and just argh generally. If anyone in a similar role has ideas on how we can manage repeat truanters with minimal staffing levels I’m all ears.

Primary school?

At my secondary we send them off to medical.

@SummerGardener nope - secondary. Don’t want to give away too much but I pretty much am medical 😭😭 as I said we’re very understaffed. However we’ve been told that tummy aches, ‘I feel sick’ etc should be pastoral territory anyway, it’s just pastoral are always dealing with high level craziness.

I wouldn’t mind if us all busting a gut was appreciated but had a higher-up make some stupid comments last week and it’s really got to me…let’s hope for making some sort of sense out of tomorrow.

Our admin/reception are non-students areas so thank goodness no!

Name change for this - I know exactly what you mean OP.

In my school medical is now simply the only place for pastoral.

We are neither trained nor paid to do pastoral work, but due to our ridiculous lack of staffing there is nowhere else for the kids to go to.

Every lesson period is spent trying to find someone to speak to the kids or to get them back into their lessons.

Today I went to the toilet for the first time at 3.30pm. I eat as I work. Extra duties are piled onto us because frankly we are at the bottom of the pile hierarchically and the buck seems to stop with us.
And SLT think that telling us to do our other work when we are quiet (which never happens) is the way to deal with it.

Staff wellbeing is non existent. It's really tough mentally.

As for the repeat truanters - they just appear with us, we send them back and they disappear again. We can request on-call to take them to their lesson, but on-call are rarely available due to being used for cover or being in meetings.

It feels to me a lot of the time with the trickier kids that as long as they are 'in school' and getting marks for attendance then whether they actually go to their lessons is neither here nor there!!

@WhyDoIWorkInASchool wow…I think we might work in the same place 🤣 this is 100% how it goes in mine except call out is this new-fangled thing that we’re introducing soon. Due to long term stress there is 1 whole member of SLT on site at the moment…so we’ll see how that goes!

It’s a shame as I like taking to the kids, even most of the disruptive ones but I am 100% too soft for secondary pastoral and never would’ve applied I’ve I’d known how responsible I’d end up feeling. Yes, the actual admin is shoved into the half hr of relative sanity between 2.15-2.45.

@PrincessPotato - I don't think we do work in the same school - none of our SLT are off sick (in fact we often joke---- say that we have more SLT than teachers!!)

Sadly I think it is the way things are pretty much across the board currently.

I had to work an extra 2 hours on Friday to make sure all of my actual job was done because I spent the majority of my day dealing with 'sickness' 90% of which was anxiety or avoidance (the rest was genuine illness or injury and in my mind I did not deal with it in the most efficient way due to the other demands on my time.)

How do you manage that half hour between 2.15 & 2.45???

I would actually happily work in a pastoral role if I was being paid to do so - our school has basically got rid of all the pastoral roles - supposedly SLT/HoY and Form Tutors are supposed to be doing it, except they are always either teaching or in meetings. It just feels like a constant game of pass the parcel, and it seems that the music always stops at me - one of the lowest paid members of staff!!