Another what would you do...

jobbingmusician

I am staggered by some other bits of this.

In this day and age, !!!!!! don't the school email their communications direct to parents? (I can see the value in kids being forced to remember to give their parents letters, but I also can't see a drawback in a belt and braces approach.) This would make it easy peasy for parents to keep school comms......

pelirocco

He had £5 on him , why on earth didnt he use that

jobbingmusician

pelirocco wrote: »

He had £5 on him , why on earth didnt he use that

I COMPLETELY understand why not. He's an 11 yr old boy. He simply didn't categorise the issue as one covered by his 'emergency money'.

peachyprice

bylromarha wrote: »

They are clear. No phones at all in the school day. Full stop. "No negotiation. These are our rules and we expect you as parents to support us in them." - head teacher on new parents evening back in June.

We don't want to give parental permission for him to see it's okay to pick and choose the school rules you obey.

All schools have the same 'no phones to be used during the school day' policy, that does not translate into 'no phones turned off in your bag'. I think you're taking it too literally and I can promise you that the majority of children will have turned off phones in their bags/pockets.

It is not reasonable for a school to expect you encourage independence by sending your child off to school alone without the
means to contact you in an emergency. Gone are the days of a phonebox on every corner or asking a stranger for help.

missbiggles1

pelirocco wrote: »

He had £5 on him , why on earth didnt he use that

That's what I can't get my head round either.

Even if he didn't think it came under the category of an emergency, I'm sure he wouldn't be scared that he'd be in trouble for using it for the wrong reason.

Just a thought - he has still got it, hasn't he?

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

skattykatty wrote: »

FBaby - you're right.

What's weird here is, if you're going out on a trip the teacher would have a register of all the children on the trip. This means that OP's son's name was on the list. With this in mind, she could have used her judgement to cough up £2 and sort that out later.

Only if she had money in her pocket (and how many other kids do it as well). And, obviously, once you stump up cash for a kid, the odds are that you will never see it back.


WE get kids telling their mums they weren't allowed to go on the trip, that form tutors wouldn't let them leave class, etc, etc. So far, three of them were kids who I chased up on the morning, to be told they didn't fancy it anymore. One of them claimed they didn't have their Oyster Card so couldn't go. And one stared vacantly at me when asked whether they were coming on the trip as we were leaving in five minutes, so they needed to get their coat and come with me. With 35 other kids who had paid, brought their Oystercards and got themselves the vast distance from their formrooms to reception all waiting and with a specific train to catch, I'm not faffing around any more than I absolutely have to.



Many schools operate cashless systems. This means that there is no cash held in the school whatsoever - parents get payment cards for school meals, payment letters for separate events, or payment can be made online. Even if they overpaid on ParentPay, to sort out the refunds would mean;

Log into ParentPay. Go to payment items. Find the payment item out of all the active items. View the allocated users. Convert into an Excel File. Remove most of the default columns exported at the same time. Change column widths so you can read the damn thing, sort so that the highest paying are at the top. Change the page settings so it prints reasonably and remains decipherable at that size. print (assuming you don't have a five minute walk across the grounds to a shared printer that doesn't always queue printjobs first time or you won't get there to find that somebody has jammed the printer with reused paper, stickytape on the original or isn't printing 550 booklets). Take list and identify overpayers.

Whilst this is happening, you're obviously completely ignoring the phone calls from people who have lost payment cards, can't understand why their kid has been told they can't go somewhere because they haven't paid, why they have to pay for a new planner/tie/blazer when it's not their child's fault they've lost it, the ones who outright lie and claim you told them that the ski trip was completely free or from staff, periatetics, agencies, suppliers with queries....(or if you aren't actually a finance employee, the calls from parents wondering what's so special about the trip, what minute they will arrive back at the station, where will they get to sit down for lunch, why won't we take them to McDonald's for a hot meal because they don't like sandwiches).

Kid 1. Right, refund. Log back in to PP because it's timed out. Go into the finance section, all the time waiting 30 odd seconds for each individual page to load up (school internet connections are so slow, ParentPay is so slow, it's done at dial up speeds, rather than broadband ones). Into the trip item. Take out the kid's £2. Transfer somewhere else. Where? Does mum want it in cash - because cash isn't used, that would mean getting special permission to go down the bank with ID and another member of staff, could be two hours round trip with waiting around. A part refund? Takes approximately 5 mins to the card it was paid on. Repeat another 38 times. Oh, and then run the report again to find out there are another ten people who want refunds whilst you've been working on it and one parent has phoned to say they want you to credit the £2 to Jessica's school meals account as without it, she won't get any lunch tomorrow.


ParentPay is IMO one of the most counterintuitive programmes out there. SIMS is up there with it - but they were bought by people who have no need to know why a keyboard shortcut like hitting enter makes so much more sense than having to move a cursor across a screen to click OK, as they either have staff to do that for them or it's OK for them to spend 55 minutes faffing about on one thing.




In terms of looking after children, I'm more concerned about the ones with confirmed needs; the ones who genuinely cannot tell the time, the ones who might have a spectacular ASD meltdown if something upsets them. the one who might hide under a table sobbing if he thinks 'his' TA is giving too much attention to the kid having an ASD meltdown, the ones who will struggle to keep up physically if we go too fast or the ones who are little sods and will inevitably do something flaming stupid if afforded the opportunity - not the kids who are all helpless until they have to sort themselves out and then manage it.

It's just another set of consequences of behaviour.



Oh, and SchoolComms. If parents actually notified their email addresses, checked their email, didn't use Yahoo (that flags SchoolComms as spam due to the thousands of messages sent each day nationwide) and it wasn't (again) a very clunky system which probably had a very convincing marketing presentation initially when it grabbed a huge share of the market - it wouldn't take so long to set up groups from reports of payments, adding each kid individually, typing the letter, hitting send and then having to sift through the people who hadn't notified an email address report before hitting OK to send it again.

jrtfan

We have parent's evening coming up next week, is yours due soon OP because that might give you a perfect opportunity to discuss with his form tutor any concerns you might have.

Flyonthewall

At 11 he is still a kid and the school were responsible for him. However close the school or his home was and however often he walks it or catches a bus, he should not have been allowed to go off home alone from somewhere different without any supervision or contact with the parents.

The teachers had numerous options (give him £2, phone you, get another teacher to take him back etc). Regardless of maturity, distance, money or anything else they did the wrong thing.

Even if he said it was fine they shouldn't take the word of an 11 year kid. He's under their care so they should make sure he's being looked after and they didn't do that.

missbiggles1 wrote: »

That's what I can't get my head round either.

Even if he didn't think it came under the category of an emergency, I'm sure he wouldn't be scared that he'd be in trouble for using it for the wrong reason.

Just a thought - he has still got it, hasn't he?

Why?

He's being taught to follow the rules, he thought all had been paid for, things probably happened quite quickly. His instant thought may well have been if he used that he'd be in trouble as it's not meant for that.

Not all kids will just spend money given without a thought. I know I didn't as a kid!

If he's quite a shy kid or a bit socially awkward then I certainly get it because it would mean speaking up and suggesting something else rather than just basically saying it's fine/haven't got the money and leaving. He may have been worried about the teachers opinion/reaction on spending emergency money as well as his parents (who may not be truly mad, but still not happy).

In the end he was a kid in a situation he didn't expect to be in, who probably didn't have much time to think and didn't want to do the wrong thing.

kingfisherblue

Our school website publishes all letters in the Parent's Section - OP, is it worth looking to see if your son's school does the same?

Also, with regard to keeping letters, a clipboard hanging inside a kitchen cupboard works well. It's out of sight, but easily available if needed, and can be cleared each half term. Important letters that are needed for longer (such as residential school trip that was booked in September but only occurred the following July), are sellotaped inside the cupboard door for easy reference, and to ensure that they don't end up being recycled at the end of half term in error.

FBaby

The teachers had numerous options (give him £2, phone you, get another teacher to take him back etc). Regardless of maturity, distance, money or anything else they did the wrong thing

You don't know that. Maybe there was only one teacher, maybe they didn't have £2 with them and couldn't leave all the kids alone to go and fetch some cash. Even if there was a teacher, maybe they didn't have the time at this stage to get into a discussion without risking missing the train and leaving one teacher alone with too many pupils.

It is easy to criticise, but we don't know what the circumstances were. We are talking about a secondary school pupil here, one who was used to take the bus and walk home, not a defenseless young kid.

Yes, the situation could probably have been dealt with better, particularly with the wording of the letter/response slip, but whether they handled his saying he wasn't going very much depends on what questions he was asked by the teacher and how he answered them.