She Should Be Settled By Now…. | School Days

28th March 2017

She Should Be Settled By Now….

That’s what they told us when we recently attended a meeting about our daughter with a teacher and the pastoral lead at my daughter’s school.

She should be settled.

Well, quite, I’m sure, but she’s had to deal with some extra stuff and so that’s where she is with that. I’m afraid she doesn’t always deign to fit in to your ‘shoulds’.

They have her best interests at heart, of course, and they are all lovely. But Ava’s been getting upset because of school for while now, and that’s obviously disrupting things a bit and not allowing her to ‘settle in’ as she should be.

We asked if they meant that things should have started to get better from when we started trying to improve things at school, but no, they meant from the very start of the school year. It doesn’t really make sense to me and has made me pretty pissed off, that my daughter is supposed to fit in with this ideal that she should be happy at school by now. Well, yes – I’m sure if she hadn’t had trouble with people not being very nice to her and her feeling overwhelmed with the ‘big playground’ and the much bigger kids flying around her at lunchtimes, then she would be much more settled. But surely you can’t compare the two? And really why should you?

They have systems and regulations and the rest in place, I know, and I know they have to follow them, but it’s all just making me quite mad right now, and it’s making me think seriously about home-schooling her for a bit until we get a place at the school in the area we want to move to. It may well be the same there of course, but as she went to the nursery there she already has friends there, and it’s a smaller school so I don’t think she’d have the same issues.

I’m just finding all of this process quite hard and very frustrating. She was only five at the beginning of January, and she just seems too young to be dealing with all of this crap, and having to meet targets and attendance requirements. She has been ill quite a lot over the winter, as I’m sure lots of children have, but because she has had a certain amount of days off we are now required to provide a Doctors Note if she is off at all, otherwise it will go down as an unauthorised absence, even though it won’t be unauthorised. Which means I have to drag her whilst she is poorly to our doctors and that is if we can even get an appointment – often the only option is to sit in the surgery and wait for a doctor to see us, which can take a couple of hours. It all just seems ridiculous and unnecessary.

Which again makes me think about homeschooling her for a bit so that we don’t have all of these issues. But honestly, I’d really rather not do that. I don’t think I’d be very good at it, and plus I need to work so I would often have to be working in the evenings and into the night to get everything done. But the thought is always there at the back of my mind as an option to make all of this go away, for her and for me. To not have these bloody ridiculous targets that my bright, funny, caring girl, who loves to write and do her homework, should be meeting, but isn’t.

My daughter is not a statistic that can be manipulated to meet targets, she is a five year old child with feelings, a not-so-amazing immune system, and a tendency to worry too much, which she gets from her mum (sorry my love).

Maybe she should be settled by now, and in an ideal world she would be. I really bloody wish she was settled and happy for god’s sake. But she isn’t and that’s that. Of course we’re trying to improve the situation, but to improve it so that it’s better for her, and so she’s happy at school every day. Not so that she meets all the bloody stupid criteria for a child her age. I couldn’t care less about that.

One response to “She Should Be Settled By Now…. | School Days”

  1. Kerry says:

    Schools are way to rigid for my liking. They seem to forget that each child is different and that they will all have different experiences etc. I really feel for you all, this sounds very stressful. Poor little Ava, hate to here she’s having a tough time x x x

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

SUBSCRIBE TO POSTS




All rights reserved. Please do not take images or content from this site without written permission.