We are seeing a real increase in the number of incidences of children being collected at at the end of the day. We appreciate that sometimes ‘things happen’ and adults might be delayed on their way to school to collect. However, a small number of children are collected late regularly and this causes disruption to staff and incurs a financial cost to school. Staff have work they are supposed to do from 3:30 onwards, quite often important meetings. They have their own schedules and, quite often, their own children to collect from a setting at a fixed time. The same applies for collection from a club. Most of our clubs finish at 4:30. Quite often staff are stuck in school with uncollected children until after 5pm.
At the next Governors meeting, we will be looking into implementing a late Collection Policy, which is something many other schools do. Typically, these charge a legally binding fee of £5 per 5 minutes late or charge the cost of a session in any available after school provision such as Lime Trees here.
Of course, we would build in some leeway for unforeseen events and most policies we have looked at tend to come into effect only after a certain number of instances; for example 3 late collections in a term.
Another aspect is that we are supposed to report extremes of regular late collection to the authorities as it is deemed a form of neglect – it causes distress to children; it is not nice to be the child left behind. This can result in the involvement of Social Care or the Family Service.
This is not something we have ever wanted to introduce, or have really needed to – we don’t like taking money from families in our community. However, the escalating problem and resulting problems caused to staff, along with the financial cost to school at a time when finances are a real challenge, forces us to consider this. We’ll update in the Summer Term. meanwhile, we urge everyone to be as punctual as they can with collections.