You noticed on a Monday, and you told yourself it was nothing, and you noticed again on the Wednesday.
You looked up the policy. You found the designated lead in the corridor between lessons and said, “Have you got a minute?”, and she had, and it took twenty.
Then you filled in the form. You wrote what you had seen and what the child had said, in their words, with the date and the time, as you had been trained to. You read it back and it did not sound like enough. You sent it anyway.
And then you went home and did not sleep.
What you were lying awake about
Whether you had got it wrong, or made things worse. Whether the family would know it was you, and what Thursday’s parents’ evening would be like if they did.
Whether anybody would do anything. Whether anybody would tell you if they had.
What happened at our end
Somebody read your form. Where I have worked, that would have been the same day or the next. They read it twice, and the second time they were reading for the thing you had been too careful to say.
Your dates mattered. Your “in her own words” mattered more than you know. Half of what reaches us is somebody’s opinion of a family. You sent us what a child said on a Wednesday at ten past two, and we can do something with that.
Why nobody told you
You may have had a phone call. You may have had a letter three weeks later that said the referral had been “progressed”, which is a word that means nothing in any language.
I am sorry. It is one of the things we do worst. Some of it is the law, which is careful about who may be told what about a family. Most of it is that the worker who meant to ring you had eleven other people to ring and you were the one who would understand.
You should not have to understand. Ring us. Ask for the worker by name. Say you made the referral and you would like to know that it was received and whether there is anything you should be doing. We may not be able to tell you much. We can always tell you that.
What you did that you do not know about
You were the adult who was there every day.
We come once a fortnight, with a lanyard. The child has known you since September. You know what they look like when they are fine, which means you know when they are not, and nobody else in their life who is paid to care can say the same.
I have sat in meetings where the plan for a child changed because a teaching assistant said, “She’s stopped putting her hand up.”
If it turned out to be nothing
Then a family had an awkward conversation, and a child had an adult notice them, and that was all. You did not ruin anything. We would have a hundred of those before we had one the other way.
If it turned out to be something
Then you were the first person to say so. There is nearly always a first person, and it is nearly always somebody in a school, and they nearly always think afterwards that they should have said it sooner.
You said it when you saw it. That is as soon as anybody can.
One request
Keep the door of your classroom open at lunchtime, if you can. I do not mean for anything in particular. There are children who need somewhere to be at ten past twelve, and who will not tell you why for a long time, and who will remember the room.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: What to get a social worker for Christmas