[Paul the 6th]

The missus works in a school as a teaching assistant where she's passing her time til september when she starts her PGCE. She has been off work yesterday and today with a banging sinus infection. She gets it quite often, full dizzyness, migranes, horrible green stuff, the works.

Last week the headmaster had all the staff in on a staff training day to run through these new "Sickness" rules. You're allowed 3 periods of sickness in a 3 month period. If you're off for 7 days, you need a sick note from the doctors...

She's called up today to say that she'll try to be in tomorrow but it's looking more like friday cos she doesn't feel any better. The headmasters secretary said that if she's off on friday, she'll need a sick note because they count saturday and sunday as a sickday, and since vicky only works tuesday to friday anyway, she will have had 7 days off (not 7 WORKING days, but 7 days regardless). So if she's off on friday, they will count the weekend as time off work, even though the school isn't open.

I can appreciate the rules are there to encourage people not to take pizzle with being off all the time, but the secretary said "well if you do end up taking tomorrow and friday off, you WILL need a doctors note but then you might as well take all of next week off, so then you can count it as a single period of sickness".

There's other staff at that school who've been signed off work for 3 months with pay. I can't get my head around the fact that they'll penalise the people who take a day or two off every once in a while, but they'll more or less actively encourage people to take almost 2 weeks off work with pay?

Are they allowed to count weekends & days off as sick days? I told vic she should offer to go in on saturday if she has to take friday off. Then she won't need a doctors note.

The other advice I gave her was to tell them to get funked and find another job. Vicky has worked in inclusion units (where the kids who can't be taught in mainstream education go, because their behaviour is so appalling) but she says the kids at this school are beyond help. The headmaster threatens the worst offenders with expulsion and then does nothing. He even suspended them all while ofsted came in, so that the school would look slightly better than last year. Then when ofsted left, he brought them all back in and more or less rewarded them for keeping out of the way. None of the other staff give a shizzle and vic gets no support when she tries to implement behaviour management i.e. "you're going to get a detention" or "you're going to end up in the isolation room if you carry on" then when she asked a fully fledged teacher to back her up, they just pat the kids on the head and say "oh I can't be bothered with you today, go and sit next to your friend" etc...


So to sum up, she hates her job and now (in my opinion) they're trying to take the pi55 out of her.

Any advice re: counting weekends as "working" or "sick" days?