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Signing in


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Can I please ask if you ask parents to sign their children in in the morning and out at the end of the day? 

Staff sign our children in with times of arrival and departure and I wonder what purpose there is of parents signing  their children as well?

 

I'm very interested to see what other settings do?

 

thank you 

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Hi ChinWag - I'm retired as of last July.   We never asked parents to sign in or out,  the flow of children and adults coming into the building was better served by one person timing children in and out.  Also, it would be possible for a parent to "forget" because they were in a rush etc.  We had one staff member on the door with the register whose only  job for those 5 minutes or so was to concentrate on that task and to catch any "escapee" children who tried to dash out after a parent - amazing how  children squeeze between adult legs and manage to get outside - with a member of staff on the doorway they were more aware of this.  

We only had one session per day and  our children had the same start times - we opened at 915 and within reason finished at the same time, one or two did not stay to lunch etc. so this may have made our system easier to work.

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similar to Panders..we have children coming in and out during the day...and we also have after school club who we collect from school. It therefore to me does not seem to work for us to get parents to sign in and out. There are some practitioners who have done this as a safeguarding recommendation to keep an eye on who is picking up and dropping off but it's not something we feel is necessary. We do now have an additional sheet for illness though and who has rung when and what is wrong with the child

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Same here.  We are full daycare and have children arriving and leaving throughout the day.  Each room keeps a register of arrivals and departures but we don't have parents signing in and out.  I think another reason some settings have parents signing their child in and out to prevent queries on invoices ("I picked X up at 3pm not 4pm")

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This has been flagged up on two recent Ofsted reports in this area. We have the parents sign in and out and a column for who is going to collect. It's probably easier for us because we are mornings only. I have a formal register that notes attendance and reasons for absence (which was inspected by LA!)

 

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We’ve never had this brought up either, same as others, registered as they come in to the cloakroom by a staff member (+ self registration into playroom with names badges) all registered as opening time unless late, they are marked ‘L’ with time they arrived,, I can’t imagine the nonsense if we had to get parents to sign in all at the same time it would take forever when they just want to drop and run.

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Obviously there needs to be other systems in place supporting daily registration - but these had built up over time because of Ofsted inspections over the years.  Simply the register would record time in time out, done by a member of staff.

If a no show, within 30 mins, or if we hadn't been contacted by a parent, we would telephone a parent and seek reason and we had a dedicated sheet to record responses etc.

  Also had a dedicated sheet for a parent to complete if someone else was picking up their child at any point during or at the end of the session, these people may already be "registered" with us as a nominated person and if so we had all their relevant details on file, but if an ad hoc arrangement then a form was completed stating name, address and contact telephone number which a parent/carer completed very quickly.  (I only had one occasion when I needed to contact a person - she had misunderstood what time pick up was, so I was glad that we had her details recorded).

Any and all of these procedures came in over time for safeguarding reasons - and really it does take a feat of memory some mornings to make sure these procedures are carried out.    Best that it is a dedicated member of staff's job to do all this checking in my opinion.

 

 

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We used to get the parents to do it as we were told to by the LA. Their reasoning was that we could prove that a child was officially in the parents care or our care in case there was an accident and the parents couldn't argue it if they had signed it themselves. The problem was that they would usually forget, which happened for one child on our inspection day and the inspector picked up on it and we got requires improvement because of it. We have learnt our lesson and now we do it ourselves, as the inspector said to me, it says in the EYFS to record the times of attendance but it does not say that the parents have to do it so why give ourselves extra work in chasing the parents to do it!

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5 minutes ago, AliceinWonderland said:

We used to get the parents to do it as we were told to by the LA. Their reasoning was that we could prove that a child was officially in the parents care or our care in case there was an accident and the parents couldn't argue it if they had signed it themselves. The problem was that they would usually forget, which happened for one child on our inspection day and the inspector picked up on it and we got requires improvement because of it. We have learnt our lesson and now we do it ourselves, as the inspector said to me, it says in the EYFS to record the times of attendance but it does not say that the parents have to do it so why give ourselves extra work in chasing the parents to do it!

That makes perfect sense - follow what it says in the guidance...…..

I have been known (only once or twice:ph34r:) to challenge 'pronouncements' from LA with a very polite "could you show me where that is written down please"

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So I’ve spoken to the owner of the nursery who said she want to keep parents signing in as it records who brought the child in officially - in the rare case of a safeguarding incident we then have a record - in terms of existing injuries  - does that make sense?

 

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53 minutes ago, ChinWag said:

So I’ve spoken to the owner of the nursery who said she want to keep parents signing in as it records who brought the child in officially - in the rare case of a safeguarding incident we then have a record - in terms of existing injuries  - does that make sense?

 

We have a book fr recording existing injuries, this is kept with the register......

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I had a dedicated member of staff by the door with the daily register.  Any child arriving ten minutes either side of the start time was just ticked on the sheet.  The door was locked then, so any child arriving later would easily be identified and the time added to the daily sheet.  Any times other than standard times for leaving would be noted in the same way.   The electronic register would just say the children were present or absent - no times recorded on there.  Ofsted were happy with the system.   The daily sheets were kept until invoices were sorted.  

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17 hours ago, ChinWag said:

So I’ve spoken to the owner of the nursery who said she want to keep parents signing in as it records who brought the child in officially - in the rare case of a safeguarding incident we then have a record - in terms of existing injuries  - does that make sense?

 

The form we use to record time of arrival has a section to say who dropped off/picked up. So we are covered for that but it just means we are not trying to chase parents to sign. we only have a small hallway which would get very crowed if we were waiting for all the parents to sign in/out and some have to rush to work. Suits us all this way 

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