Emilie Silverwood-Cope: The mystery that is school lost property
Emilie Silverwood-Cope writes about Parenting Truths.
There’s an experience fundamental to being a parent that I’ve never seen written about in any parenting book. I know it matters enormously though because not a week goes by when this issue isn’t raised via a class WhatsApp group. If you pay attention, you can see a parent trying to resolve this problem in real life, every single day. It’s the background hum to every drop off and pick up. It’s dealing with lost property.
“Has anyone seen Max’s jumper? It’s brand new, he’s only worn for three minutes and it’s named” is the standard message sent to the class WhatsApp group approximately 14 times every week. No one has seen Max’s jumper because we are all too busy looking for our own child’s missing items. You’re on your own with lost property, there’s no one who can help. We’ve barely the time to deal with the stuff our own children are shedding on a daily basis.
Besides, children don’t ever seem to come home with someone else’s jumper, they simply come home with nothing. In the summer they will lose their compulsory sun hats and sunscreen. In the winter it will be their woollens and coats. Packed lunch boxes, games kit, hockey sticks, coats, water bottles, shoes. All of them disappear into the blackhole that is school lost property faster than you can say “but they are named”.
Hours and hours are wasted buying all the things your child needs for school, diligently naming it all and then looking for it when it goes missing. I sat next to another mum, going through a jumper mountain. She grew up in the Soviet Union and said with a shrug: “We didn’t lose our clothes when we were growing up. We had one of each thing and we froze if we lost a coat so we didn’t lose it.” I think of my Western democracy-raised child at his classroom door minus his coat and his jumper. He’s unable to tell me when and where he last saw either. Maybe freezing is the only thing that would get it through to my children. They need some Soviet Union discipline to make them take care of their things. My frustration, anger and threats certainly haven’t worked.
What is the solution? Do we make children replace lost property out of their pocket money? My daughter lost a brand new coat within the first few days of term. She’d have to save her pocket money for a year to pay it back. My outrage meant she went into school without one for a few weeks. Every day I’d wave her off with the instruction to “have a great day and find your coat”. As the temperature dropped the guilt kicked in but she needed to learn, I reasoned. The thing is though, you aren’t allowed to send your child to school without a coat on because they don’t get to play outside and in the end you get a stern email from a teacher telling you to buy your child a coat.
I bought the fancy name tapes, thinking sewing them in would throw a protective shield around my children’s property. No such luck. Named clothes disappear but you still have some hope they might be returned. Didn’t name the item? Why are you even bothering to look?
I have had my most profound existential crises kneeling in front of a lost property box, sifting through piles of navy jumpers, checking every label in the hope I will find my child’s. As I pick up each slimy item (what happens to lost property, why are the clothes so slimy?) I think of the time I spent shopping for the uniform, naming it all, washing it ready for school only for it to be dumped somewhere and I question all my life choices.
The mental load of motherhood has been shown to hold women back. If we sorted out this problem of lost property we’d add at least £2 billion* to the GDP (*not peer reviewed). All those wasted hours hunting for coats, shoes and PE shorts could have been spent solving the climate crisis. Us Mums could’ve collectively resolved the French fishing crisis while simultaneously staging a successful COP26 (we wouldn’t have overlooked disabled access that’s for sure). Instead our valuable brain space was used up trying to find that ruddy coat.
In Year 4 my child learned all about fast fashion. She learned about landfills and wasted clothes and the pointless consumerism that drives it. If I were her teacher I’d teach them all about looking after their school uniform and deal with their own vertiginous jumper mountain. I would have an assembly at least once a week devoted to ‘how not to lose my jumper’. I would scrap ‘Show and Tell’ and replace it with ‘Has anyone seen my PE kit?’. Imagine a school being net zero on lost property and you’ve imagined the happiest school community possible.
I will give the last word to a fellow furious mum, who has had enough of effectively throwing money in the bin: “I have now got to the point that I am more pleased to see a complete set of hats, gloves, scarf and coat at the end of the school day than I am my own children.”
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.
