There’s a particular kind of tired that settles in around mid-July. Not the sharp, adrenaline-fuelled exhaustion of exam season, but something softer and heavier: the tiredness of a job well done, over and over, for thirty-nine weeks straight.
If you’re a school nurse, you’ll know this tiredness better than most. While the rest of the building is clearing lockers and tidying displays, you’re likely closing out referral lists, chasing up the last few parental consents, and making sure no child slips through the gap between one school year and the next. It’s rarely the part of the job anyone thanks you for, but it’s often the part that matters most.
It’s easy to let the end of the academic year become just another item on the checklist. Final clinics, outstanding referrals, handover notes for September, lock the cupboard, go. But there’s something worth pausing on here. Across the hundreds of children on your caseload, this is the moment when a whole year’s worth of small, careful observations either gets followed through or gets lost in the rush out of the door.
Think about what actually sits behind those numbers. A reception child who failed their vision screen back in the autumn term and whose referral you’ve been quietly chasing ever since. A Year 4 pupil whose hearing check flagged something worth a second look, and whose parents you finally managed to reach last week. A teacher’s passing comment about a child who “seems to switch off” that turned out, on checking, to be a hearing issue nobody had caught. None of that shows up in an end-of-year newsletter, but it’s the quiet clinical work that actually shapes a child’s year.
That’s really what this time of year is for, if we let it be: a chance to look back honestly at your own tracking, not just the school’s attainment data. Did every referral get followed up? Did the family who missed the first letter get a second chance? Did the outcome actually reach the person who needed to act on it, or did it stall somewhere in a shared inbox over half term?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, they’re the difference between a screening programme that looks good on paper and one that actually changes outcomes. Vision and hearing issues have a habit of hiding in plain sight. A child doesn’t know that what they’re experiencing isn’t normal, they just assume everyone sees or hears the world the way they do. Getting the follow-up done and the record straight before September rolls around again can make a genuine difference to how that child settles into their next year group, and to the workload waiting for you when term starts.
So as the room gets packed away for a few weeks, it’s worth taking a moment. Not just to tally up how many children were screened, but to check what was actioned, and what still needs finishing before the doors reopen.
The summer holidays are a well-earned pause. But for school nursing teams, they’re also the last chance to close the loop properly before a new cohort and a new set of concerns land on your desk.
If chasing down outstanding referrals and piecing together this year’s records feels harder than it should, it might be worth looking at how much of that admin could be lifted off your plate. Get in touch with the SchoolScreener team to see how our platform can help you close out this year cleanly and walk into September with a clear caseload, not a backlog.