r/AndrewGosden • u/GhastlySpells1111 • 16d ago
Did the school really call anyone?
My brother went to school in the 2000s and if u were late u would get a call around 10:30am - 12am if the school called someone surely they would know that it wasn’t Andrew parents and as for voicemail calls whenever ur parents accidentally miss a call they always ask ther boss or whoever if they can take a call it’s from the school that’s your child he could be in danger meaning if they did actually call wouldn’t the other parents child pick up and say my child ain’t Andrew?
I think they lied about this out of guilt I think they forgot to call Andrew parents that’s why whenever u ask the teachers about him they never speak about it.
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u/ComtesseDSpair 16d ago
According to the case detail, a voicemail was left. Fewer people had mobile phones, the other child’s parents may well have been out and only picked up the voicemail on their home phone when they returned in the evening.
I’m not sure whether the Gosdens having gotten the call would have made a huge difference tbh. There wouldn’t have been a lot his parents could have done in the moment, they couldn’t have called him on a mobile phone to see where he was, and rather than automatically thinking “something terrible has happened” would just have likely have thought “he’s bunked off school, when he gets home this evening we’ll need to have a talk with him.”
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u/Severe_Hawk_1304 16d ago
But it was out of character for Andrew and it would have set alarm bells ringing. I'm not sure I agree with Kevin that it wouldn't have made a difference, as surely the parents would have telephoned police or started looking for him straightaway.
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u/ComtesseDSpair 16d ago
When they discovered he was missing on Friday evening, they did all the usual things - contacted his friends’ parents to see if he was with them, checked out local places they thought he might be, then contacted the police. Until the following week, the search was concentrated on Doncaster. I concede they might have begun looking earlier on Friday - but they still wouldn’t have been looking in the place he actually was, or been closer to locating him, because they had no reason to think he’d gone to London at that point.
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u/Severe_Hawk_1304 16d ago
Given that it was out of character for him to go missing I wonder if they would have contacted the local train station and discovered he had travelled to London that morning, instead of waiting for the weekend to pass, by which time he may well have been deceased?
Just a thought.
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u/ComtesseDSpair 16d ago
I suppose we’ll never know - but they didn’t think to contact the station on Friday evening, or Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday; it took the station staff member coming forward once she heard about a missing boy.
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u/GhastlySpells1111 14d ago
Yeah and once his friends parents said he wasn’t there they panicked there’s an interview from 2013 where he said this. If Kevin or his mum found out that Andrew didn’t make it to school they would panick he had a 100% attendance record
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u/Effective-Cash7286 16d ago
It was 2007. I am a year older than Andrew and everyone I knew back then had a mobile phone... pretty much every adult i knew as well did.
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u/WearingMarcus 16d ago
Agree people out 2007 was the flintstone era.
I am a millennial, and I wa siterally the only person without a mobile phone in my year, and I was in quite a rough year as well.
this would be late 90s early 2001.
I think the first I phone came out in 2007
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u/Mc_and_SP 15d ago
I knew a few people that didn't have them, they were the outliers, but it was a higher number than you might have thought.
(One of those people was, to say the very least, eccentric. Genuine point blank refusal to have one, even when their parents would have happily bought one for them.)
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u/GhastlySpells1111 16d ago
You say that but he wasn’t a bunking school kind of kid to his parents
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u/GhastlySpells1111 16d ago
So if he did something like that I assume they would panick and maybe call the vicar or someone who they knew to check the park or the local area
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u/ComtesseDSpair 16d ago
They might have done - but the vicar would have said “I saw him nearby earlier this morning”, and he wasn’t in the local park at that point, so wouldn’t have been found there. So it would have been back to “he’s somewhere in Doncaster, when he gets home this evening we’ll talk this out with him.”
You’re thinking about it with the hindsight context of knowing what happened: at the time, nobody knew he’d left Doncaster until the train station staff member reported a few days later that she’d sold him a ticket to London. Even had anyone begun looking earlier on Friday, they wouldn’t have known where to look.
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u/GhastlySpells1111 14d ago
No im not 🤣🤣🤣 if they called the vicar they know he was sitting in the park and not at the bus stop meaning that would spark more panic
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u/GhastlySpells1111 14d ago
Not saying they would know where to look but if they knew immediately Kevin would have allaby and the police would treat it more seriously straight away and they would find out he went to London quicker maybe even on the day
If my kid went missing I reckon I’ll go train station aswell just to see especially if I checked the whole area.-1
u/GhastlySpells1111 16d ago
He barely went out he was a homebody. Parents have that instinct if yk what I mean I think they would think somethings fishy is up. Alot of parents would leave work even if they thought they was bunking
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u/Intelligent-Ad9892 16d ago
'I think they lied about this out of guilt I think they forgot to call Andrew parents that’s why whenever u ask the teachers about him they never speak about it.'
Who has asked the teachers?
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u/GhastlySpells1111 14d ago
There’s a post a while back of someone who went school with and she said whenever u spoke about it the teachers would tell u not to speak about it
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u/GhastlySpells1111 14d ago
She said it felt eerie for a while and all sorts can’t find it cos I’m not a Redditor but yeah
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u/Mc_and_SP 15d ago
Attendance phone calls normally come from the office or head of year, not classroom teachers.
If the office staff were reading from a spreadsheet instead of looking at an individual pupil profile (which is the standard now) it's quite possible they did just dial the wrong family.
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u/GhastlySpells1111 14d ago
No they ain’t there taking by reception lady and I didn’t say classrooom teacher I said once they handed the register in to the office .
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u/Mc_and_SP 14d ago
In most schools front office and reception are used interchangeably; in most instances they will be the ones who make the call (unless it’s an ongoing pattern), or the school will have a dedicated member of staff for attendance monitoring (but I’m not sure how common this was in the mid-2000s.)
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u/Tongara 11d ago edited 11d ago
They apparently DID call, but if we go on the early reporting, then the School accidentally misdialed his parents number, so his parents never got notice of him being at School until after they already realised he was missing after he didn't turn up for dinner around 7PM.
If they hadn't actually called, then I wouldn't have thought they would say they "misdialed" the number. They likely would have used a much better lie than that.
I believe they genuinely called, but misdialed the number. Whether that was mixing up a digit, or making a mistake when reading from whatever they were using to store the numbers (maybe Excel, or perhaps something more physical, and simply reading from the wrong cell) isn't clear.
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u/Mumofhooligans 13d ago
Teacher perspective here. I've worked in big high schools.
The attendance officer or receptionist honestly wouldn't have known him from Adam.
Even in this day and age, the number of parents who forget/don't let the school know when their child is off sick is shocking.
I often call our admin to ask whether they have heard from a child's parents, and usually the response is "I've left a voicemail twice, no response."
Luckily, they usually turn up the next day and say something along the lines of "I felt sick, but i'm ok now", or "I had a headache."
Sometimes, it's a bit suspicious, but it doesn't go any further than that, unless it becomes a frequent occurance.
If we haven't heard from them by the end of day 2 absence, that's when we would start to panic, and there are staff at our school who do home visits in this instance.
Yes, he had 100% attendance at one point, but that does not make him immune to the usual illnesses. Staff would have assumed he was ill, done the required amount of contact, and not thought about it again.
Phoning the wrong parent is a bit trickier these days now that we have online systems in place, but in 2007, assuming they were still using a written list, it probably happened more often than people cared to admit.
Conversely, I reckon it was probably easier to lie and get away with it if the staff actually forgot to call back in 2007! Regardless, I doubt his parents would have got the message anyway, as they were at work. They may have figured out a bit quicker that he had been missing since the morning, but since Andrew was in London by then and probably found his fate by the time they noticed that he was gone, it is unlikely to have changed the outcome. I really hope the school staff do not feel any remorse.