‘Truant’ was on way to asthma hospital
A MOTHER threatened with jail for repeatedly letting her son play truant has been cleared after it emerged he was being treated for severe asthma.
Nicola Newns, 39, had already lost one son to the condition and feared for her other boy Jacob who had repeatedly collapsed at home.
But while she was in an ambulance taking him to intensive care, she received a call from education officials demanding to know why Jacob, 16, was not in lessons. Later she was issued with a £60 fixed penalty notice by Salford City Council saying her son’s attendance at Buile Hill Visual Arts College was ‘unsatisfactory’ as he had been absent without authority on 20 occasions.
Mrs Newns, from Salford, refused to pay the fine and could have faced up to three months in prison. But a judge at Manchester Magistrates’ Court has now thrown the case out after he heard Jacob had been in hospital on all 20 occasions between January and March this year.
Mrs Newns’s other son Ben died aged 12 in 2014 after waking up in the night struggling to breathe. Yesterday Mrs Newns said: ‘I may not have contacted [ the school] as soon as I should have done but I wasn’t going to leave my son’s bedside if he might die. [One time] I told the school Jacob had had a bad attack, and I was in the ambulance and he was going to hospital but for me, there was no compassion or empathy. ’ Jacob and Ben both had a severe form of the condition known as brittle asthma.
Jacob’s headteacher James Inman said: ‘We discussed every absence with [Mrs Newns], those related to his asthma and those which were not, and offered extensive support.’