A mother and father are furious after a school reported them to children’s services for being late collecting their child from school.

Mayville Primary School in Leytonstone had deemed their child to be too sick to stay in school and asked his mother to pick him up at 11am on Friday, October 18.

Mother-of-five Charlene Robinson, a maternity unit nurse, had begun a busy shift and her husband, Christopher, who works night shifts, was asleep.

Charlene had taken her 3-year-old boy, also called Christopher, to the school’s nursery despite him having a cough because she did not believe it was serious enough to miss a day.

She informed the school she could not leave work and did not consider the cough an emergency but would continue to call her husband to wake him up.

At 1.30pm she finally got through to her husband at their home in Stratford – who arrived to pick up their son at 2pm.

Mr Robinson briefly left his 1-year-old daughter in the car at the school gates while picking up Christopher.

He has since admitted this was a mistake and said it will not happen again but insists it was only done because it was raining and he did not want her to get sick.

“They had said he had a very bad cough and I feel like they exaggerate the whole thing so we would come sooner – they said he even said he was vomiting excessively,” Charlene said.

The Tuesday after Charlene Robinson received a call from Newham Children’s Social Care.

Charlene says they were in “shock and horror” when they heard they had been reported to the borough’s children’s services over a “risk of neglect”.

The school had reported the parents for being late to collect Christopher and Mr Robinson for leaving their daughter in the car.

Newham’s Children’s Social Care investigated the incidents and decided not to take any further action.

Charlene believes the school had no right to report the parents over what she called “false allegations of neglect”.

She said: “What they did to us was malicious and wrong we are good hard-working parents and to accuse us of child neglect was very disheartening.”

The school did not respond to comment.