Parents’ Evening

You are now most likely entering the time of year where everyone’s favourite evening of the school calendar happens¹. Yep, it’s time for the first parents’ evening of the year!

Parents evening should be a time for you to give feedback to parents as to how their child is getting on. Every child. It should be a space for you to be honest and truthful, which may include telling a parent how their child spent the lesson throwing glue sticks at the ceiling to see if they would stick, or doing zero work and then looking affronted when you remind them you’re meeting their parents and the report won’t be good.

Except you won’t, becuase those parents won’t turn up. Or at least, they very rarely do, and even then they know exactly how much of a little shit their kid is. Queue exasaperated cries from teachers everywhere, but think of it like this: why would you go somewhere willingly where people are just going to have a go at you for the next hour? It would be soul destroying, right?

I’ve talked to a lot of parents over my career, and one thing repeatedly strikes me² about parents of our more challenging students: they almost certainly had a terrible time in school themselves, perhaps being called ‘stupid’ or ‘waste of space’³ by their own teachers. Maybe their own child’s parents’ evening brings back deep seated anxiety, and maybe they couldn’t get the time off work.

Either way, if you are going to give a broadly negative report, the parent should really already know. You should have contacted home, either with a call or email, or maybe both if the student is bad enough. At least then, the meeting might be able to focus on something positive like how the students behaviour has improved since the last call.

It should go without saying that at least some of the meeting should be positive, even if you have to couch it in a shit sandwich. This would go something along the lines of ‘Eleven⁴ is always on time, but she could do with completing more work each lesson. I love how happy she looks when she’s leaving my room’.

Other advice I always give ECTs⁵ is to stick to facts. Tell the parents what they got in an assessment, what their homework record is like, even if it’s non-existent, and so on. Phrases like ‘I think they could be doing more at home’ can backfire horrendously as you will have very little idea what the home is actually like.

For example, my son had his Year 13 parents evening this week, and his maths teacher said he should be doing more work at home, at least an hour if not hour and a half, each day. My son was annoyed by this as he spends up to four hours commuting to college and back as we live in a rural area. I had to say the teacher a) didn’t know and b) didn’t care, he was simply stating what my son needed to do to get a better grade in his subject.

Parents evening is not the time to score points against students (or parents) who are tricky – more it should be a time to try and forge a positive relationship. Everyone should be working towards the same goal after all – the best set of assessment results the child is capable of. Of course, no child should be defined by academic success, but that is the reality of our current education system. There is sadly no GCSE or A level in being decent.

My last (ever?) parents evening was to year 10 late last academic year. During the day, both my year 10 classes were working well, behaviour was exemplary and you could hear a pin-drop⁶. That is, apart from two lads who were having a whispered argument at the back of the room. Before it could escalate into a louder discussion, I yelled across the class ‘Flynn, cut it out right now and get on with your work. And besides, everyone knows chocolate hobnobs⁷ are the best biscuit’⁸.

Kids really will argue about anything if it gets them out of work.

Anyway, fast forward a few hours, Flynn sits down with his parents, looking sheepish and he puts a packet of chocolate hobnobs on my desk. What a legend. On my last day, just about everyone in that class turned up with packets of chocolate hobnobs for me, and I am sad to say they have only just run out (this was July, and I’m writing this in October). What a bunch of legends.

I used to teach a lad, let’s call him Basil, and he was the one student who laughed at all my jokes⁹, even the more obscure ones, and he would throw back a reference to Monty Python. At his parents evening, his mum and dad sat down and I said “Can I just start by saying what a fantastic sense of humour Basil has’ and his dad said, without missing a beat, ‘He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.’ Cue lots of eyerolls from the mother as we spent the next five minutes quoting Monty Python at each other. I don’t think we discussed maths at all.

Let’s end with a more serious point, and this is for the parents amongst you. As a maths teacher, if I’d had a fiver everytime a parent had said ‘well, I’m no good at maths’, I’d have been able to retire a while ago¹⁰. Please don’t do this (or about any subject). The meeting is about your child, focus on what you can do to help them improve, not your own hangups about a subject.

Until next time.

1. This is, obviously, a lie. ↩︎
2. Not a parent, thankfully. ↩︎
3. Things used to be a lot more brutal, back before words like ‘accountability’ entered education. Ah, good times. ↩︎
4. I’m on a Stranger Things marathon, getting ready for season 5. No spoilers please, I am way behind the curve with this one. I’m about to finish season 2, when I’m done writing this today. ↩︎
5. ECT=Early Career Teacher. Used to be called NQT = Newly Qualified Teacher. No clue why it was changed. ↩︎
6. This is pretty normal. Students think we will forget and forgive the previous nine months if they behave really, really well for one day. Poor, deluded fools. ↩︎
7. If someone from McVities wants to sponser this blog by giving me a lifetime supply of chocolate hobnobs, I’m okay with that. ↩︎
8. Yes, I disrupted the class more than Flynn did. I had a month to go at this point. ↩︎
9. What a suckup. ↩︎
10. I am well aware the maths on this doesn’t add up – be generous and call it thirty parents every time, five meetings a year, for 32 years. Comes to about £24 000. That’s still a lot of fivers. ↩︎