Parental Involvement

There’s two weeks to go until the Easter holidays, and it seems everyone I meet in schools is on their knees. I talked about burnout a couple of weeks ago¹, and given it’s now later in the term, the burnout is in danger of turning into long term sickness due to stress.

So this seems like a perfect time to discuss something that adds to workload²: parental engagement. For secondary schools, this is notoriously low, and parents often find it hard to adjust to the change following primary school. They miss the school gate community (or at least some of them do), and having a single point of contact within an establishment. Sure, in secondary school you have form tutors, but often these see the students for less time per day than their teachers.

Many staff I talk to have a complaint about poor parental involvement, and to me it seems to have got significantly worse since the COVID lockdowns³. Some parents are notoriously tricky, and always have been. Earlier this week I was reminded of a time early in my career, where a parent called me up and accused me of calling his son a ‘fucking cunt⁴‘. Now obviously, I had done no such thing, but the father believed his son, who had just been suspended. His son was in year 7. He kept having a go at me, calling me names, until I snapped and said I’d wait for him by the school gates⁵ and he could repeat all that to my face. I stormed down to the gates, and the Head Of Year 7 stopped me, asked what the problem was. I was fuming, and explained everything and said something along the lines of ‘If he speaks to me like that, I going smash his face in.⁶‘ She said he was a disabled man who went everywhere on crutches⁷. Told me to go back to the maths office, have a cup of tea, and calm down.

This is an extreme example, but part of the problem here (apart from my ridiculous overreaction – why didn’t I just hang up?), was that this was the first interaction I’d had with this particular family. I do think that anyone with even a modicum of sense would know that a teacher would not use such language⁸ in a classroom or elsewhere. However, the dad didn’t know me, didn’t know what I was like and so immediately assumed the worst. This is the crux of the problem: parents have no clue what we’re like as teachers or even people as they get one chance per year to meet us.

A while ago, I was working with a teacher who had been intimidated by a group of year 8 boys whilst he was on break duty. Every single one of the boys claimed they were ‘having a laugh’. The CCTV was appalling and really showed the boys up for lying and how gang mentality had kicked in. Me and the teacher did the full restorative with all the boys, and then contacted all the parents. Of course, some of the lads went home and claimed they had done nothing wrong, so this led to face to face meetings with all the parents. We showed the parents the footage, they apologised, their kids were in even more trouble and the teacher suddenly had no problems in his lessons with those lads. The whole unfortunate situation had a good outcome, because we involved the parents, and crucially had all the facts to back us up.

The incident happened in April I think, and none of the parents had met the teacher until the face to face meetings about rubbish behaviour. See a pattern here? Teachers in secondary need to get better at involving parents early, but of course it comes at a cost of workload – or at least it appears to. Perhaps if we did more early in the school year, problems would be less later on as parents would know a bit more about us as people.

So what can we do? Schools have an open evening, usually in September for prospective parents to visit. There is usually a similar one in June for those year 6 students who have accepted a place in the school. Perhaps we could combine the two into one big event in September instead? Have year 6 and 7 parents come up at the same time for a look around. This way the year 7 parents can be reminded why they chose the school, but also meet staff. Any early problems could be nipped in the bud. Not made friends yet? No problem, talk to the tutor face to face and get seating plans altered. Scared of the canteen? No problem, lets get them a lunch buddy. In the wrong group for maths? No problem, the Head of Maths is over there, let’s go have a chat.

Face to face meetings are always better than email. Nuance and intent is frequently lost in writing, and can be misinterpreted. If a parent misunderstands in a meeting, we can pick up on that and clarify. Much, much better, but potentially a little more time consuming. However, how much time are you saving by dealing with anxieties and problems before they become insurmountable?

Obviously, some parents will be unreasonable whatever we do, but by reaching out early we can perhaps turn the Court of Social Media in our favour. If you want to be depressed, have a look at any school’s Facebook profile and the minority of parents who post extremely one-sided versions of events to garner sympathy for their plight and hatred for the school. It’s depressing. An example is the parent of a girl I used to teach who said her girl had never been supported, and never pushed by the school. I know for a fact both of those statements are untrue – I was the person who did both, and I know I was not alone. However, staff are not allowed to respond to social media posts as it could be seen to be inflaming the situation.

I’m coming to the conclusion that is bollocks. I don’t see why a school shouldn’t have a social media person⁹ who trawls those posts and calls out parents for posting factually incorrect or misleading statements. They could also post the remarkable things that happen in school on a daily basis.

And I think that’s where we can win parents over: the use of technology. Have positive messages put out by social media as many times a day as you can. Hold a discussion evening over Teams (an hour per half term) where parents can contact people and have virtual private meetings with staff. Many parents won’t do this, but those that do can have their concerns addressed. By having them over Teams, parents don’t need to schlep up to school after a long day at work.

The tough one is parents evenings. They never run at a time convenient for parents who work, and however hard it is, we need to be more sympathetic about that. Why not hold the evenings over Teams? Hold it 6-9pm, or 6-8pm, but teachers can hold the meetings from their own homes. Each meeting has a strict five minute limit and if anything can’t be sorted then the parent is invited in for a face to face meeting¹⁰. Have school start an hour later the day after a parents’ evening as payback.

Publicise open days more, and have them more often. Anyone can visit a school at any time, but obviously they have to be with a member of staff due to safeguarding. Make this an organised slot each week, and the day can rotate too. Really publicise this to existing parents, in addition to prospective ones – make sure everyone knows they can come and visit the school. SLT or middle leaders could be assigned time to run these tours – again it is an increase to workload, but I maintain the benefit of having more parents onside would offset that.

What do you think? Am I wrong¹¹? What would you suggest to improve parental engagement and positivity towards teachers? There is, of course, the media’s portrayal of teachers, but there’s not much we can do about that.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Burnout – David Watkins ↩︎
2. Come back! It’ll be alright, I promise… ↩︎
3. Like many other things, like student behaviour, lack of fun in schools and everyone’s sense of time. ↩︎
4. Oooh, a C-bomb on a Friday? Sorry about that. ↩︎
5. Yeah, I know. Very, very stupid of me. ↩︎
6. Yeah, I know. This story does not cover me in glory. ↩︎
7. Doesn’t stop him being a cunt though does it? ↩︎
8. Three so far in this blog, if you count the hidden reference. Hehe. ↩︎
9. Schools do now have a social media person, but it’s often tacked on to a different job. To my knowledge, these people do not respond to negative posts, but happy to be proven wrong. ↩︎
10. This happens at parents evenings currently, but at least this way the teacher isn’t being shouted at in a room full of other teachers and parents. Also, if a parent becomes abusive, we can just hang up. ↩︎
11. It would hardly be the first time! ↩︎