Ah, parents! Who’d be one? It’s about the only thing in adult life you don’t need a license or test to do. Just about anyone can be a parent1, but does that mean everyone should be? That’s not for me to decide2, but if you are going to be a parent, you should at least try to, you know, parent your child.
Before anyone thinks about my abilities as a parent, let me share my son’s dyslexia report. He wrote: “I really wanted a dog, but my dad said no. Then he got drunk and bought me one anyway.” Now, in his defence, that is largely factually accurate, but it does miss a couple of important points. First, we’d been to see some puppies and I didn’t want to get his hopes up, so I say we’re just looking. We then saw the cutest dog in the world, and me and my wife exchanged the look3. We went back to mate’s house having decided we would get the dog later, but didn’t tell our kids so it would be a nice surprise. I had a few beers and then went to collect the dog. So, yeah, I got drunk and bought my son a dog.
The dog in question! Why would you not buy him?4
It’s on his dyslexia assessment, which we’re about to send to University so he hopefully gets help and extra time allowance there and yet again I am going to look like Dad Of The Year.
So with my own parental credentials out of the way, let’s get started. When it comes to school and their kids, parents fall largely into three brackets: deeply appreciative of the work we do5, completely on board as long as their child is doing well6 and absolute nightmare. Obviously, we’re going to talk about the last group this week.
I had my first parental complaint from one of the schools I work in this week. Apparently I told a student she was disrupting the lesson, and I’m not allowed to do that as it says on her support plan not to discuss poor behaviour with her. Now, I’m a big believer in support plans and they do a lot of good, but parents can be really unreasonable about their expectations. This parent requested her child was not told off and it was written into her plan. Really? What good does that do? This student was shouting out, talking, ignoring the teacher, refused to leave the room when asked, argued with the teacher, argued with other students and when I asked her to leave, ignored me too. She went home to complain to mum, who then complained to the school. Do you see how nuts this is? She’d been given loads of warnings, loads of support and it still went wrong, but it was somehow mine and the teacher in charge’s fault. At no point was there any acknowledgement that the student was in the wrong. At all. Make that make sense.
This problem is exacerbated by Facebook, of course. Community Facebook pages and school social media pages are full of people complaining, often under anonymous usernames. There is no way to follow up with someone who is complaining without revealing who they are or what the context of the complaint is. The mum of the student mentioned above could put on Facebook that her daughters needs are not being met and it’s outrageous. There would then be a pile on, and lots of the people who join in saying the school is rubbish are also posting anonymously, and who’s to say these aren’t all the same person? Or all related? There is no way for the school or teacher to defend themselves, and show everything they did to try and keep this student in the room – and believe me, it was a lot.
However, new parents will look at these posts and think, ‘Hmm, maybe I won’t send my child there.’ Even people who do post with a name don’t have anything saying what their connection with the school was. A couple of years ago, the school I worked for had a sustained Facebook attack about it (I forget why) and people were posting along the lines of ‘it was crap when I was there, so this doesn’t surprise me’. Now given I’d worked at the school for twenty years and didn’t recognise the names, they’d clearly been there a very long time ago. Why comment on something you have absolutely no idea about7? Also, why feel the need to comment on something that happened over twenty years ago – and let’s not forget we are talking about school and not a criminal offence?
A girl was truanting lessons a while back, and refused to come into school to go to the lesson8. She point blank ignored all staff who tried to talk to her. When her dad was phoned to collect her as we couldn’t guarantee her safety, he refused, saying it was our problem. What the hell? Basically he said we should deal with it. Now, what the fuck did he think we’d been doing? We didn’t ring him because we couldn’t be arsed to deal with her and hadn’t already tried. We rung him because his daughter was essentially running away from staff and could potentially be a danger to herself or others.
My question is what does the dad do next? Does he moan on Facebook? Probably. Does he moan to his mates in the pub? Possibly. Does anyone kick back on his nonsense? Probably not. Does he ground his daughter or take away things she likes? Almost certainly not. Instead what we get is a stream of posts saying how shit the school is. How does this help anyone? What happened to parents backing the school and the teacher up9? When did respect for the teaching profession become so low? When did everything become our fault and not parents fault?
There are loads of stories coming from Primary schools about how students are turning up not yet toilet trained. Stories of students, who, when given a book, tap it or swipe to turn the pages. We are victims of device culture, or Netflix nannies, and yet parents expect us to deal with their darlings in school, put up with their rudeness and disobedience and teach them something. Why? They can’t even entertain them when they go out for dinner without plonking them in front of a screen10.
Attention rates are falling. Politeness is becoming rare. I’ve seen students being taught to say ‘thank you’ to someone who has held a door open for them, or when they are given worksheets or a book. And this is secondary age students. All of which begs the question: what the fuck are the parents doing? What the fuck is society doing? We are heading downhill rapidly.
In the U.K., we are about to ban mobile phones in schools, which seems a great idea, but actually has difficulties. Diabetics use them to monitor blood sugars. Rural communities with crap transport rely on them to make sure their kids get home safely. Parents are asking for schools to invest in lockers or similar so the phones can be locked away. Again, this seems like a sensible idea until you wonder who is going to pay for that?
Back to ridiculous parents. Shortly after COVID, my school decided to rename the Houses they organise the year groups into it. They were named Drake, Grenville, Hawkins and Raleigh. Two of the four started out as slave traders, one benefitted from the trade and the final member of the four played an important role in the abolition of the slave trade in Britain11. My school rightly decided these names weren’t ones we would want our school associated with and changed them to birds of prey12. This was around the time that Black Lives Matter13 was at it’s most prominent and so the school copped flack for jumping on a band wagon.
Note: we got slated for wanting to disassociate ourselves from the slave trade, and oh my god, the reaction online was shocking. Parents and ex-pupils jumped all over the decision saying how disrespectful we were and how ‘woke’14 we were being – like that’s a bad thing? It was a textbook example of how a decision (correct in my view) leads to schools and teachers getting slated for no reason. It just shows that ‘keyboard culture’ is alive and well. A face to face conversation along the lines of ‘you want us to use slave traders as aspirational figures?’ would have shown these people up for the borderline racists15 they were being.
Anyone can be a keyboard warrior. It’s easy and requires no skills and increasingly, no facts. Challenge someone on what they have posted and you get ‘do your own research’ – not an answer or a rebuttal, but it does smack of someone who’s source is someone who isn’t even remotely credible. Most people would not speak a person in real life the way they do online.
I have had difficult meetings with parents, and by the end of the meeting we have usually come to some sort of agreement. At the very least, a face to face meeting means the parent gets to associate a face with the monster who is making their child’s life difficult. Usually it leads to a more productive relationship involving phone calls or emails and generally an improved attitude from the student. I stress ‘usually’ because this doesn’t always work and those are the ones you pass to your line manager.
To any parents reading this, I implore you to step away from Facebook bashing and get in touch with the school. Keep an open mind, and listen to what they are telling you about your child’s behaviour or attitude to learning. Back the school up at home – the teachers are trying to help.
For the teachers, reach out to parents. Send that email. Make that phone call. Be honest, but also factual. Don’t try to put blame anywhere, and definitely refrain from blaming the student. Talk about behaviour (“when you threw the rubber across the room, it disrupted the learning of the class”) and try not to use hyperbole (“the rubber could’ve killed someone”). Don’t say anything about feelings, but stick to things you can prove. Also, if you got something wrong, admit it and say what you will do to prevent it happening again.
Teachers and parents are a partnership, and we seem to have lost sight of that. We both have a responsibility to change this.
Until next time.
FOOTNOTES
- Even if the equipment doesn’t work, you can always foster or adopt. ↩︎
- At all! ↩︎
- The one that says ‘we’ll talk about this later.’ ↩︎
- My son named him Dexter, The Destroyer Of Shoes when asked the dog’s name by the vet. As she started to type all of that into his record, I said ‘we call him Dexter for short’. ↩︎
- We love these guys. They’re the ones that give us chocolate and biscuits at the end of term. ↩︎
- The vast majority of parents, really. ↩︎
- To be fair, this is a social media problem and not confined to school. I recently had someone tell me I was allowing Sharia law to enter the UK because I didn’t believe Sir Kier Starmer was the worst PM in the last fifteen years. I mean, I’m willing to accept he’s disappointing, but have you forgotten the utter shambles of Johnson? The short trousers of Sunak? The lettuce? ↩︎
- To be fair to her, it was a nice day and she was working on her tan. ↩︎
- And yes, we make mistakes, of course we do. But that still doesn’t mean we should suffer trial by Facebook. ↩︎
- And I’m not talking about children with ASD or other processing need for which this can be a necessary calming measure. ↩︎
- Reform’s intention to not teach history through a ‘progressive lens’ would not have approved the change either, which only goes to show it was an excellent idea. ↩︎
- Much cooler to be fair, unless you’re a small rodent. They don’t have opposable thumbs though, so are less likely to be dicks on Facebook. ↩︎
- And just don’t with the all lives matter shit. ↩︎
- I’m with Kathy Burke on this. She said: “They’re calling you ‘woke’ if you call out bad things, basically. If you’re not racist, you’re woke. If you’re not homophobic, oh, you’re woke. Be woke, kids. Be woke. Be wide awake and fucking call it out.” ↩︎
- Or just regular racist. ↩︎
David Watkins 
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