To think parents expect too much of schools?

i have no idea how you guys put up with it. I witnessed another parent shouting at one of the poor office staff a few weeks ago because she had been given an appointment at an inconvenient time. 🙄

Oh yes definitely. Not just learning - I work in a primary school office, 700 children, and the things parents expect are unbelievable. Drop everything to look for an unnamed jumper, make the child something special for lunch, keep the children half an hour late every day, arrange a tour on a Sunday….. I could go on. And office staff have been pared to the bone.

My DC all knew the days of the week before starting school, even one that is SEN. With the exception of SEN child they learned how to spell their names at home. One of them is 16 and still has awful handwriting but excells in other areas. I don't think any of the things raised in the What's App or indicative of bad teaching. Do schools even teach children how to spell their middle names? I'm not sure they do or why they would.

If they struggle to get the days of the week in order, can’t spell their middle name and struggle with handwriting, that could possibly indicate dyslexia. I know a child with dyslexia who at that age really struggled with getting the days of the week in order and would have struggled with knowing which days were the weekend and which were weekdays. Her Mum had definitely tried to teach her.

I couldn’t agree with you more. The amount of complaints that people have on the school WhatsApp groups are just ludicrous. The expectations on schools are massive and plenty of parents don’t give a fuck about how little Johnny’s behaviour disrupts the entire class and means the teacher has less time to actually teach. So more kids fall further behind.

Many families over-schedule their kids and complain about homework given. Tarquin can’t possibly practise spellings on weekends because he has a football game, karate competition, a birthday party and oh we want to go to the pumpkin patch to take insta worthy pictures so we can show off our perfect family.

I agree that some parents only want to do the fun bits of parenting and expect the school to step in and do the rest.

A lot of the issues when children are starting school comes down to lack of support for parents though. It’s easy to judge but so many parents had poor parenting themselves meaning they don’t know how to parent and they don’t have a support network around them to help with getting things right in those early years.

By the time children start school there are already gaps in development so schools are starting from a point of having to try to help bridge those gaps before they can move on. Working with parents and trying to provide advice of what to many seems like basics of parenting. Many parents could benefit from extra support which just isn’t there so the cycle continues.

We need to normalise support for new parents, we need a return to things like sure start centres and HV drop in sessions. We need to normalise saying “this is hard I need help”

I cant even with the nonsense that youre writing. Reception do maths and literacy and basics like the date every single day. In the years that I've taught the only thing that's changed is the parenting.
If a child doesn't know the days of the week by the end of year one and are NT then they're either not very academic shall we say or dont have adults that converse with them. The children only learn through play when theyre not in a group with an adult, and they need time to practice and use what they've learned or its not going to stick.

Oh I totally agree, I was just pointing out that even if a parent didn’t feel confident there were commercially produced alternatives. Also good for sharing on play dates.

Yanbu...I'd be embarassed to admit my child didnt know the days of the week.

While she might mix up tue- thu my 3.5 yo reliably knows the days of the week.

🤔 I spent about an hour in the morning with my DC ... and then about 4-5 hours in the afternoon/ evening- reduced to about 2.5 hours while working full-time. Some of this time is taken up by breakfast & dinner, some for homework and some for bedtime. One or 2 days DC go for stuff like swimming and football or whatever. This is 5 days a week. I would expect the school to at least be able to lay the foundations for general knowledge as they spent an equal amount of time with the DC during the week. This obviously needs to be followed up via homework.

I spoke to a parent as part of my job recently and she was annoyed school weren’t helping her teenager enough with his reading, writing and handwriting. He cannot read his own handwriting. I asked her what they usually do at home to practice and she seemed genuinely flummoxed by this and said they do nothing at home. And then continued to complain about school.

God bless our teachers honestly. Absolute heroes

I think that one of the problems with schools is that more and more is expected of them. My heart always sinks when someone says that "XYZ should be taught in schools" because quite often XYZ is something that could be taught at home. Things like using cutlery, tooth brushing, knife safety. Schools are not going to be able to solve all the ills of society.

I would be quite irritated if my children's school told me how to parent but then didn't send reading books home.

Having said that, I would expect a school to have taught the days of the week (I think my children sang a song to learn them).

Yes parents these days appear to have given up on teaching their own kids. The teachers cannot make a dent if the groundwork isn’t laid at home

I agree with you but I'm not sure why you are surprised. Many families have two working parents and are time poor, often parents on here bemoan having to do any kind of homework or learning outside of school because that is what school is for and weekends are for family time. I hear this from my own dh. My own parents couldn't really help with homework once I got to secondary but at primary they would test me on spellings,my dad would get me to add up the kwiksave receipt to check it was right and I had to write out the shopping list every week to practice writing and spelling.

I read daily with our 3. I do spellings with them weekly,10 minute hand writing practice every other day and maths or time table practice. I find the time because I value their education and know whilst their teachers do their best for them my child is 1 of 20 or 30. For me they are a bigger priority so I take the time be it on the school run, whilst I'm cooking their dinner etc. It isn't easy as our eldest does have sen but to make sure they reach their potential we have to take an interest, at least that is my thinking.

We have a shocking number of children in nappies in Reception and Year 1.

We have children that come to school regularly without breakfast, even though their parents have food in the house, because they can't be arsed to sort them out in the mornings.

We have children with crisps and chocolate for 'lunch' in their lunchboxes.

We have children that have broken, rotting teeth that are just shocking to see.

We have children who can't use cutlery.

We have children who come in with fevers, obviously quite ill (rashes, pox), have been sick in the night - or that morning - whose parents won't answer the phone when they're called to collect them.

We have parents who argue with us about returning their sick-bug/tummy bug child to us because they don't want to keep them home the required 24 or 48 hours (age-dependent).

We have parents who refuse to properly treat their children's nits.

We have parents who tell their children they don't have to do X Y or Zed at the classroom doors 'if they don't want to'. Thanks for that. The curriculum is not optional for your child.

We have children who are late Every Single Day because their parents can't be arsed to get them in on time. Or at all in many cases.

We have parents who do nothing educational with their children, including basic reading, and their sheer disdain for education shows in their children's constantly poor and disruptive behaviour at school, meaning they're well behind in everything ... yet are then constantly outraged that their term time holidays are not authorised. So call their healthy children in sick instead.

We have parents whose children are violent and rude and terrify other children but their parents will not accept that their child are ever the problem.

It's soul destroying ...

I live in a pretty nice, northern commuter town. Whilst not amazingly wealthy, deprivation and unemployment is low. Pretty much all of the kids in reception could count to ten, knew the alphabet, knew colours and probably knew the days of the week (I’m less sure on that). I am always amazed at parties how interesting and chatty most of them are. I don’t recognise this massive decline talked about on this thread.

Whilst most kids at our school have 2 working parents, both of those parents are educated to at least school leaving standard (often much, much higher) and there is enough disposable income to substitute the lack of a SAHM (as was so common in the sort of town I live in now in the 80s and 90s) with educational experiences around school hours, such as decent wrap around care, extra tuition, extra curricular activities or retired grandparent(s).

So whilst I don’t doubt the teachers on this thread, I wonder if this is symptomatic of the horrendous and worsening inequality in this county. Basically, the divide between the kids that have and the kids that don’t have is getting wider and wider and is showing as early as age 4. I would be interested where some of the teachers on this thread work and what they think.

I really agree with this.

If my son had been allowed to come home to eat lunch it would have transformed his chances.

All the mandatory "enrichment" just scared him.

If the school had stuck to teaching and allowed my DS some head space to live his actual life outside of school, then many things would have been better.

I really am very confused about why the secondary school was so proud of having 300+ trips a year, then said they couldn't afford subject specialist teachers or class sizes of under 38 in some subjects.

I work in an infant school and the amount of children not school ready has definitely grown (lots of children not fully toilet trained).
There are so many more children with additional needs too and no funding for them (very long waiting lists means it takes longer for a diagnosis therefore a longer wait for funding).
We still just have one teacher and one TA but the expectation on us is so much more.

There are always children who never do homework or read at home and the gap between those and the children who do get support at home just gets bigger and bigger. Due to this we need to do more with those children at school to ensure they keep up.
We have some parents who strongly believe all teaching should be done at school and none of it done at home.

Yes, but the change of month doesn’t happen often enough for them the register the order of the months, and then carry their previous knowledge to remember the sequence.

Also, in England they aren’t in school in August. 😉

When my kids started school, they could read, write, count etc (age appropriate) and had social skills.

At the other end, I employed private tutors to get them through all the exams.

All I required, in between, is for teachers to teach them properly.

This was years ago, but surely, everyone just needs the same. 🤷‍♀️

The thing is that everyone is afraid of their kids coming to harm if they are not on screens. If they are on a screen then they are not getting hit by a car, or rummaging in the knife drawer, or eating the weeds in the garden (myDS did this), or boiling the kettle, or any of the other million wild things that kids do.

Mothers are trying to keep their kids from physical injury but letting them on screens, but then the kids' behaviour goes off the dock from being on screens and it is very hard to go back.

If any of the people who are judging these mothers would pitch in and help a bit then it would really be good, but I can be my bottom dollar that these kids who are not school ready are also not getting the party invitations or the play dates.

Mothers just can't win, I think.

As I have said already mine were at primary in the noughties. I expected their primary to educate them. The Head Teacher always seemed more concerned with telling a largely degree educated cohort how to parent. What to feed them, brushing their teeth, and don't get me started on the newsletter about why teachers striking should be supported and applauded.

Sadly, some of the teachers could not construct grammatically correct sentences, could not spell and one taught my son that the x axis was vertical and the y axis horizontal.

It isn't just a parenting issue, too many teachers are ill equipped to teach literacy and numeracy.

My DC started school reading, and knew their numbers to at least 20, colours and days of the week.

My Y5 neighbours a few doors down are particularly fluent with the f-word.

I can't count the number of parent information days or new parents' evenings where the headteacher spouts out that school is a partnership of parents, teachers and children, when parents seem to nod then mishear this and pass this on to their children. Teachers definitely do the heavy lifting (as if they are also not parents or time-poor).