Should teachers be allowed to speak to parents as they are spoken to?

My standard response to 'my taxes pay your wages' was that as they are my employer I would like to report a breach of safety that affects their employees.
Most didn't understand what I was getting at.

How is your tone in your op going to open any kind of dialogue?

Oh the temptation I used to have! I recall being told 'my taxes pay your wages' and being very tempted to say 'you've never got your arse out of bed to go to work for years! Who do you think provides your dole?', My standard response to these parents was a raised eyebrow and 'course you do'.
Similarly when they managed to find the school when their darling was in Year 11, they would come and tell us 'he/she needs a C to get on the course he/she wants, what are you doing about it?'. On more than one occasion I would stand up, offer my hand and say 'How do you do, I'm JudgeJ, I don't think we've met before and I've taught him/her since Year 8'. Luckily, they were usually too thick to get the message!

Your post. Literally your post states this.

You got exactly what you asked for!

Having a knowledge of SEND is a reasonable expectation. School staff having no access to psychologists to support their pupils is not.

What is your point about compassion?

I'm not downplaying the teachers role, I think it's a very skilled profession and most do an amazing job. Having a knowledge of SEND is what I see as part of that roe. Being able to meet different children's educational needs is not what I'm referring to when I say having compassion is required.

I don’t know what cloud you live on @JLou08 , but primary schools certainly do not have ‘pastoral teams’, (whatever they may be), in my experience. The DSL is usually the senco, who probably has a full teaching timetable because of staff absence. The ddsl’s are often normal class teachers. Sometimes they’re management too, but often with many other responsibilities.
The next time I’m asked to attend an ehcp meeting, or write a report for the ed psych, or attend a family welfare meeting, or talk to a parent about their child’s potential school refusal, or listen to another parent swearing at me, or evacuate a class because a child is throwing chairs, or be asked for strategies for toilet training or one of the million other things that you think I’m not responsible for I shall say that you said actually all I should be doing is ‘being compassionate’ and see how well that goes down.

(All of the list above I have been asked to do recently as a medium term supply. So god knows what else real teachers have to do.)

Of course it's exaggeration to say that teachers are expected to be social workers and psychologists, but teachers do far more of both roles than your post implies.

When a child makes a disclosure, I am expected to know whether it is something to report instantly or not. The safeguarding lead may not be available on the phone to advise and I should work out whether I need to stop teaching and go and find them (while simultaneously finding someone who can watch my class). We then discuss any further questions needed, as we are expected to carry out safeguarding investigations (I've heard it many times that teachers aren't, but social care almost always direct us to ask further questions before they will even consider a referral, includig in cases where children have repeatedly disclosed physical harm from their parents). This did not happen 20 years ago.

Seeing an educational psychologist is almost impossible at the moment, unless a child is having an EHC needs assessment. Therefore, almost all assessment and support of pupils with highly complex needs is being done by teachers. The level of knowledge that SENCOs and teachers need of complex needs is not just "treating people with compassion." If I treat all pupils with the same compassion, this won't work when one has PDA, another CPTSD and another autism.

OP was unreasonable, but it is also unreasonable to downplay the complexity of the role.

Even a customer service advisor at Asda needs good communication skills, that's not asking then to be a social worker.
A social worker assesses a family's social care needs, do work with the parents to improve their parenting, work with the wider family to look for protective factors and ways to improve the childs life, they make decisions on the level of risk to inform the intervention, if needed they write court reports and draw on evidence from school, health professionals, police and the evidence they have gathered from their visits and work with the child and family. They look for placements for looked after children and support them settling into a placement and maintaining contact with their birth family safely. Teachers aren't doing this, they're not asked to be social workers.
Social workers also attend and contribute to EHCP reviews and education reviews for looked after children, they help find educational provision for children who need to move area, they help families develop routines to get children to school on time and do homework, but no ones claiming social workers are expected to do schools job.
Psychologists are highly trained in their role and assess and support children's educational abilities/mental health. Social workers and teachers are doing a bit of that too but we're not expected to be Psychologists, we're just expected to have an understanding of how to engage people and to treat people with compassion. The latter being something we should all just do as humans.
Safeguarding is everyone's responsibility and all professionals need to contribute but we all bring our own expertise and have our own role in that. Schools have pastoral teams and a DSL to enable them to do this without taking teachers away from the classroom.

Another daily heil post with the ‘little Johnny’ trope.
no, teachers should not be allowed to be retaliatory.
teachers are doing a job where they are expected to teach and support students, not get emotionally invested and any decent teacher will understand that parents are emotionally invested to a huge degree and that this emotion will be evident when they are trying to support their kids.

teachers are so deskilled nowadays, wider, softer skills just aren’t being taught anymore, many teachers don’t respect their students or the families, the language often seen here is evidence of this.
many teachers do not have the life experience to work professionally and holistically with children and families .

These days, the people with 'digital exclusion' would not be in receipt of benefits (which is something that's really irritating when posters go on about mobile phones and internet being luxuries for claimants, refugees, asylum seekers or any other vulnerable group).

It's far more accessible than expecting people to do everything by post - and safer/cheaper/easier than having them come in person when they only need to know their child's name and date of birth and their own name, address and contact details.

Teachers should be there to teach not parent. The parents should ensure their children are polite and respectful of others and now it even extends to expecting teachers to change nappies and toilet train, parents need to step up. There have always been families living in comparative poverty in crowded housing, etc, etc. The difference is in the past most parents would not have tolerated bad behaviour by their children or cheeking the teachers now a lot seem not to care at all.

I don't know what you do about it, it seems to be a shift in a part of society that someone else has to do everything for them including raising their children to be civilised human beings.

I agree op.
I’m not a teacher.
I often think to myself if I turned up looking like the majority of the general public and behaved like them, the public would be horrified. Turning up late for appointments, yes we all know the ‘traffic is bad’ but hey, the staff have managed to get here.
Or answering phone calls whilst in an appointment, scrolling through their phone whilst I’m trying to speak to them. Christ, would they like it if showed them the same respect.
Or turning up stinking in scruffy clothes and eating in appointments.
Plus don’t talk to me about parents telling their child that I will discipline them. No, that’s not my job.

But that’s the point @JLou08 , teachers are being gaslit into being social workers/psychologists/parenting experts as well as teachers for whole families.

Tricky parents (mostly properly middle class, in my experience) have always been part of the scene, and an understanding of what drives some aggressive behaviour is of course necessary.

But the sickness, recruitment and retention crises in teaching speak far louder than any opinions about teachers and their holidays.

I think the reason they talk yo school that way is the total lack of respect for the school and teachers. School are more powerless these days, it's not easy to exclude children and you have to put up with very awful behaviour from the kids and sometimes their parents.

Teachers are becoming powerless punch bags with very little recourse. I've heard many stories of verbal and physical abuse from students with no consequences. NOONE should go to work and experience this.

You might be shocked at the way the OP has written but teachers have had ENOUGH. We are not punchbags.

Teacher here. The pupils who are the most challenging are generally the ones with aggressive parents who will not admit that little Johnny has done anything wrong and refuse to let him do DTs etc.
If those parents just acknowledged the issues and worked with the school it would make Johnny happier and do better. It is SO frustrating how damaging this is for the child.
It's like 2 parents having different parenting styles. It undermines the child's ability to see right from wrong and is ultimately very bad for that child.

I do get the frustration. I'm a social worker so have dealt with people being aggressive. It's not okay but it is our role as professionals to manage that and maintain the relationship. We need to keep ourselves safe to, if I spike to some parents the way they spoke to me it would probably escalate to them physically attacking me.
As for the reasons they act the way they do, I think it's often linked to their own experiences. Feeling let down by authority figures in the past so lacking respect for them and not having trust in them. Even if they've no personal experience they can be lead by what they read online or hear from others.
I'm from a working class background and moved to what would now be seen middle class. I think you're either very lucky or quite naive to not recognise that working class people are judged very harshly by some people and they feel that judgement even if it's not said outright to them. Being around educational professionals can feel really intimidating for some people and put them in fight mode when they feel judged or like they're not listened to. People like you and I have been educated and have learned good communication and emotional regulation skills to get where we are. Not everyone else has. Some people have only learned how to shout and/or intimidate others to be heard.

This is such a good post. The point about the symptoms of poor parenting being very similar to the symptoms of ADHD is so very true, and also well put. Thank you!

Teachers ‘are failed’ all the time @AngryHerring , which means children are too. All the time.

Recruitment, retention, sick leave. All at crisis point. Once schools run out of TA’s willing to be exploited, and can no longer scrape the money for supply, god only knows what’s going to happen.

An online form can be translated automatically, enlarged or read out loud for somebody with a different first language, literacy issues (although name, address and date of birth are normally the things that the overwhelming majority are able to manage) or unable to see a paper form clearly enough to fill it in and complete all the other stages of posting it or travelling several miles to hand it in at the office.

and yet Digital Exclusion is still a thing and there should be alternatives for people who need them.

you're a professional with professional qualifications and codes of practice.

Of course you can't talk to parents like that. Your professional studies should have taught you how to say all that properly, like an adult not like the children you spend your day with.

bottom line: if the home life is failing the child, you need to do all you can to make sure you're not failing them too (as far as it is your job to teach them etc)

I do wonder how much of the problem is systemic. I think some. schools create an ‘us v them’

Our local primary is lovely- the head/senior team wait at the gate, and welcome children by name. This has the effect of stopping problems before they start- because she can listen, and take action before problems escalate.

To contrast with what I hear of some schools they stand and ‘uniform inspect’. That immediately sets up a negative start to the day- the worry of have I got it right/what can I get away with (us v them mindset)
We had a slight uniform issue where pe kit wa left at dads; was given a smile and told the small logo on the alternative option was absolutely fine, nothing to worry about.

Top down data driven test systems with an over academic curriculum that doesn’t work for a lot of children is also an issue. A wider more vocational education with a focus on skills/trades would i suspect motivate children as they would see a purpose, rather than leaning about algebra which they will likely never use. There are too many children who can’t access this level of rigour and are bored and resentful because of this.

Punitive attendance policies also create a discord between parents and schools - sniffy letters and threats of fines when children are struggling to go in don’t help anyone. In the 80s we were allowed to have up to two weeks allowed for annual leave, this was then abolished and again parents resent the school for this policy. It sets up distrust us v them- do we not go, do we lie, do we get hit with a fine? This policy doesn’t encourage open dialogue and honesty. Again I think our school have previously been able to manage- send the letter, but wish you a lovely time and not refer. Changes in law mean they are unlikely to continue to do so, and the fault isn’t with them.

Another thing our school do really well is call in days and class assembly, there’s welcome events at the start of the year, and other events throughout. They work hard to create a community, bringing people together and not setting them apart.

My DS’s maths teacher once called me to let me know that he’d given DS a 10 minute detention for repeatedly forgetting to bring a calculator to his lesson. DS had told him that he couldn’t stay after school that day because it was my birthday and we were going out for tea, so he was calling to check that was actually the case.

I assured him that it wasn’t my birthday and suggested that he gave DS a longer detention for telling lies.

The teacher was amazed. “Oh Mrs Jade, I wish all parents were like you… etc”. It really shocked me to hear that the majority of parents wouldn’t support their child’s punishment when they’d done wrong. Maybe I’m old fashioned but it really opened my eyes to the shit that teachers are up against. Honestly, I don’t know how you do it (and remain professional). I couldn’t. I take my hat off to you.

While I agree that a lot of parents are being allowed to just not parent and family support is a joke, I'm wondering if you repeat the Universal Credit remark to your Cleaning, maintenance, delivery, catering, learning support staff? because a lot of them will be topped up by UC. FYI a lot of middle class people also aren't good parents and people from all classes are capable of putting their latest shag before their children.

@TheCurious0range that's why I've said family support is a joke, it props the parents up, while failing to safeguard the children.

Early intervention was cut by the Conservative government in 2011 (as was other services), we are now paying for it. Those parents failing their first child attending school, should have been identified and intervention put in, by their third baby, it's too late.