To be disappointed about lack of communication from child’s school?

Because they are busy!!!

Have you ever had to teach a class of 30 young people? Taking pictures and uploading them to apps is not a priority. Equally, some students will not have photo consent. I actually don’t agree that photos should be sent across an app to 60+ people to screenshot and send to whoever they want too. Children deserve privacy too.

Exactly, i wanted to know from my child how their day?or week is and fron the teachers if they had an issue or needed to tell me something

I want teachers to spend their time teaching as aint that the point of them? If parents want that much detail home school (or whatever new buzz word is being used these days) teachers are not parents PAs

You expect a teacher to visit your home to talk about your kid
And to ring the parents of 30 kids once week
and send emails
OMG
Entitlement off the Richter scale
Absolutely insane

Teachers do not have time to send messages to every parents about their kid
They have lives as well

This! When I went to school, you had one Parent's evening and one school report (a single A4 sized page of a hand written report) per year. What else do you need? Surely teachers should be teaching not faffing around telling parents how brilliant/shit their drawing of a dog is.

It's no wonder teachers are working so many hours these days. It's utterly ridiculous. They'll tell you if there's a problem. No news is good news. Stop interfering!

Careful what you wish for. They’ve been back two weeks since the October break and I’ve had 11 emails from the school. Thankfully she is in 6th year so not much longer to put up with the deluge.

I think this might be the difference. Our school has at least 30 per class with 1 teacher and mostly a TA (they might also be asked to help in year 1). There are several children with 1:1s so there will appear to be lots of adults, but they might not be readily available depending on the needs of the child they are watching
This means that teachers don't have time to stop and talk at the door as they need to be dismissing other children. Generally TAs hang on out of good will, but I am paid til 3.30 which is also when school ends so maybe your school has TAs who go when their time ends, so the teacher is not able to chat.
I don't know what our teachers do in terms of posts but it's definitely not a personalised message! They send out something at the end of the week to summarise what learning has taken place..photos became controversial as some parents complained if their child never appeared so maybe teachers feel is best not to add any.

My experience- reception class with 4 adults. Lots of ‘lovely but unnecessary’ posts home via whatever platform they use.
reception class with 2 adults. Hardly anything.

Tapestry isn’t used beyond nursery at DC’s indie. Very little updates online, they have letter/sound sheets sent home to practice in R and reading books, with a planner you can use for communication.

A lot of this should be handled by a SENCO I’d have hoped?’

Or it has been at my DS’s schools (12, has SEN that does require some meetings as you discuss)

I think this is right, even if it seems harsh.

Teachers need to spend their time teaching.

And it’s hardly their fault that you’re rarely there at drop off and pick up - I think being there at least sometimes is key in gauging how your child is getting on.

I don’t think the parent / teacher relationship has to move to putting more pressure on teachers just because so many parents now work - and I say this as a parent who has always worked full time (dc are 18 and 12)

My son’s teacher told us they have a list of children that regularly don’t eat much at lunchtime, and this is flagged up at parents evening (obviously varies by school but I would think at reception age there’s a fair amount of monitoring across the board to be honest)

👏👏👏

It totally varies between school's and teachers. With my second child I got way more photos on tapestry than with my first and assumed they were told to send more but then I spoke to parents in other classes and they said they hardly got any so it was just this particular teacher was making the effort to send them.

We also felt the drop in communication from pre-school to reception was huge. We went from having a weekly update with 5-10 photos of the class and what they were up to and a way to message the teachers for any child specific questions on the Class Dojo app, to now getting an update every half term with a few photos but no real description of what they were doing, or how he is.

Our first parents evening is tonight and we get 10 minutes only, so really hoping to get an understanding of how our son has settled in as we have had zero feedback since September and him (along with most of his 4 year old friends) don't give much of an answer to 'what have you been doing at school today'. My son is also a picky eater outside of home, and often tells me he doesn't eat his school lunches because he doesn't like them but we never hear if this is true or if he is actually eating an okay amount. Do they monitor if young children are actually eating their lunches or being hungry all day? A 4 year old is still very young and can't always adequately given accurate information to their parents about their time at school.

Why are some parents not grasping that if in 2006 if I, as a teacher, had one hour available to teach, I spent that hour teaching. Now in 2026 with that same hour, I need to have a meeting with Mrs A to talk me though the bespoke language that will get the best out of Bob, a meeting with Mr and Mrs B who need to explain to me that Sophie will best learn through a visual demonstration, and taking photos for CoffeeThen. I now have ten mins left to teach. So we achieve as a learning cohort far less than 20 years ago. Then that’s every day. Why are then parents surprised come exams ‘you didn’t cover fractions in lesson.’ ‘No, we didn’t have time, my time was all taken up by parents’.

let. Teachers. Teach.

Yeah I think the key is support staff. As I’m sure you know these have been cut back a lot, or they’re tied up with dealing with children with additional needs that traditionally might have been able to get their own LSA.

I very much appreciate any update I get though, yes my son can tell me himself but a) he’s five and most of the time just tells me things like they saw a cat in the playground or Ilias was badly behaved and put in the calm corner. Of course I’d like a bigger picture of his day and any way I can help support and further his learning at home- we painted pumpkins with dots the other day for example as I knew he’d been learning about a Japanese artist at school and her work.

b) it just helps to have an open line of communication with the environment he’s now in 30 odd hours a week.

Do you have concerns about your child? If so you should contact the school. If not, then I can't really see the issue. Surely it's better the teachers are teaching than doing website posts.

Often there are issues like safeguarding meetings/issues that come up much more often than people realise. And a lot of staff absence, for obvious reasons that didn't apply when we were at school in the 90s.

I have a non verbal son so really value his communication book and am eternally grateful to his TA for filling this out, I wouldn’t know what he was doing day to day at all without it! I don’t expect anything like this from my NT DS who can tell me what he did himself…