"Hard to reach" parents- thoughts please.

Yes, agree it's a dreadful letter. If it's helpful, here's the rough equivalent that we got. Not particularly aimed at hard-to-reach parents, but it's still a hell of a lot easier for me to understand! (The English in letters home is often a bit stilted as I'm pretty sure the original is drafted in Welsh, but it's still pretty clear.)

"As we look forward to the summer, we must now focus on examinations, and we ask you to help your child prepare for them.

Please encourage your child to study hard for their examinations, and contact the school if any help is required.

Parents of pupils in years 11, 12 and 13
Revision sessions will be held during the Easter holidays. Please support your child by ensuring he/she attends all relevant sessions.

Details are available from the school office.

Thank you."

I'm a secondary school governor as well. That letter is dreadful. Even worse if this is aimed at "hard to reach parents".
We have a particular problem with after school revision because it's a rural school and so a large majority go by bus.

It's also true that these are the parents who are more likely to have contact from school when things are going wrong, this can make it harder to engage them when you want to.

We have used various tactics. A simple leaflet entitled "How You Can Help Your Child". Explaining the importance of homework and revision.
Facebook, the kids may not use FB these days but those parents probably do. Text messages reminding the child and the parent of revision sessions.
It probably needs spelling out in one simple message that GCSEs are changing massively for these Y9 and 10s

I agree with everyone else about the letter. Dd's primary had a similar demographic, and they used a text service as well as letters. So eg secondary equivalent 'we are running maths revision on Thursdays after school to help with exams. Your child's teacher will tell them about it. Any questions call 1234, or text 5678 for a call back'

Dd's school also used to hold meetings and explain in an easy to understand but non patronising way about sats, phonic checks, curriculum etc.

Not sure how practical either would be at secondary though.

My sister is the type of parent you mean. She wouldn't even read the letter to be honest. But if she had a phone call asking her to go along to a meeting about, she may turn up. Or may not.

Where the exams are being sat is completely irrelevant to parents I've no idea where my DS's have sat their exams over the years an frankly couldn't care less.
If "controlled assessment" means coursework then call it coursework. I agree remove going forward.
"Subject teachers will be setting structured revision for homework"
I do hope the English dept didn't write this!
Dont worry Op its not just your school that cant write a clear letter. Every school my DS's have ever been at seems unable to say what they clearly and succinctly what they want to say in one paragraph.
I've generally switched off after the first two sentences as I suspect have most parents, leaving us clueless about what's going on. Over the years I've heard many very engaged parents in both sectors say they've never read properly the often very important letter sent home by the school. a friend who works in a boarding school was moaning that parents never return various bits of essential paper work despite being very clearly asked to do so.

Our school has a similar demographic to yours.

I would imagine that many parents would give up halfway through the first paragraph. I nearly did too.

Far too much waffle. I read it through twice and I'm still not entirely sure what the point of it was.

Surely all it really needed was a sentence or two to say that the exams would be taking place and that it was important for the students to revise/prepare for them?

Whatever else you do, please delete "going forward".

Lots of unnecessary information and not enough emphasis on the important bits. Considering it's a school who should know better, no thought at all to matching the content to the target audience - that would get poor marks if it were an exam question in the GCSE English GCSE!

If a lot of the target audience are likely to have low/poor literacy skills, then it should have been short and snappy with simple structure and words, or even better, some kind of infogram or poster style to give the key facts that the school want to portray. It should also have highlighted the help available, such as revision clubs etc.

I'd say the only people who would engage with that are those parents who are already engaged with their kids' education.

Well I'm not a hard to reach parent, but I am a writer and that text is very inaccessible. It's full of 'corporate' jargon and is pretty dense. I've brought it up three times now and keep giving up on it. I'm not sure what it's trying to tell me.

I would rip this to shreds if it came across my desk

To improve it, first work out what you're trying to say - what do you need parents to do after reading it? Strip out everything that doesn't support your central point. Write it like you would say it. If you are trying to reach people with literacy problems put it through one of the reading ease tests on word - they're not perfect but will give you a benchmark.

Breaking it up into nice short sentences with bullets and subheadings is a good way to make people think it's going to be easy to read too.

But essentially - just tell people what you need them to do, usually more than once, and keep it very simple!

If the parents struggle with literacy then fewer words need to be used and key info (dates of exams) should be in bold.

Yes, it looks very official and the key information doesn't exactly stand out - not sure if making it more user-friendly would help as I'd wonder if the parents you want to reach would read it in the first place, but definitely scope for improvement.