Question for primary school teaching staff

[LongIslandIcedSummer]

As a teacher or head teacher, if a parent emails the school office with a question for you and the office forward the mail to you, do you reply to the parent or do you send the office an email back with what you want the office to reply on your behalf?

I reply directly to the parent unless it is something the office need to know as well (absence, forms etc? Then I would cc them in

Our Head likes us to send reply to office for them to copy and paste to parents.

Maisie- do you know why they want it done that way?

Our head suggests it goes through the office as we have a number of parents who, once they get an email address, bombard staff with emails and expect replies at any time of the day.

I was a primary head teacher for ten years although have now begun a new career (training as a sniper in case I ever see Michael Gove). Anyway. I usually asked the appropriate staff member to reply. It's rare that when a parent emails the head teacher that the information required for that response needs to come from the head IYSWIM? If Mr. Bloggs will have that info, why get him to tell me so I can tell you? I'll ask him to converse directly with you. Occasionally it would need to be me and in that case I would reply personally. What was the nature of the comms?

We send our reply to the office and they just copy and paste it to the parent. My school doesn’t want parents to have email addresses for teachers and we don’t have access to the main school email account.

Comms of any nature and I just can’t see why!

I’ve joined a really busy school office with a huge backlog of work and any email I forward on to a teacher or to the Headteacher (because they are directly relevant to that specific teacher) get sent back with “Please tell Mrs Xxxx that Thomas should bring his violin on Thursday for our class assembly if he prefers playing that to his flute” (or whatever). I then have to copy their reply, delete their reply to me, copy and paste the email address of the parent and paste the teacher’s reply with a note saying Mrs Class Teacher asked me to let you know that Thomas is welcome to change his part in the class assembly from flute to violin etc.

I want to approach the Head to challenge this being a good use of time but trying to understand whether their are any genuine barriers first.

*THERE
(Now sacked as office admin anyway!)

we have a number of parents who, once they get an email address, bombard staff with emails and expect replies at any time of the day.

For this reason. At my school and my DC's school all contact is via the office. If parents had teachers' email addresses they would be far more likely to be in regular contact, adding a lot to workload. It's not like secondary where your DC has a range of teachers so you are less likely to contact them about general issues.

In the examples you give, in my school the message would grt passed to us and we would phone or speak directly to the parent.

@LongIslandIcedSummer That sounds reasonable to me. It's an administration task being asked of the (incredibly important and I don't mean it as an insult) administration staff. As others have said, parents can be most odd and if as a head I ever sent an email directly to a parent it would come back to me in spades from that parent (not a mistake I made more than once!) They then pass the email address on and because they got a reply, every parent wants a personal reply which just isn't workable. Parents often used to totally bypass the office admin staff which used to annoy me, more because often they are the font of all knowledge! I'd often receive an email from parents and actually they'd have got a quicker reply from the admin team because I'd have to get to the email first (no mean feat) and then forward it to the admin staff because they knew the answer!

I guess it's down to team work really. Allow the head teacher to do their job-that's not really answering questions about flutes 😬

When reading my reply, bear in mind that I loved teaching for 20 odd years and then Michael Gove. Every chance I'm a bitter old bitch!

Usually at my DC’s primary-parents email the office with a query, the office walk down to that classroom, ask the teacher (if they don’t already know the answer) what to do and then go back and reply.

The teacher can’t reply as they are teaching.

I would say that’s reasonable.

At our school, all teachers email addresses are available on the app and parents are encouraged to email their dc’s teacher directly.

Parents know that they may have to wait for an answer and if it’s urgent then it would be best to email the school office.

@LongIslandIcedSummer

I don't know really, never asked. I know some teachers have suffered from bombardments from parents so the Head decided that our email addresses were not to be made public. It wouldn't be hard for parents to work out though.

An interesting mix of replies. Thank you for posting. Seems there is a variety of ways of working this out there.

For the record I would always answer anything admin related (and never ask the Head about flutes!). It is just emails that are a directed to a specific teacher I was referring to as I think it’s bizarre for the member of staff to have to then send me a reply back asking me to reply to the parent from them. It doesn’t stop parents emailing teachers - it just means 4 emails are exchanged each time instead of 2 therefore as a team we’ve doubled the work every time a parent emails.

It does mean that the unreasonable parental emails can be stopped from reaching the teacher by admin or the HT!

I used to work in a school office. I often found it was easier to verbally tell the teachers what the email said, get a verbal response from the teacher, email the parent back and BCC the teacher in so they could refer back if necessary and know it had been dealt with.

Emails to parents are always sent by one of us in the office. We do not want parents (or sales people) getting hold of individual email addresses.