if you are a headteacher, why is it apparently impossible......

[Ncncncagain]

to give parents a reasonable amount of notice for school events that you expect them to attend or any dumb theme day that requires a costume or magenta coloured clothes ? We have experience of 3 schools (private and state primary FWIW), and the administration in all of them is dreadful. Received emails on Monday from 2 schools asking us to attend daytime meetings this coming Monday and Tuesday. So 7 &8 days notice respectively. Nothing on previous newsletters or term calendars. DH and I both work, no where near the schools. We both have a reasonable amount of flexibility with sufficient notice, like a month, but can't do much with only 7 days. AIBU?

Not enough for me, and I work 3 shifts/week (12 hour days)- rota is 8 weeks in advance and if you can't find someone to swap a shift, you can't have a day off for anything. I do accept, in my case that I have 4 days off and could probably lease with the school to move it to a day off, though!

Also a 15 page newsletter every week.

Im sorry but that is ridiculous, who on earth has time to read a 15 page school newsletter every week?

I work in a school (not a Teacher) and regularly have to remind the Head and other colleagues that not all of our students have a parent at home full time. Of course, rationally, they know that already and the last thing they want to do is make life difficult for parents, it's just they're so manically busy and focused on what's going on in within the school environment that they momentarily forget about life outside, which for many parents is a constant juggling act. So they fire off an email to a parent asking them to come in for a meeting tomorrow in an attempt to be proactive and get whatever the issue is sorted, but I then get a panicky/pissed off phonecall from said parent who (understandably) can't take time out of work at such short notice.

schools need to get their act together

That's not likely to be honest. Admin and support staff posts are being cut left, right and centre. Mainstream schools are having to manage students with increasingly complex needs due to lack of specialist provision. More students with significant mental health issues, increasingly challenging behaviour, more students living in poverty all requiring a high level of support and intervention from school due to outside agencies being so overstretched and underfunded. Staff become stressed and exhausted so they end up going off sick. All these things have a knock on effect on the day to day running of the school so things become more disorganised, things get missed or pushed back, everything becomes more 'fly by the seat of your pants' as a previous poster put it. With further cuts to schools budgets planned it's probably going to get worse before it gets better.

If short notice is given, the teacher/school will understand not everyone can attend
Indeed. But children are less forgiving. And having to tell DD, yet again, that we can’t come and see the thing she’s spent weeks rehearsing, or is really pleased to have been chosen for, is soul destroying. Thankfully she is quite understanding and knows that if we could come, we would.

Alternatively, it is a common gripe of primary schools that parents do not bother to read communications properly and act surprised about events that were clearly advertised several times in every school newsletter for the last term and have also been on the school website for weeks, but apparently the only one the parents read was the final reminder

I get groupcall texts every day, telling me what’s for lunch, reminding me that children should not use the front door, that the lost property box is full, that Miss so and so is leaving please donate to the leaving fund..... there is certainly not a communication problem, and the admin staff are not lacking in time to send messages. On the class FB group, there was an uproar about the late notice of the assembly. It certainly isn’t a small group of parents who are affected.

I am a headteacher, there’s a calendar of events on our website. There is a weekly newsletter which is sent via email, put on the website and is up on noticeboards around the school grounds. It contains all dates at least a term in advance. We use an internal school messaging app which parents are on and text messages. The newsletter is also put out n here weekly as well. And yet, we still get parents complaining that the ‘didnt Know’ about events/ school photos parents evening staff etc. When told it had been on the newsletter they openly say they never bother reading it.
So my question is........if you are a parent, why is it seemingly impossible ..........Etc etc!

Admin and support staff posts are being cut left, right and centre. Mainstream schools are having to manage students with increasingly complex needs due to lack of specialist provision.

Simple solution. Cut the number of daytime activities where parents are asked to attend. I can’t think there would be a huge outcry if it went back to being the nativity and sports day. There is something every month or two we’re asked to attend. If schools are so busy, having a monthly learning cafe, meet the teacher day, (where you never actually meet the teacher) class observance, class assembly etc, can surely drop off the calendar?

I hear ya, OP. This is the sole reason for me forking out for amazon prime, after too many occasions from nursery where muggins has had to dash out and buy the most random of stuff, often the night before needed. One year I remember a list minute direction that DC needed a brown top for their role in the play (brown?!) and another time recall sitting drawing spots on a white t shirt as per the last minute brief for sporty clothes for children in need charity event.

Ours is good we tend to get the details months in advance but then our head seems to have a lot of free time of their hands. Some weeks they are a head teacher other weeks offstead inspector

That comment made me laugh so much...'free time' ..I doubt it very much and you made it sound as if 'when s/he has a spare day, they just decide to do an OFSTED inspection!!!...holiday...mmmm? 🤔 ..no....I'll go and do an inspection'

Do you realise how difficult both of those jobs are? Do you realise that it is likely that your HT needs to carry out OFSTED inspections to earn money to shore up the school budget?

YANBU. DD's primary school did this at one point until they received a lot of complaints. I don't know what planet those who think a weeks notice should be enough.

I received a message tonight to say my child needs to wear a particular colour at school TOMORROW

YANBU If you’re a shift worker nurse/midwife rosters are made up 6 weeks in advance. You need to find a swap if you’re very lucky,wards can’t be left understaffed. I’m fed up asking schools for more notice.

Simple solution. Cut the number of daytime activities where parents are asked to attend.

Yes to this, shame no one told Ofsted!

Ha ha, Barbie222 - I was about to say exactly the same thing to Yabbers, then read your comment .

Our website is kept very very up to date - I know, I do it.

It is more comprehensive and more up to date than any other primary school in our city (none of them have a Bathsheba).

Our parents complain when they get too many “push” notifications- emails and Xpressions messages.

So we put everything on the website, very accessible.

Apparently now though parents want us to tell them, via push notifications, when we update the website...

(I updated it 7 times today with info and pics.... yet they complain about too many push notifications)

If somebody gives me a week's notice then they have to take pot luck whether I'm busy or not as I work freelance and also have childcare (not regular due to shift work). I think this is unreasonable and I would send an email to the school asking for more notice for such events.

Oh well, at the end of the day, disorganised schools are totally outnumbered by disorganised parents, so you could argue that when it comes to unreliability, parents actually win the day in terms of their sheer numbers .

I picked up my son one day in December to be told he was in the nativity the next day and that all the other kids would only be attending in the morning, so if he was to stay for the full day he would be the only one in for the afternoon. I had no idea that the nursery class even did a nativity.

Luckily I was on maternity leave at the time but now I’m back at work there’s no way I could attend an event that I only found out about the night before.

So not just my kids school then?! They got outstanding from ofsted, but their planning is shite at times. Luckily I'm a sahm so when they send a text or letter out saying such a thing will happen next week I can make it, lots of my working mum friends just can't. They need more notice than one bloody week.

Short notice money is often a big issue for us and has been an issue at every school the kids have been in. Makes me cross because actually had I had more than two days notice for £15 or £30 DD could have done a lot of the trips she hasn't been able to.

On a side note I don't think any job I've ever done would have let me have the day or afternoon off with less than a weeks notice. One wouldn't allow time off during a run at all!

Frankly I think schools do too many of these daft, unneccessary activities anyway and I wish they would tone it down a bit and concentrate on actually teaching the kids instead of all this mucking about. I stressed for years about this kind of thing with my three kids as a divorced working mother. As much as my employers were a great company to work for, no danger you could just skip off early one afternoon at a week's notice to attend some random performance/dressing up event or other such creative timewasting. I now have a stepson who is 8, and it seems every month there is some letter or email instructing us to either attend some classroom activity, provide wellies /come and visit the tadpoles/ volunteer for a barbecue or send our child in dressed like a bloody bee... We only had sports day, parents evening and a Nativity play when I was a kid.

"Simple solution. Cut the number of daytime activities where parents are asked to attend."

Yes to this, shame no one told Ousted!

Ofsted has changed its focus dramatically in the last several years and there is no longer the same expectation of all-singing all-dancing lessons and activities. I think sometimes "But Ofusted wants to see this!" is used as a shoe-in for stuff that schools just want to do anyway, or are in the habit of doing and don't really want to change things.

Looking at schools I know and Ofsted reports, there does not appear to be any correlation between the Ofsted report and the number of "wear-a-color days" "random dressup days" etc. These at least could be cut.

Kokeshi123 - the concept of multiple dress up and wear a colour days is totally alien to me, anyway - they were never a particular feature of any of the schools my children went to, I was a governor of or that I worked in. They did World Book Day, but you can work out for yourself when that is, what with it being the same day nationally, and children were in coloured houses for things like Sports Day, when they wore t-shirts in the colour of their House, but you were told what colour that was when they started at the school and it never changed for the whole 7-years of primary, and the Sports Day date was given out well in advance (with the usual provisos about weather). Btw, Ofsted still puts pressure on schools about parental involvement, and if anything has moved its focus back to an all singing and dancing curriculum, away from focusing on core subjects and data tracking, so you are way off the mark there. Schools which focus too much on the core subjects to the detriment of a broad curriculum are now the ones that will be penalised.

By the way, what on earth are these wear a colour days about?!

Ps since there are huge numbers of books with ordinary children in them, all you actually have to do for World Book Day is send your child to school in their own clothes. It's really not difficult! I did that several years running...

We have topic days for every half term. These often involved dressing up. (Our reception has at least an ugly bug ball, disney day and at ome point had a dress up day each week for about 3 weeks.)

The years play will involve dressing up as some character. (Wear a brown t shirt / dress as an alien...)

They seem to do every charity day (spotty for children in need. Or pjs. ...)

Wear red white and blue was for various royal things.

A lot of the kids enjoy it but I preferred previous head who suggested 3 x a year maximum! And also had play costumes in school.

Walkaround. I agree, my autistic child has done just that - but not many 6-8 year NT children want ti be the "only omes not dressed up."