To expect to be able to directly contact teachers?

[Fallingrain]

Just that really. My school doesn’t give out email addresses or phone number. If we want to get in touch, we have to send a message to the school office. They pass it on then inevitably we get phone tennis because I’m working when they try and call back and they never arrange a fixed appointment to speak. I understand why they do it but in this day and age, I’m not sure that shielding teachers to that extent cuts it any more. I don’t know any other profession where that happens but I wonder if there is some half way house. How do other schools deal with parent/teacher comms?

We can’t email teachers directly at our DC school. We have to send an email to the office, they pass it on, teacher will either ring or you receive the teacher reply from the office. Individual emails are never disclosed. That’s fine with me

I don’t know any other profession where that happens

Police
Doctors
Nurses
Dentists
Retail assistant
Cashier
Scaffolder
Life Guard
Bank teller

I could continue.

We have class reps. Any questions about logistics, admin etc goes to the reps and usually they can answer it or if not, they email the teacher but it’s much more manageable for the teacher to have one main line of comms. Same if the teachers wants to send a message, it goes via the rep.

We do also have the direct email addresses for appropriate questions, I’ve use them about once a year

Not sure how you think you can avoid the phone tennis. Teachers don't have work phones or an individual phone number. They don't even have their personal phones on when they are teaching (not that youshould be given their personal phone number anyway). The vast majority don't have an office, so no direct line. Many don't even have their own classroom (and classrooms don't generally have phones anyway). Genuinely - how do you think you're going to get in touch with them by phone without going via the school office?

Email is different. Plenty of schools do allow you to email teachers directly. I think there should be a policy, or at least a blanket assumption, that if you email a teacher during non-working hours, they are absolutely not expected to respond until next working hours.

It would be horrendously invasive to have a teacher's personal phone number! They probably don't have work numbers because they spend the day teaching. Surely the method of contacting the office and requesting a call or response to a query is the best way of communicating with the teacher.

In my DC's schools, past (but recent) and current:

School 1 (primary) - no teacher emails given out, you have to email the office
School 2 (primary) - you can email the teacher personally
School 3 (secondary) - you have to send an email to a generic year 7 (or whatever) email address and it is passed on

There should also be an awareness that directed time is 90% teaching. Yes we work long hours outside that, but the time the HT can direct what we do is almost all taken up with teaching.

Therefore even a response in "next working hours" is unreasonable because teachers will be actually teaching.

You should realise that teachers have lots to do during the day and phone calls and answering emails are going to take quite a lot of time. If you teach 300 students and 5% of them contact you every day that’s 15 emails or phone calls everyday. If they take 4 minutes each to answer that’s an hour extra work every day.
At secondary schools they usually have a pastoral staff who can deal with the majority of issues. The messages get passed on and someone gets back to you. What is so urgent that you need to contact the teachers directly so frequently? Just leave the times you can be contacted each time you leave a message. If you leave enough information about your query then the answer can be left as a message.
I think that you’re unrealistic about your child’s education and the input you need on it.

When I was at school, parents spoke to teachers on parents' nights. If there was something out of the ordinary they'd send a note in with the child. If there was a question about homework then it was up to the child to raise it with the teacher at an appropriate time between when the homework was set and when it was due.

With the advent of Covid and more homeschooling then I think some dedicated office hours where kids (not parents) could contact teachers would have be appropriate.

I can understand that more contact might be required in the case of kids with SEN or health problems but those cases are exceptions and an appropriate communications channel should be formally agreed.

It does sound to me like parents are getting involved in the minutiae of their children's schooling and I doubt that's a good thing for anyone involved.

In lockdown, we had to contact the parents of our tutor group once a week.

It took a whole day - 28 students with calls averaging at 15 mins - that’s an average that takes into account some not answering and some being very, very much longer.

I do positive phone calls at the end of the day on a Thursday- I allocate a certain amount of time and the number I get through depends on the amount of time parents talk. Sometimes it’s impossible to stop - and I’m quite firm with my “ok, you have a lovely evening” - short of hanging up on them...

My point is that phone calls take a lot of time - so call backs have to happen when we can be free for enough time to listen.

This really is a very non-problem.
You can avoid the "phone tennis" by emailing the school office and asking for a reply via email because you work - or stating when you're free to answer the phone. I think most professions don't enable direct contact - almost everyone would either need face-to-face contact (which your child has every single day) or some kind of receptionist or secretary.
You appear to have just invented a problem that doesn't exist.

I have children at two different schools. Neither of them give out teachers email addresses. All communication has to go through the school office. It works ok.

[quote SomeHalfHumanCreatureThing]@WeAllHaveWings

I've never contacted a teacher via email..

My secondary age child is isolating at the moment because a student in school has a positive covid test. The teacher left off a vital piece of info for the homework, he emailed, teacher responded, all good.

Mundane, is it?

🙄[/quote]
Obviously your child can't ask the teacher in school so has been told how to communicate instead 🙄. Irrelevant to my post.

At the DT's primary we have ClassDojo to contact their teacher.

DH's department has a phone number with an answering machine and email addresses are readily available (secondary).

When i started in a school office I was amazed how many parents thought the teacher could just 'pop out of class' to take the call in the office - like the class could just teach themselves. Then they"d say 'can she call during lunch' but not factor in that the teacher might have a lunch duty, or a meeting and need to set up the classroom so the break bit is actually only 20 mins at best and they might not be the only parent wanting a call.
So we take the callers message and ask them to suggest some sensible times and set up a call.
We also do the email forwarding because a lot of teachers are part time or have sick days and sometimes the info is needed earlier .

DH's department has a phone number with an answering machine

I worked in a school that had a dept phone. It was a bloody nightmare because if you were working in the office the phone would ring and BAM that was anything from 10 mins to half an hour of your PPA disappeared.
And if you didn’t answer? Sometimes whoever it was would just ring and ring and ring.....

If you have an issue, send a note in with your child and a means of contacting you.

As above, we don't have phones. During my working hours I'm mostly teaching kids so not exactly able to pick up the phone I give my email address if the parent seems reasonable but I have had this abused several times so I'm wary now. We use an app which does have a messaging facility but parents are discouraged from using it to message us. Doesn't stop the complaints sent to me at bloody 9pm on a Friday night though.

If I need to contact school about dd I just email the office with FAO dd's teacher re dd. As part of my message I put my phone number and times I would be available to talk. I can't think of more than a couple of times I've needed to speak to a teacher urgently though. Sometimes they don't need to speak to me and can just sort the issue directly with dd, which is the aim really.

At my school, parents need to email the office and that then gets forwarded to the right teacher. Often that's not the teacher they thought they wanted. If there's a problem they want to discuss, quite often the head of year or head of department is a more appropriate person than the class teacher. If it's a general query then the classroom teacher is more appropriate, and we will do our best to ring parents at a time that is convenient to them (if they've let us know times that would be convenient). It's impossible to give phone numbers because we don't have individual phones for school. The pupils do know our email addresses this year, but never did in the past. Some parents are rather rude and aggressive in their communications with teachers, others are just relentless in needing to speak to someone all the time, others just send emails about the same thing over and over again.

I don't understand why parents need to be sending all these emails. Surely contacting a teacher should be a very rare event? I appreciate its different now with CV, but on the very rare occasion that we had a question, I put a note in DCs bag or approached them at the gate - it maybe has happened 3 or 4 times altogether, with 3 dc at 3 different schools. Things like letting the teacher know dc granny died, that kind of thing.

When do people think teachers get time to read all these emails? Would you be happy if they did it whilst they are meant to be minding your dc? Or when they are meant to be preparing for the day ahead/the next day? When they should be marking your DC work? Or dealing with pastoral issues/first aid/discipline/ playground supervision/grabbing a quick sandwich/ etc etc - which of these tasks should be ignored to facilitate a slot to answer emails?

I have emailed our head at times and been very embarrassed when he responded over the weekend to mundane crap that I just happened to have time to send at that point as I also have a busy job, I wouldn't do it now knowing that he clearly gets notifications binging to his phone, I guess they always monitor email 24/7.

@beepbeepsheep

As above, we don't have phones. During my working hours I'm mostly teaching kids so not exactly able to pick up the phone I give my email address if the parent seems reasonable but I have had this abused several times so I'm wary now. We use an app which does have a messaging facility but parents are discouraged from using it to message us. Doesn't stop the complaints sent to me at bloody 9pm on a Friday night though.

I find that shocking, it must take the good off your whole weekend. I am so sorry that happens to you. I am a midwife and would be very upset to receive someone complaining about my care before a couple of days off. I cannot believe parents cannot put themselves in your shoes

One good thing to come out of school shut downs was our school setting up an email address for each class where you can contact the teacher directly. Pre-lockdown it was either get in touch via the office (a PITA for parents & office staff) or teachers collaring parents / parents collaring teachers at pick up, which was pointless for full-time working parents. But one thing I've noticed generally is that small things which our HT considers perfectly possible for our school - a bog standard 'Good' state primary with a not exactly salubrious catchment area & plenty of 'challenging' kids - are apparently unthinkable in lots of other schools thank fuck our school isn't run by MNers

I have had teachers email for quite a few years but that’s because DS is quite a complex child and so it’s a handy way for us to share information backwards and forwards with no time pressure to answer or hassle of trying to schedule a phone call.

In general though it would be go via the office or email the key stage email rather than the teacher directly.

I also have email for a lot of the professionals in his care for the same reason. Great for none urgent things

I have the email of senco and pastoral. Probably in email contact once/twice a week. DD has an EHCP and the placement is failing so I also have face to Face contact with her 1-1 and between one and all of the SLT on a daily basis. She is only in two hours so I have started turning my phone off when she's in as I was getting phone calls too.

Generally we have year group emails we can email. I think I've used that twice since September, both to try and figure work that I'm meant to be doing with DD in the mornings now she isn't in school apart from 1-3.

Some parents can be awful, even at DDs "nice" primary. When I email there is never an expectation of a fast response or out of hours etc. I never chase up.

I'm a secondary teacher.

This week I have had over 30 out of hours emails (by out of hours I'm saying past 9pm before 7am) and over 50 emails from parents with questions. One parent emailed me three times within a morning chasing for a response, they sent first email at 5am, second at 8 and third at 12 - I hadn't responded as I'd been teaching.

2 of those 50 e-mails actually needed me to answer. The rest either could have been sorted with the student speaking to me in lesson the next day, or the parent going to the school website.

It's so easy to say "turn your emails off" but right now we need to know ASAP if a child tests positive for COVID, and I keep my emails on because if students need me I want to be there to help them as I teach A-level so students often need help and advice with their uni applications / work.

It's frustrating for those who would only ever e-mail if needed but unfortunately the parents who e-mail just to moan about things such as why haven't I marked their child's exam paper (that they sat that day) yet or that their child got in trouble for no reason (when they swore at a teacher). I have one parent who e-mails me almost daily to moan about something (usually nothing that I can control), she also does it to other teachers in the school. I have no idea how she has so much time to complain but this ONE parent out of the 1600 at the school probably uses up about 4 hours of people's time throughout the week, every week.

It's tough - I keep my emails on as the students might need me, but it can be very tiresome.