Why do schools alienate Dads?

[Dadsrule1234]

It has come to light during lockdown that my kids a school run a parent 1 and parent 2 system. I have asked them previously to email us both, but everything still comes to me only addressed to me. I am getting a complex because despite our 50/50 partnership as parents and both working full time I get every negative email about uniform and now home school. Is this normal? Why alienate the Dads they place a huge role. I don’t know how to approach this? The email about home schooling was really awful. I find it so strange that schools don’t value their parents anymore. Unless it’s just this one.. thoughts please.

Agree with everyone else. If it's that stressful put yourself as parent 2, and then he will deal with everything.

They "system" isn't only used for email it will be the same system used for attendance, allergies, progress results, the list is endless. Changing to a more fit for purpose system is a big project (I've done it) and very costly.
I don't disagree. The point is that whoever designed the system failed by not making it easy to email two contacts for the same child. I can totally accept that a lot of school are stuck with a sub-par system. It's just a bit annoying they were only offered/chose a sub-par system in the first place.

@DappledThings

They "system" isn't only used for email it will be the same system used for attendance, allergies, progress results, the list is endless. Changing to a more fit for purpose system is a big project (I've done it) and very costly. I don't disagree. The point is that whoever designed the system failed by not making it easy to email two contacts for the same child. I can totally accept that a lot of school are stuck with a sub-par system. It's just a bit annoying they were only offered/chose a sub-par system in the first place.

Perversely, the schools suffering most will be the ones who were quickest to communicate electronically with parents and have some of the earlier MIS systems with this feature. The issue has been identified and changed for later versions .

Oh god - can’t you just forward it?! Or ask the school to put him down too? Are you trying to blame to school for something here?

If you can’t cope with the stress of receiving an email you’re probably not suited to being parent 1 are you

It’s not remotely alienating Dads. You can choose who is parent 1.

It would be helpful if they could send to both as this is very tricky when you’re divorced / separated- I get a mixture between “why do i never know what’s happening” and “stop sending me all these messages” from exh, depending on whether I am forwarding them or not. I refuse to filter them for him though - it’s all messages or none!

Our school say their system will only allow one person per child to get all the messages If the one person was exh though they’d all be ignored and dc would miss out.

You just need to be quite direct to them about it. Also, realistically all emails should come to all parents. It's stupid to have a 1 parent, 2 parent system. Our school was only sending emails from class teachers/TAs to the first parent (that's me). But dh was sorting out much of the homeschooling initially because I had to work (and he is self-employed and was able to take some time off). He was completely lost and I was so confused, until we sat down and compared the emails and saw that he was receiving some (from office and HT) but not all (not the class ones). I complained to the school and it's been fixed and all parents get all emails now.

I think the issue is if the emails are time sensitive - about the login details for today or about work set for today - and they only get sent to one parent, then there is no guarantee that is the parent sitting around at home doing the homeschooling that day. It's stupidly set up to assume there is one default parent who does everything. But when you both have busy careers, you trade off. If some time sensitive emails get sent to one parent randomly and sometimes both, it relies on the default parent to be sitting around on their personal email all day at work to forward things to the parent who is at home doing the homeschooling. That's just not how lots of people's families work and it means the kids miss out.

We gave the school a joint email address to avoid this issue (as we both work and share childcare)

You must have agreed to be the contact it is a standard how you'd like to be addressed and who is the main contact.

Wow. I know schools get blamed for all sorts of shit but this is crazy. My broadband provider must be alienating dh as they only write to me, and the gas people are doing the same to me as they only write to him. Shocking!
As pp has suggested, get a joint email for you both, you can set it up to send the messages on somewhere else if you want.
In the midst of everything schools are dealing with I can't believe you're complaining about this.

We have parent 1 and parent 2 boxes in dd's school, and the school I teach at.

I put dh down as parent 1 so he's the one they contact in an emergency. But I put my email address down as the contact for homeschooling because I'm the parent most likely to be helping with school work (I'm a teacher, working from home, I can explain using the methods they use pretty quickly, dh would have to watch the video with dd to know the methods she needs to use, it's an efficiency thing) They're pretty good at contacting the right parent for each thing. When she was younger, they even allowed us to put the childminder down as an emergency contact (with her permission obviously) because she was far closer and could collect a poorly child quicker than either of us.

At my school, parent 1 tends to be the parent they live with, so if parents are still together they are both in the parent 1 spot and the phone numbers go in the order they've been written on the data collection form. If the parents live separately (quite a lot of them) then the non resident parent is parent 2 because they are less likely to be physically present to sort the issue out. We do try to respect the parents wishes about who gets contacted first, but occasionally mistakes get made.

As several others have said, set up a parent@... email address that automatically forwards all emails received to mum@... and dad@...
(You could also get utility bills etc sent to bills@.... which could be useful.)

You could also set up your mum@... so, when contacting the school, it can send emails as though they are being sent from parent@...

I'm so with you OP. In our case, DH is down as parent 1. Who do they call? Me. DH is a keyworker so did all the application for lockdown school place himself using his info. Who did they call to discuss it? Me. It really hurts him and I have raised it with the school who just brush it off with "well we've got hold of you now so we don't need to speak to him".

@jcyclops

As several others have said, set up a parent@... email address that automatically forwards all emails received to mum@... and dad@... (You could also get utility bills etc sent to bills@.... which could be useful.)

You could also set up your mum@... so, when contacting the school, it can send emails as though they are being sent from parent@...

This doesn't work with texts or calls.

@mindutopia

I think the issue is if the emails are time sensitive - about the login details for today or about work set for today - and they only get sent to one parent, then there is no guarantee that is the parent sitting around at home doing the homeschooling that day. It's stupidly set up to assume there is one default parent who does everything. But when you both have busy careers, you trade off. If some time sensitive emails get sent to one parent randomly and sometimes both, it relies on the default parent to be sitting around on their personal email all day at work to forward things to the parent who is at home doing the homeschooling. That's just not how lots of people's families work and it means the kids miss out.

Which is why you set your email up so that all school emails get auto forwarded to the other parent's account. It's not difficult to do.

Just forward the emails on to him op.

I had this with DC1 so with DC2 I put DH as the parent contact and purposely missed out my own email. They still contact me. Anyway I let DH do most of the homeschooling as I've given up fighting my own kids, and work is far too busy.
It is sexism.

We created a joint email for this reason so all the day to day stuff like newsletters and currently links to the online work is accessible to us both. Not as easy if you are separated but if parents are separated the system should tell them that. if you are togetheter you choose who is parent one and parent two, it's not sexist. When something happens and, as a teacher, I ring parents I almost always use mobiles so I start with parent 1s mobile. Their gender is irrelevant..

The school will just call the first person on the parent contact list. I can't believe people honestly believe they bypass dad because he's male. If they are ringing mum it's because at some point someone told the school she was "parent one"

It's just a database with a list of contacts in order of priority.

I work at a school and I always send everything to both parents. The system we have allows us to do that (if the correct box is ticked). However I guess it depends which software the school uses and what procedures the admin staff follow. We have lots of families where the parents don’t live together which is why I do it.

However at DDs school, I only get the emails. I just forward all relevant info to DH but they obviously have either different software or a different admin policy.

I also have had the experience of the primary ignoring contact 1, contact 2 and ringing me about a banged head as contact 3. DH was contact 1, 10 minutes away, childminder contact 2, 5 minutes away, me contact 3, an hour away. Had they even tried DH or the childminder? No. We just assumed you’d got it wrong and Mum would want to come and get him. Argh! So I’m not terribly charitable about this. To be fair after a year or so of me explaining that this wasn’t clever they now manage to ring us in the order we asked for before he started! I also had to explain why not having waiting lists for clubs (back in the day) and telling people as they dropped their child off to go and sign up was very unfair on those DC who had two parents who worked. Sigh!

@Clymene

It's weird that people are incapable of setting a rule on their email to forward all emails from a particular sender but expect schools to input twice the amount of email addresses into their system for convenience

I think it’s weird that people are keen to put up with systems that perpetuate the ‘primary contact’ thing when there are two parents with (hopefully) equal input and responsibility.

Changing systems for the better at primary schools would benefit everyone.

I prioritise my children's chronically underfunded school spending their limited funds on improving my children's education @NoSquirrels.

Migrating to a new system is a costly and labour intensive exercise which I would put low down a list of priorities as a 'nice to have'

Yea, get that Clymene. But if no one ever raises the issue with school they never even get it put on a “if we had the funds this would be beneficial” list. So that next time they do need to update a system it’s not even in the criteria because “no one needs it”.

It’s not forcing them to spend funds on that vs iPads now or the creative curriculum. It’s raising an issue that could be progressively beneficial instead of leaving it up to personal responsibility. Change happens gradually. Secondary schools have managed to shift to systems where both parents are contacted by email. Primary schools should have this as an aim too.