To be dreading face to face parents evening Thursday

[IHateParentsEvenings]

Going to get flamed to a crisp, never mind.

I am dreading it … teaching all day and then three solid hours between 4 and 7 talking to parents, some will be lovely but there will be some really difficult ones, won’t be able to be cut off after five minutes, will enjoy making me justify every detention since September.

Then home exhausted and still got the next days planning to do …

sorry MN, I dread it.

@CoralBells Only one teacher, she was really helpful providing resources for the next topic. The others made it clear that I had to get help from the SENCO, we were already in regular contact. The teacher I really needed to speak to (English) didn’t log on and ignored my request for a chat.
This year DS started year 9 in another school, an independent paid for our LA, and it’s been a far more positive experience.

Apart from being a tiring, long day I tended to enjoy parent's evenings and meeting the parents and often the pupil in a different context, and it did tend to give a good boost to the teaching relationship.

Being secondary in a foundation subject, my slots tended to be booked by the pleasant pupils with positive feedback. I tended to be phoning up those where difficult conversations were required as needed anyway.

Personal relationships and a sense of school community are important and it worries me that an impersonal online world is replacing it.

5 minute slots where a teacher dominates the dialogue is not good. Sometimes parents can throw up things that weren't evident and get them addressed, and shutting them out is not productive even if it feels good on the night. There are completely unrealistic parents, but most parents do want what is best for their child, and proper dialogue is important in getting parents and teachers working together to achieve that.

I'm not a teacher, but I pity the teachers who teach my colleagues' kids. My colleagues are forever ranting about how they ideally want half an hour with each teacher, spread out over weeks and weeks, they want to know precisely what number in the class their child is, they want to know what the teacher is doing about 'inserting parenting issue here', they want to know why their child isn't getting more attention for being so gifted and talented...

Notwithstanding this, they all arrive glowing the day after with stories of how their children are top of every class they're in.

I get exhausted listening to them all. I've no idea why anyone would be a teacher, but thankfully for my colleagues some are prepared to do it.

Parents' evening always struck me as a waste of time as a kid. If there's no issues then there's really not a lot of point in going.

Clients hold service providers to account all the time, not just in teaching. Trip advisor, booking.com, twitter, Facebook, instagram, Trustpilot are just some of the platforms where individuals and companies offering a service are analysed, reviewed, praised or complained about. What's worse anyone can write anything it doesn't actually have to be true.

Poor you. I always had sympathy for the teachers - now our school has stayed with online meets and it's so much better! Yes many of the teachers stay at school to do it, but tight schedule (with some breaks for the teachers), no standing around overhearing about other kids, no racing around a hall, no awful cheap wine. Teachers seem to prefer it too - they know who they will see next and know that the five minutes really is five minutes!

Great news 🙂

Well it would be good online if the popular teachers didn’t get fully booked within ten minutes of the booking system going live.

It was for this reason I was unable to see my sons core subject teachers even for 5 minutes so I technically didn’t get a parents evening this year.

I'm not a teacher but I was reading an article that said the average well being score of teachers is at clinical depression level currently. So I'm glad our school parents voted to keep PE online if it helps teachers.

I think online parents evenings are great. As a parent of teens, it saves so much time as no need to traipse around the school building, everyone keeps to time and as there is a cut off point so time is limited, I’ve found that the conversation is more focused around the key things I need to know about my child’s learning without lots of faff and chat.

As a primary school teacher, I think online meetings are an efficient form of communicating information about each child’s learning, friendships and behaviour in school. Where I teach there are many opportunities for parents to contact their child’s teacher outside of parents evening - in person at the class door, via email (we have to give parents our work email) or by phone call. This is the time to bring up and discuss issues with parents as there is no strict time limit.

We have 3 parents evenings a year and each one is spread over 2 nights so 6 late evenings a year. Each parent gets 10 minutes and separated parents can have their own slot each. It does make for a long working week as the school still insists that teachers run their extra curricular clubs at break or lunch and we still have after school staff meetings on top of the usual planning, teaching, marking and assessing. It’s also very intense teaching the day’s lessons are like doing 5 x1 hour presentations then switching straight into time limited parents meetings often 15 of these and they can be back to back (no gaps between appointments on our online system.) We do have some parents who scrutinise and question every word we say so we can’t afford to make any mistakes or word something that they will take umbrage with.

What I find really frustrating is the amount of chasing we’ve had to do as teachers to see all the parents. There seems to be a growing apathy from some parents and we’ve had to email, phone and chase at the door to speak to them. I also get annoyed when parents book an appointment and don’t log in or answer their phone at this time to do the appointment. We’ve had some parents book their appointment, not show up then ask us to call them back at 9pm when they’ve put their children to bed. That’s unreasonable and shows a lack of respect for the teacher’s time especially when we’ve bent over backwards already to accommodate the parent . Thankfully this is the minority of parents though.

By popular do you mean ‘in demand’?
Teachers who have 30 spaces to see a particular year group but actually teach 3 or more classes (80-90 children) within that year group?

You’re right, there is not enough time.

@ICannotRememberAThing

Yes in demand, core teachers. I don’t claim to have the answers but my nephew is in year 9 at the same school and has never managed to book a slot for maths or English despite going on quickly when it goes live. So the whole parents evening at my kids school is just a smoke screen.

We've not had a parent's evening in our household specifically because the areas we live in have very poor internet facilities for managing teams/zoom calls.

We're laid-back parents, so shrug and hope it'll go back to a human connection. If it doesn't then we'll have zero interaction with the school regarding our children's education.😶

Can your child’s teachers phone you instead of video call @Hrpuffnstuff1 ? This is not ideal but better than no contact at all. We have been told to chase 3 times and offer a video call or a phone call then the attendance figures for parents evening go to the head teacher so we’d be trying to work with you so we could find a solution.

It must be very difficult at secondary.

My DD is at Primary and the meeting lasts 10-15 min. It is spread out over a couple of weeks. This year they have done an option of online or in person. I really don't get on with online so really glad to be able to go in in person. I found it really useful to be able to ask questions that you don't really want to bother the teacher with at the end of the day. The teachers talk about the DC's progress and set goals with them. The only thing I find is that as these meetings happen with the DC present, you can't talk about things you'd like to but it would be inappropriate to talk about in front of your DC.

I know the ex-wife is never in, however trying to hold an important phone call is virtually impossible unless I drive a mile away and sit in the car.

It is what it is. Both children are progressing fine.

I loved the online thing during COVID as it kept everyone to time but tbh I have been lucky enough since we left the UK to have my kids in schools where we could always schedule a meeting with any teacher we wanted within a week or so with no time limits if we felt the need. We rarely did.

Ours was online last week for 10 mins - perfect! Everyone runs to time and it’s video.

Enough for a chat about things going well and a couple of areas to improve on. We really like the teacher and were happy with what she said/it was a fair reflection.

I see lots of people think the parent teacher meetings should only be online. I think this makes it really tough for some people like those with mental illness or autism for example. This could lead to some people being unable to access these meetings.

Equally, face to face in a massive, noisy, busy hall where you have to find the right teachers and judge when to jump in can be very stressful.

Yes, but when I was a child, my mother didn't attend a single parents' evening in Secondary because her disability meant she couldn't walk there (and it would have involved being out after dark and around more people in an unfamiliar location, which she didn't do, either). So having online ones actually increases access for others.

I have had unprompted feedback from several parents with additional needs or mental health problems this year who said they much prefer online parents evening as they find coming into school to do them face to face too overwhelming.

I’m sure a lot of neurodivergent people, and those with mental illness would also prefer online.

And a lot of people with physical illnesses and disabilities would, too.

Oh you are so very very far from unreasonable op! 10 minute appointment slots with an automatic cut off? No traipsing all round the building then finding they're running late so you either wait for that and miss another subject or go to the other one and miss that. Loved the online ones.
There's a consultation on at dc's school at the moment to see if we stick with online going forward. I hope so!

We all have crap parts of our job… suck it up. I can assure you most parents dislike face to face PE too!! Much preferred the online 5 mins slot! I feel if there are any proper issues that the teachers should have already been in touch!

I had no problems at all with parents who were keen and interested, but I did sometimes want to scream (quietly!) when, after an in-depth summary of the English secondary syllabus, they would ask brightly: 'Do you teach spelling?'