AIBU to find schools terrible comms frustrating?

[FFSandmoreFFS]

DD started Y3 today.

school have always had pretty poor communication but they’d get there eventually with everything.

they are getting worse and worse and it’s driving me nuts. Every email they send it terrible - either conflicting info, missing key info, leaving everyone with loads of questions and often they just make no sense!!

they decided to bring school dinners and breakfast/after school club in-house this year. It’s now lunchtime on the first day of term…. no info about school dinners (how to pay, meal options, how to sign up) and no info about after school club (does my child act have the place I requested?? How to pay, where to collect from afterwards)

people are ringing and emailing but getting no proper response.

how can they not see that this is unacceptable??

what is the best thing to do? Write to governors? Involve PTFA? They seriously need training or resources or something to improve what’s going on!!

argh….. stressed rant over!! 🤣

Yep same here. When my DC1 started school in 2011 it was terrible, still no better as she goes into year 11 (different school).

My DC2 goes to a different primary and they have been great so far, but they do assume you have a Facebook/ twitter account which not everyone does 🙄

School office jobs are meant to be sought after

Not so much now that so many people can work from home in other, better paid jobs. When my kids were in primary school I knew former lawyers and accountants who were looking for school jobs, so they could be with their own children after school and in the holidays, but now those same people would be able to work relatively flexibly from home with no drop in pay.

in the (large secondary) schools I’ve taught in, the people responsible for admin are also likely to be responsible all or some of first aid (an almost endless stream of kids requiring attention), the school minibus, lost property, managing cover teachers and the reception desk. It’s not like a normal comms/admin role. You get emails to send out from teachers/leadership who all work in different buildings and are teaching most of the day so send you stuff they’ve rushed off in break or before school. It’s unusual to see it running really well because it’s generally a slightly mad, hugely stretched system. Not great, but not because people are being deliberately lazy or think it doesn’t matter.

I couldn't agree with you more OP.

My children's primary school is diabolical where communication is concerned. The last time, just before the summer break, a letter was sent out regarding an event that was happening - the very next day!

I spoke to the HOS about this, and he informed me he had had a very urgent issue to deal with, and that is why it was delayed being sent out. I simply asked him if he had heard of using delegation - and he was a bit stuck for words to say the least!

Another time, school decided to lock one of the entrance doors (been used for years) and the children had to access school via another classroom. The poor kids were left standing outside, with their classmates knocking on the windows trying to point where they needed to go! At the very least a notice could have been put on the entrance door telling them where to go.

Honestly, I could go on and on about this....

Communication. It is the most basic thing ever, but something that is rarely executed effectively.

Oh, and don't even start me on spelling mistakes!

One of mines school is the same its an absolute joke - it's primary. On more than one occasion they have sent an email out at 7-8pm saying 'don't forget! It's bla bla bla day tomorrow so your child needs to come dressed in xyz and bring 123 with them'
Cue me trawling through the last 3 months of emails and weekly newsletters and nope no fucking mention of bla bla bla day anywhere yet you still have the nerve to put 'don't forget' putting full blame on the parents knowing full well there has never been any communication sent out about it.
Oh there's a Facebook group ran by the receptionists but you aren't allowed to post anything negative about the school or it gets deleted straight away and replaced with a snotty message reminding the parents of the 'groups intended purpose'. Amazes me how the receptionists are so hot on policing the Facebook group but not at doing their actual job 🙄

I'm a teacher and I'm not surprised you are infuriated with this. I'm not sure why some schools make it so hard to communicate with their parents. I visit different schools in my role and was looking on the website for one school for their calendar so I could mark their INSET days in my diary. Could I find it on that site? Could I heck! Other schools had it really accessible but this one, no. Same with trying to find out new teachers' names for my caseload - some schools have no photos, some no names only photos, some don't get the new staff attached to the new classes over the holidays so I'm going into schools not even knowing who the teacher is.

For a parent it must be worse so I'm not looking forward to my DS going next year! I've previously taught in many schools and they've all been okay, so I shall be hoping his new school is okay!

No advice, just bags of sympathy!

P.S. @NeverDropYourMooncup I hope my spelling and grammar is sufficient for you.

DDs school have sent absolutely nothing to do with the new academic year, we weren't even told classrooms or how to get to them, so it was chaos this morning with parents trying to work out where children should be.

Also no option to purchase lunches, been quite a few complaints about that on the school Facebook particularly those who're on FSMs.

Well, personally, I'd have put a comma between 'no names' and 'only photos', created a somewhat less dense body of text through the use of paragraphs and slightly fewer exclamation marks.

But nevertheless, you're definitely one of the better ones. You know the difference between their and there and where to place an apostrophe for staff names, for a start.

They're written by teachers, mostly, then sent to the admin with about 5 minutes' notice 'This MUST go out right now this very second', etc.

We think the same things as you.

Doesn’t anyone oversee Comms as a whole going out?

Isn’t there a weekly/monthly meeting where Comms is discussed and planned out alongside what activities/events are happening?

I can’t see how schools seem to communicate so badly - surely this approach must be more stressful for teachers too? Unless it’s a sudden emergency I can’t see why this would happen so regularly.

It would need to have the input of somebody who actually knows the technical side of how communications go out and how parents respond.

But that's not a teacher/SLT, so they wouldn't be listened to. Teaching staff don't want to be concerned with the minutiae of the apps and how they select particular fields, that it's going to take 6 hours to put letters in envelopes and individually label them then sort them into class order or that giving admin the spreadsheet with a field for class on it would mean they'd be able to filter and sort alphabetically then create a mail merge, rather than a 'just send it to those who need it in year 6' or a screenshot of a non sorted list where each letter has to be edited manually.

In short, teachers are great at communicating learning concepts. They're frequently not anywhere near the same level in communicating in good time or understanding the practicalities of mass communication and administration.

Yesterday DD Y2 arrived home with a reading book in her book bag which is leagues ahead of where she is, it's a 150 page chapter book with complex language and she's not there yet. I've heard through the grapevine that she isn't expected to read it, they were just told to choose any book they like the look of to read with their adult. We figured it out by piecing things we'd heard together on the parents WhatsApp chat. If I ask DD anything about school she always says 'I don't know' or 'I can't remember'.
Also we don't know which days PE is yet. Someone thought it might be Wednesdays and Fridays so I've sent kit in.
All par for the course.

Trying to say this as diplomatically as possible...sometimes when the admin roles are terribly paid and the role encompasses a tonne of duties for that low wage the quality isn't always...good. It used to be the case that plenty would apply as its term time work but here anyway that's not the case anymore and the quality of applicants isn't always great. Not saying in this case its their fault and its likely a combination of other things as well but yeah, schools need better investment basically.