To expect an appointment with all my child's teachers?

[ACTIVE123]

My only child has started High School for the first time this academic year.

Appointments have been made available for parent consultation evening (5 min zoom appointment per teacher) but despite looking at all slots, I can only get appointments with 4 out of 12 teachers.

I logged onto book only 2 hours after the email was sent saying appintments were made available.

I contacted the school and was told I'm on a waiting list as there are simply too many children to get an appointment with every teacher.

Am I being unreasonable to expect an apppointment with every teacher? Is this how it works at High School? Asking genuinely as I'm new to this and not sure if it's just me?

The school is an ofsted outstanding and is highly oversubscribed.

@T1Dmama most schools have different evenings per year group. It doesn't help you if you have more than one class in a year. Staffing issues and lower funding means this is happening more and more. All my full time colleagues have a year group with more than one group and we're a core subject. We can't see everyone in the time.

Pretty sure my parents didn't get to see all of my teachers in the 90s/00s either.

You absolutely should be able to see them once a year but sometimes it can prove impossible if a teacher has multiple classes in one year group (I once had 93 kids in one year group so couldn’t get through them even in a 3 hour parents’ evening!) That said, teachers are normally perfectly happy to arrange a 5 minute phone call if you haven’t been able to see them.

I’d be quite happy with a 5min zoom if needed. If the report showed no issues I probably wouldn’t bother.

YABU unfortunately, teachers tend to be given a 3 hour slot to see all children in that year group, 5 min appointments. So if for example they have 2 or more classes in that year group, it's just not possible to see all the parents.

If it's an in-person parents' evening I'd go and see if you can catch them when free as people definitely book slots and don't show, or you could ask for an email update

I very rarely go to parents' evenings seeing as the school send me a million emails a day.

You ANBU but this seems to be how it is. My DS started ‘big’ school this year too and we had the same situation. The appointments I managed to book were on a timer and the meeting closed automatically after 5minutes so we didn’t really learn that much about how our son was settling in. It was disappointing, particularly given the new school setting and the variety of subjects studied in comparison to primary school.

I just picked core subjects English, maths and science then picked PE because it's an area he enjoys for my year 7. I know his geography teacher personally and he's never had any negative behaviour points at all so assume all is well everywhere else. The only teacher who seemed to give me personalised comments was his PE teacher who raved about his abilities and told me about all the competitions he's getting him doing 🤣 the others gave me the usual 'doing well, well behaved, no concerns' 🤷 pointless tbh. I think they should just contact you if they want to speak to you (for both good and bad reasons)