To be sick of hearing school information from pta mums in the group chat

[seasid]

basically my sons school have cheapened out this year, less money to spend sending out texts and no app use to communicate with parents. We have a class group chat that the PTA set up and it’s on mute, but every now and then I open it and get informed ‘school uniform on Friday’ when there’s no sign of it being on the website or ‘download this app for homework this week’ or ‘bring £3 in for ingredients tomorrow’.

I'm too busy to scroll through these hundreds of text messages on this group every single day just to get critical information, so am I unreasonable in thinking that the teachers should be giving this information via the website/bookbag etc and not leaving it to hearing it from other parents????

Are you missing a weekly newsletter or something? How are the pta members getting the information?

I literally have it from every angle, whatsapp group, email and private messages from parents, I’ll probably get it delivered by a bloody pigeon soon too!

If the group chat is your only way of receiving this info, it sounds like the group needs to be more organised to not bombard the chat with unimportant items. If there’s something upcoming, one of the Mums will usually ‘pin’ this for ease. Or there’s always the super organised Mum who collates all the info in one text. Any other parents commenting on the chaos?

They’re not putting this information on the newsletters. It seems like they’re having PTA meetings and getting the information and having a class ‘representative’ that the class teacher gives the information to so they can put on the chat.

Im missing many information as I have to put the chat on mute as they send hundreds of messages daily having a conversation among themselves, so the information gets lost within the chat. I think it’s completely unprofessional that it’s not hard to put this stuff on the school website or an alternate medium and not leave it to hearing it from other parents.

At minimum there should be one group chat for "chat" and one group chat purely for notifications. But I agree school should be notifying the class parents, not another parent.

Don’t the children have home/school diaries or communication books for exactly this sort of thing?

If that's the case, they should make a separate group where only the "admin" (PTA member) is able to send messages. My old church group was like this, much easier.

Also, how stupid not to have it communicated even by email or something!

We have one annoying yolk who screenshots all messages from the school within nanoseconds of them arriving and puts it in the class group chat. Yes, we all got the notification. She is also always fizzing with excitement as soon as the reports drop. 'Reports are up!'

This is odd. I'm the PTA class rep. I'm not privy to any information about the school that anyone else is. I'm not a conduit for information about non-uniform days or anything other than PTA specifically related stuff. So I will send a message reminding people when there's a bake sale after school. But I know no more about available apps or homework or anything else

School should be sending reminders about these via email and it should be in tbe weekly news letter. I’d never catch up on WhatsApp messages like that.

It’s the school’s responsibilty to communicate directly to its parents. I’m sure there will be some statutory expectation on this. I’d make a formal complaint through the complaints policy on the school website. I know budgets are tight but communication with your key stakeholders is a pretty fundamental requirement.