Should teachers be allowed to speak to parents as they are spoken to?

[ProudCat]

Following on from a discussion on another thread. Can you imagine greeting the parent of a disruptive child and saying 'Oi, shithead, you smell like cheese.' Alternatively, in one of those conversations where a parent has complained because you've embarrassed little Johnny when they turned up to your lesson late with no book, no pen and no apparent interest in actually being there 'Well, the reason your darling is failing hard is because they literally don't give a crap and you've sent them that message, so if you want them to get anything out of school, and not be like you on universal credit living off chicken nuggets, maybe you should stop complaining about us and take a long hard look at your own parenting technique, that's if you can get off your back long enough to actually focus on anything that's not your latest deadbeat boyfriend.'

You see, this is what teachers actually know. We can wrap it up any way people want. We can believe (and many of us do) that all behaviour is an attempt to communicate. And as nice as it might be to offer the 80 billion excuses available at any given time, what the kids are communicating to us is that their parents are ridiculously ill-equipped to be actual parents. Oddly, I don't blame them for this. Huge spikes in poverty. Serious addiction issues. Overcrowded housing. Limited access to MH provision. People are drowning. But you know what? We (teachers) are not the enemy.

Why is it that parents and carers find it so hard to work with us? I'm from a really terrible background, don't own my own house, am even partial to a cut-price Spoons afternoon deal, so what gives? How did we get here? Why are we at each others throats? What would make a genuine difference?

But that’s the point @JLou08 , teachers are being gaslit into being social workers/psychologists/parenting experts as well as teachers for whole families.

Tricky parents (mostly properly middle class, in my experience) have always been part of the scene, and an understanding of what drives some aggressive behaviour is of course necessary.

But the sickness, recruitment and retention crises in teaching speak far louder than any opinions about teachers and their holidays.

I agree op.
I’m not a teacher.
I often think to myself if I turned up looking like the majority of the general public and behaved like them, the public would be horrified. Turning up late for appointments, yes we all know the ‘traffic is bad’ but hey, the staff have managed to get here.
Or answering phone calls whilst in an appointment, scrolling through their phone whilst I’m trying to speak to them. Christ, would they like it if showed them the same respect.
Or turning up stinking in scruffy clothes and eating in appointments.
Plus don’t talk to me about parents telling their child that I will discipline them. No, that’s not my job.

Teachers should be there to teach not parent. The parents should ensure their children are polite and respectful of others and now it even extends to expecting teachers to change nappies and toilet train, parents need to step up. There have always been families living in comparative poverty in crowded housing, etc, etc. The difference is in the past most parents would not have tolerated bad behaviour by their children or cheeking the teachers now a lot seem not to care at all.

I don't know what you do about it, it seems to be a shift in a part of society that someone else has to do everything for them including raising their children to be civilised human beings.

These days, the people with 'digital exclusion' would not be in receipt of benefits (which is something that's really irritating when posters go on about mobile phones and internet being luxuries for claimants, refugees, asylum seekers or any other vulnerable group).

It's far more accessible than expecting people to do everything by post - and safer/cheaper/easier than having them come in person when they only need to know their child's name and date of birth and their own name, address and contact details.

Another daily heil post with the ‘little Johnny’ trope.
no, teachers should not be allowed to be retaliatory.
teachers are doing a job where they are expected to teach and support students, not get emotionally invested and any decent teacher will understand that parents are emotionally invested to a huge degree and that this emotion will be evident when they are trying to support their kids.

teachers are so deskilled nowadays, wider, softer skills just aren’t being taught anymore, many teachers don’t respect their students or the families, the language often seen here is evidence of this.
many teachers do not have the life experience to work professionally and holistically with children and families .

Even a customer service advisor at Asda needs good communication skills, that's not asking then to be a social worker.
A social worker assesses a family's social care needs, do work with the parents to improve their parenting, work with the wider family to look for protective factors and ways to improve the childs life, they make decisions on the level of risk to inform the intervention, if needed they write court reports and draw on evidence from school, health professionals, police and the evidence they have gathered from their visits and work with the child and family. They look for placements for looked after children and support them settling into a placement and maintaining contact with their birth family safely. Teachers aren't doing this, they're not asked to be social workers.
Social workers also attend and contribute to EHCP reviews and education reviews for looked after children, they help find educational provision for children who need to move area, they help families develop routines to get children to school on time and do homework, but no ones claiming social workers are expected to do schools job.
Psychologists are highly trained in their role and assess and support children's educational abilities/mental health. Social workers and teachers are doing a bit of that too but we're not expected to be Psychologists, we're just expected to have an understanding of how to engage people and to treat people with compassion. The latter being something we should all just do as humans.
Safeguarding is everyone's responsibility and all professionals need to contribute but we all bring our own expertise and have our own role in that. Schools have pastoral teams and a DSL to enable them to do this without taking teachers away from the classroom.

Of course it's exaggeration to say that teachers are expected to be social workers and psychologists, but teachers do far more of both roles than your post implies.

When a child makes a disclosure, I am expected to know whether it is something to report instantly or not. The safeguarding lead may not be available on the phone to advise and I should work out whether I need to stop teaching and go and find them (while simultaneously finding someone who can watch my class). We then discuss any further questions needed, as we are expected to carry out safeguarding investigations (I've heard it many times that teachers aren't, but social care almost always direct us to ask further questions before they will even consider a referral, includig in cases where children have repeatedly disclosed physical harm from their parents). This did not happen 20 years ago.

Seeing an educational psychologist is almost impossible at the moment, unless a child is having an EHC needs assessment. Therefore, almost all assessment and support of pupils with highly complex needs is being done by teachers. The level of knowledge that SENCOs and teachers need of complex needs is not just "treating people with compassion." If I treat all pupils with the same compassion, this won't work when one has PDA, another CPTSD and another autism.

OP was unreasonable, but it is also unreasonable to downplay the complexity of the role.

I don’t know what cloud you live on @JLou08 , but primary schools certainly do not have ‘pastoral teams’, (whatever they may be), in my experience. The DSL is usually the senco, who probably has a full teaching timetable because of staff absence. The ddsl’s are often normal class teachers. Sometimes they’re management too, but often with many other responsibilities.
The next time I’m asked to attend an ehcp meeting, or write a report for the ed psych, or attend a family welfare meeting, or talk to a parent about their child’s potential school refusal, or listen to another parent swearing at me, or evacuate a class because a child is throwing chairs, or be asked for strategies for toilet training or one of the million other things that you think I’m not responsible for I shall say that you said actually all I should be doing is ‘being compassionate’ and see how well that goes down.

(All of the list above I have been asked to do recently as a medium term supply. So god knows what else real teachers have to do.)

I'm not downplaying the teachers role, I think it's a very skilled profession and most do an amazing job. Having a knowledge of SEND is what I see as part of that roe. Being able to meet different children's educational needs is not what I'm referring to when I say having compassion is required.

Having a knowledge of SEND is a reasonable expectation. School staff having no access to psychologists to support their pupils is not.

What is your point about compassion?

You got exactly what you asked for!

Your post. Literally your post states this.

Oh the temptation I used to have! I recall being told 'my taxes pay your wages' and being very tempted to say 'you've never got your arse out of bed to go to work for years! Who do you think provides your dole?', My standard response to these parents was a raised eyebrow and 'course you do'.
Similarly when they managed to find the school when their darling was in Year 11, they would come and tell us 'he/she needs a C to get on the course he/she wants, what are you doing about it?'. On more than one occasion I would stand up, offer my hand and say 'How do you do, I'm JudgeJ, I don't think we've met before and I've taught him/her since Year 8'. Luckily, they were usually too thick to get the message!

How is your tone in your op going to open any kind of dialogue?

My standard response to 'my taxes pay your wages' was that as they are my employer I would like to report a breach of safety that affects their employees.
Most didn't understand what I was getting at.