Can’t contact teacher directly, is this normal?

[ggmom87]

We’ve just moved, and our children are starting at a new primary school. I just learned that there is no way to contact class teachers directly, we’re not given their email address. All communications to teachers must go through the office and be forwarded onward. The office has a fairly bad reputation for not responding to emails / taking weeks to respond etc. I’ve already experienced this firsthand. So this whole arrangement makes me feel quite cut off from their teachers. Is this normal? At their old school we could email teachers with questions and concerns.

Probably the schools who have entitled parents 😜

Absolutely the norm
I would work in a school where I could be contacted directly. Parents abuse the system and it never ends well

1000x this! I will never (again) work at a school where parents have my email address.

My school is probably the direct opposite of a private school. A member of staff from each class escorts the children out at home time so that if parents want to speak to them they can. In fact, every school I’ve worked in, all inner city state schools, have done this.
You don’t have to pay out thousands to get nice teachers who care about your children’s well-being you know.

My DM is a teacher and class dojo drives me berserk! Bad enough that she gets home after 6 and then starts working again in the evening, but now also the nonsense that parents send at evenings and weekends expecting a reply.

Really unhealthy and damaging for any workplace to expect employees to be contactable 24/7 like this.

@Unihorn - I agree with you! But parents should be able to contact their child’s teacher directly, rather than going via a busy school office (and where, IME, errors can be made and messages not passed on). A one day turnaround for a reply is fine - but I do reply!

Before covid we had to email office who passed on messages but now we have the teachers email addresses. But I can imagine some parents have become pains in the arses having direct contact!

This is so true. Mental health issues in teachers is worryingly high.

Normal.

It's a shame some parents have abused the use of new technologies and therefore this has had to happen.

But I've worked in education for decades and if you really need to pass on a message to a teacher they generally don't mind a written note in the book bag the child passes over.

But use this only for serious - must get message across now - type exchanges - where you can't catch the teacher before class.

For example "Nan was rushed to hospital at the weekend and Lucy is quite upset".

Most teachers I know would absolutely want to know this info to support your child and would prefer direct info rather than getting it from the office 24 hours later having had an upset Lucy all day.

Our Class Dojo has a message that tells parents it will only be looked at between 8.15am and 5pm. In reality, we may well look at messages out of those hours, but we don’t reply to them out of core hours.

One of my friends gave up a responsibility post at secondary school (related to SEN) partly because she had parents emailing her up to 20 times a day.

I’m a primary teacher. Parents have access to our email addresses, but the head has requested that parents direct all correspondence through the office.

This is for a few reasons.

The first is so that teachers only get forwarded emails during working hours. Before this rule, if you had an email from a parent at 9pm, you’d feel obliged to deal with it immediately and/or stress about it half the night. Now that parents know we won’t read emails during evenings and weekends, they make appropriate appointments or come to the office at the end of the day.

It also gives the 9pm keyboard warriors a bit of time to cool down and think before sending. We had an incident of parents picking on a vulnerable staff member by email in the evenings. Once those parents realised others would read it first, they stopped being so nasty and the situation was dealt with more constructively.

Our office manager reads the emails first and may direct them to the management instead of the teacher if she thinks it’s appropriate. I’ve been teaching long enough that I can deal with the wrath of an upset parent, but some of our newly qualified teachers fare better with the support of senior management involved. It’s better for the child involved too, particularly if you think the teacher is not getting it right.

Finally, if you’re emailing about a need for support or you have a real concern about your child, if the email goes through the office, it is appropriately logged. If it’s just sent to the teacher, there is a chance it might not be.

Normal.

@Goatinthegarden absolutely!

So you’re “that” parent, I guess, with an attitude towards office staff like that 🙄

Yes - At my son's school you have to send an email to the main email address, it gets forwarded to the Head of Year and you get a reply within 48 hours. If something is urgent you can phone the school and if the administrator agrees it's urgent they will go to the classroom and speak to the teacher straight away.

Quite often issues can be dealt with by admin and the teacher doesn't need to be bothered, admin can deal with forgotten lunch boxes by ordering a school dinner, can look in lost property for a child's missing jumper, can run up to a classroom and get a child being collected for an appointment etc. Also, many issues can be dealt with by the classroom assistant, for example my son forgot where he put his PE kit and the classroom assistant helped him search the classroom for it while the teacher carried on with the teaching.

It's a shame some parents have abused the use of new technologies and therefore this has had to happen.

New technology has made it worse, but it's not new. My late aunt was a teacher. She retired in the 1980s. Her phone number was always ex-directory, because otherwise parents would call her at home. She had an unusual surname, so she could easily be identified if she was in the phone book.

My school has an open door policy and emails for everyone on the school website.

DD's school is email the office, but you can talk to the teacher at pick up, there is a home school communication book, and whenever I needed to talk to someone head/office/teacher I was always able to so it doesn't make much of a difference.

This. Our inboxes we’re getting clogged up with this kind of thing and we were missing important staff communications, so we switched to Seesaw. Means instant reply, and we can set a daily time to check them. I reply instantly to simple things and can send a holding message for other things to deal with when I have time without impacting on daily planning etc.

Are you sure the school doesn’t have something like this OP?

Oh ok. We aren't paying thousands just for that you know.

It’s normal and should be. Unfortunately some parents just don’t understand boundaries.
We started using class dojo for messaging last year as a continuation from lockdown - obviously it was necessary for home learning - and it caused a whole load of problems. Parents just messaging a lot of inane crap that, if they had to go through the office first, they probably would have thought twice about sending. A lot of the messages had to be relayed back to the office, we told parents they shouldn’t contact teachers about appointments, dinners, buying uniform and stuff like that but they don’t seem to take it in. Also, a very worrying amount of of abuse - because it’s easier to gob off via email than to say rude things face to face. And parents kicking off because the teacher didn’t reply within an hour - even though their message was sent at something like 9 o’clock in the evening.
The head teacher had to compose and send out a very strongly worded letter with terms of how to use dojo (he already sent out two previously with guidance) and made it clear if things didn’t improve we would scrap it this year.

Totally normal. As a HT I don't allow unfettered email traffic to my staff. They have quite enough to do. Everything goes through the office and if we have put notices out in the bulletin, we ignore request for repeating information. There is nothing that needs to be emailed. You can come in and leave a message at both ends of the day or you can write a quick note. I would ban emails if I could. They have unnecessarily increased an already overburdened teacher's work load.

What makes you think I am trying to contact the school during the summer holidays? What a weird a assumption. I’ve been in touch with the school since February, toured it in March, applied in May, received a spot in June, and they’re starting in September. I’ve had months of back and forth communication and it’s been slow and painful, and other parents at the school who I know agree that office communication is very poor.

Thank you for actually answering my question. It makes more sense now.

When did I say I was unhappy with the school? 🤔