Parents are not customers?

[Avocadostone]

I have come from a corporate environment into a support role leading other support staff in a new school with a growing positive reputation. Since I started, we as a team we have always focused on ensuring that we deal with parents in a very professional way, I also keep an eye on social media, and when parents are grumbling about something (in number) and we could have done better I follow it up at school. Head has told me that basically he doesn't want me to pander to social media and that parents are not customers, and to paraphrase, it's our school so they can like it or lump it. Unless they email us, I'm to ignore it (unless it's a burning issue). I feel like the rug has been pulled out from beneath me. Is this how most schools see things? I tried to explore with the head how social media is useful and how many people communicate this way, but the Head has a very traditional /fixed view on this. It has really upset me, and I will of course do as instructed, but I've spend most of the weekend wondering if this is right job for me. We never even got to discuss the impact on students through poor /inaccurate comms etc...another example is school events? I asked if we could collate a plan for the year of key school events and was told, no, a couple of months notice is sufficient. It's driving me up the wall. I'm offloading as I guess I either do the same as parents - lump it or like it! I am very near to lumping it!!!

My DC attended some really expensive schools and yet I didn't consider us customers.

However, we did expect a high level of service ( in return all the schools expected a high level of commitment from us all).

I don't doubt that may happen in some schools.

The solution is for those schools to be better, not adopt a customer service style approach inspired from retail/corporate environments and waste time entertaining whingers on social media.

I agree that schools shouldn't use social media as a customer service /communication channel.

But I am baffled that schools that affect to be truly interested in or committed to a partnership with parents isn't interested in knowing what is being said about them by parents in social media or any other public forum - not to address directly, but to reflect internally whether the issues raised are reasonable, and if so what can be done to address them.

Social media is such a rich source of insight into the views of a self-organised community. To assume it's all entitled parents whinging about acrylic nails, or whatever, is pretty dismissive.

Social media is such a rich source of insight into the views of a self-organised community. To assume it's all entitled parents whinging about acrylic nails, or whatever, is pretty dismissive
But if we're being honest, most of the people who get all keyboard warrior, circle jerk on social media do tend to be the people who just love a whinge.

Without being funny, there are many things that have annoyed me about situations, but I rant to DH or a friend and then move on. It would be very easy to quickly fire things off on social.media when it isn't big enough for me to feel like raising it properly.

Most of the complaining stuff I see on social media is just people whining about small things but who are too lazy to do anything.

Social media can be great. I've used it in my teaching and pre teaching roles. I still wouldn't want to have lots of resources on the 'they who shout loudest' bunch.

But if we're being honest, most of the people who get all keyboard warrior, circle jerk on social media do tend to be the people who just love a whinge.

I think we have very different experiences of the sorts of conversations that happen about schools on social media, which is of course fine. If that's your principal experience I can see why you're so dismissive of it when it comes to how Sofia media can be used to build effective relationships with parents.

Anyone looking at the open Facebook groups related to our local school, or even the class WhatsApp group, would come away with the main impression that the school could probably do a much better job of communicating expectations to parents based on the overwhelming volume of 'does anyone know about x, y, z, what they're supposed to wear on x day, whether children not attending y should also bring a packed lunch' etc.

Thank heaven for the parents with older children, and thank heaven for social media. Without it I'm sure the school would hold me in even greater disdain than it already does.

See I don't mind parent groups. Set up a closed group that anyone can join and share information etc. None of that bothers me and to be honest, even an open group of parents sharing info is perfectly reasonable.

(Hell, we have a staff whatsapp group for when we forget what time the meeting on thursday goes on til and 'what did Dave want sending to him - all information we've been given but have totally forgotten)

The type of thing I'm irriated by are the ones where school has a page or people set a page up and on those pages it's just people claiming nobody told them information that's on tje website etc.

E.g. I saw one for a local school where a recent post to was about how someone was annoyed with the way some children were biking/scootering/walking home from a weekend sports fixture. Apparently this was a sign of a massive behaviour problem in the school and they were in two minds whether to call the police if the school didn't deal with it. The circle jerk this time was from other residents about how awful the (very good!) school is because at the end of the day children were in a group at the bus stop!! And the local shop gets busy.

Another local school had their annual uniform circle jerk. Parent shared to school page and then there's hundreds of commenta about why the school is crap, why the teachers are perverts, how isolation is a joke and they'll tell their child to leave etc.

Those are annoying (and the parents in our school do a pretty good job of self-policin social media channels to avoid that).

But that's what I'm saying - the school, if aware of what was being said, can choose what to ignore and what warrants reflection. The message put out by many schools is 'don't dare suggest we're not perfect, what would you know, you're only a parent.'

Do you know why I so love my eldest child's secondary? Because they LISTEN. I don't necessarily expect them to agree every time but it is so depressing when you have a school like my other kids' primary where their first response to any query, however benign, is to be defensive. And actually they aren't always correct and it would do them no harm to occasionally acknowledge that. Now to be fair this hasn't played out of social media but some schools are instantly dismissive of so much of parents' concerns. Same school told my friend that her child was school refusing because she was a weak parent. Fast forward and he's got an autism diagnosis, is in a special school and acknowledged to be severely affected by anxiety. My eldest does little work in class and wouldn't attend open revision sessions. He has aspergers, is severely affected by anxiety and struggles to put pen to paper for ambiguous tasks despite being highly intelligent. He is also so seriously inhibited that he can't go to an off timetable session unless it is timetabled, in case someone asks him what he's doing. School only have this level of understanding of him because they listen and work with me, they don't assume they know best.

Other child is in a different secondary who are less good at listening. He is bottom end of top stream, with 7,8,9 targets for GCSEs across the board. But he won't get all 7s plus. So in his exams he gets 'below expectations' in a bunch of subjects. I have said to the head and head of year, as have a number of other parents, that this is really unhelpful as firstly it's very negative, and secondly it doesn't tell us enough as parents. Is 'below expectations' on target for a 6, which is fine, as he's a borderline top streamer, or is he on target for a 2 in which case he needs a kick up the arse? No idea. School resolutely ignoring this as they have raw scores so I assume they know. But they don't tell us parents! Ridiculous.

School are probably resolutely ignoring your queries about target grades, oldbirdy because they are a load of nonsense re the new GCSEs and they don't actually know at the moment what he is on target for, certainly not to the level of detail you are expecting.

Noble I realise that, but surely they know if he has just slipped under very high targets, or if he got 5 percent and it's a serious concern? But I don't know as his mum, just that they deem him below the expected level 7 they have as his target.

I work in education so I get that no one quite knows what a 7 will look like. But if they say he's below it, they could surely say "just below" or "miles away"??

School are probably resolutely ignoring your queries about target grades, oldbirdy because they are a load of nonsense re the new GCSEs and they don't actually know at the moment what he is on target for, certainly not to the level of detail you are expecting

Then surely school is capable of explaining this - and putting context around 'below expectations'?

Doesn't your DS know his results? Kids generally know roughly where they fall in the class.

I would have been very reluctant to give out info like 'just below' a particular grade for the new GCSE. I just didn't know.

Just look st this as temporary and find work in a private school when you have enough experience. Public sergeants uronically rarely care about the people that they serve.

I don't care what grade he might get. He's a good kid and a hard worker. That isn't the point really. Its the use of a system which is not fit for purpose.

They put him in the academic stream and arbitrarily say that the target for this stream is 7,8 or 9 in GCSEs. I know my son and he's not a 10 As kind of kid. He'll get a few As, some B's and some Cs (in the old grades). That's fine. However if they put him in the middle stream, I assume they think it wouldn't challenge him as he'd be on target for 4,5,6 only. Of course if they did put him in that stream he'd be "above expectations" in a bunch of his exam results, with exactly the same scores.
It's telling a kid who is working to the best of his ability, but is a borderline candidate for the top stream, that he has scored "below expectations" in 5 subjects. When he could be just a mark or two off "expected progress" or thirty marks off. As parents we get no info except the "below expectations" and don't know whether to say "never mind you did your best" or "buck your ideas up".
I believe they were told raw scores in class but we were not given any, and in any case raw scores wouldn't tell us how far below his arbitrary expectation he was, unless the school said 70 percent was expected standard and he scored 65 or something (which would be much more helpful).

You're right that the system isn't fit for purpose, but it's not like the school could replace it with something brilliant, but isn't.

Do you want to know how I have filled these things out in the past? I've thought about the kid and gone 'gut feeling, they're about a 5'. Then I'll do the rest of the class, cast my eye back and see I've put Jonny at a 5, but Billy at a 6, and Jonny is better than Billy so I either bump Billy up or knock Jonny down. Scientific it isn't! The school is probably hoping to keep the wizard behind the curtain.

What comes up in these posts is that parents who feel they should be seen as customers want to be the primary concern and centre of the school's focus.

The only reason schools and teachers have interest in parents is because they are a component part of successfully teaching the child. The child is the primary focus. Parents seeing themselves as customers however unconsciously take over and dominate that focus, distort the focus to their own interests and views, and the school has to put the children and education first.

Really, Miss Haversham? In what way is wanting to have at least some idea of how far below target my son is a distortion of school agenda to my own interests and views?

MissHavisham the only reason state schools have an interest in parents in my experience is to seek donations and volunteers for menial tasks. Ours had the cheek to ask for parent volunteers to make tea for teachers on parents evening.

I made a couple of DD's teachers a cup of tea at Parents evening and that was at Private school!!
They were doing 2 hours solid with no breaks and it was no big deal for me to get them a cuppa
I look at teachers both at State and Primary as being in a sort of partnership with me working towards a good school experience for my dc and if I can contribute in terms of time to facilitate that then I will.
I thank them when things go well and I question when they don't but I would NEVER consider myself a customer

Parents seeing themselves as customers however unconsciously take over and dominate that focus, distort the focus to their own interests and views, and the school has to put the children and education first.

We put our children first. Achieving the best outcomes for them is our primary focus and as parents we are way more personally invested in doing the right thing for them as individuals than the school, which has to take a 'whole school' approach.

The PTA used to make us cups of tea during parents' evening. We were really grateful as talking for 3 hours without a break is awful, I'm always half dead the next day.
Then that stopped and we got a bottle of water instead.
Then that stopped.

Ours had the cheek to ask for parent volunteers to make tea for teachers on parents evening.

Yes, God forbid that teachers talking nonstop for extended periods of time might like a cup of tea. How entitled of them! Especially asking for helpers - my god,
just forcing parents into it, aren't they?

Actually it is cheeky. Take a bottle of water with you. Parents are there to get feedback on their children's progress - that's it.

I take my own water but the PTA have always done a stall in my last few schools. We appreciate it and so do parents (think younger siblings like the option of a snack too).

One parents' evening I had a parent have an outburst at me. When I finally got rid of the parent, I had loads of sympathetic looks from other parents and one offered to go and get me a cup of tea. I appreciated it.