Phoning home

[Nc5683939w9er]

Just wondering your schools policy on this. If a pupil is sent to another class, that automatically gets them a 30 min after school detention (no longer taken by class teachers thank God!) But we do have to phone home the same day. We have a lot of high tariff kids which means for some that's almost every lesson. Parents are often rude and unsupportive. Do all schools expect this? We are often chased up to ask what the parents said to check we are doing this although I admit I don't always. It means that sometimes I don't send pupils out so I dont have to make awkward conversations (parents that have been rude in the past). It's really bothering me as it is adding stress and workload but maybe I am being unreasonable?

Different schools have different policies.

It sounds like your school is really struggling. You shouldn’t be having to deal with aggressive parents - that’s what senior teachers should be doing

We have a strong SLT who are supportive and back us up so I can't complain about that. It is a very deprived area though and as such we get a lot of behaviour incidences, even when it's dealt with efficiently. I just feel like a text would be enough unless it's something really serious- parental engagement is a huge problem for us though, and they want to be friends with their children rather than parent them!

My school has a similar policy but send a text home to parents centrally

My last school has this policy and I hated it. I had so many run ins with parents, who basically did everything in their power to get their kids out of the detention. It wasted huge amounts of my time, so my workloads were through the roof, I spent most of every day feeling nervous because I was dreading the torrent of abuse on the phone every day after school, and then it also affected my own discipline, because I would instinctively avoid sending pupils out, even though they really should have been out.

I've never rang home about a behaviour issue at my current school - anything that goes past a first warning (if you can be bothered to log it), gets picked up and dealt with elsewhere in the school. Whatever they do seems to work, because the pupils are generally very well-behaved.

Any behaviour policy that increases workload for teachers when correctly implemented will not be correctly implemented, making it less effective.

Expecting a phonecall home for every detention is bonkers, especially as parents don’t have to be legally informed at all. Our school system automatically generates an email home when a detention is set.

Most schools have a system in place to generate an automatic email to parents.

That way you only have to respond to the parents that ring for a response.