Teachers, can parents email you?

[OfficeDrama]

At the local high school, all the teachers email addresses are available via the website. At the local primary school only the school office email is available on the website.

What's usual where you work? I expect it's different everywhere but I was wondering if there was a link between available at high school and unavailable at primary.

If parents can email you, do you get a lot of negative messages? How do you deal with it?

Thanks :)

Secondary Teacher - direct email allowed, 48 hour return policy. I had an out of office for external emails to point out I was part time.

My childrens primary, during the lockdown set up year accounts, but now it is all through admin emails. Hard work as drop off messages ie x going home with y now have to be emailed!

Primary teacher here. Yes, parents can email me for non-emergency situations/conversations. They know not to expect a reply during the school day and that it may well take a couple of days to reply.

I've found it incredibly useful to be able to contact parents via email too. It's more discreet than a phonecall which can be particularly important to parents whose usual contact with school is when their child has got into trouble. An email reduces embarrassment and goes some way to preserving a relationship between home and school that doesn't result in the parent being afraid to answer the phone. It's also been useful when wanting to give a parent the heads up about a situation e.g. child throwing away their packed lunch each day, being out of sorts or even to let a parent know that X has had a fabulous morning and I've photocopied the writing they did so s/he can admire it when they get home.

As a parent, I've always been able to email my DCs' teachers (primary and secondary). I don't do it very often but it's been handy to be able to do so as DH and I are both teachers so the DC have rarely been taken to/from school by one of us. Email gives us an opportunity to have occasional contact with their teachers as well as to be able to get in touch with other staff e.g. to let them know how much we enjoyed the school production, or to thank the teacher who repaired DC1's broken shoe.

Yes, they can. I much prefer it to notes in diaries tbh.

Most parents are lovely via email. Some are not but of course you get that in any job. We try to reply to emails within 48 hours - if the parent is a dick, I always stick their reply on a scheduled send so they receive it just before deadline. Nice (aka normal) parents will get their reply as quickly as I can and might get a reply in the evenings/weekends if I am online doing school work.

Oh, forgot to add that I'm primary!

Yes primary and I am happy to have that direct contact.
I do not have work email ok my phone and I very rarely check it over the weekend though. I don't reply to patents outside school hours, and if I do work later at night I do a delay send so they don't assume I'm happy to respond at any hour.
I figure if anything really bad is going on at school someone will WhatsApp me!

Only if I email them first.

I'm Primary...since lockdown, parents have been given our school email addresses. Most have been respectful...some are using them to email several times a day! I have one who emails me every detail of her child's life (very sweet but I don't need to know what she has for breakfast on Sunday 🥰). I only reply once a day 👍

I’m secondary and parents have my email address as Head of Sixth Form. They usually email my non-teaching pastoral lead rather than me as she’s likely to respond quicker though. The emails of non-SLT staff (apart from HOYs) are not shared on the website and, although they follow a pattern that is fairly easy to suss, it’s pretty unusual for parents to email teaching staff directly. We don’t encourage it as it’s a big workload issue for staff and 9/10 times the enquiries are things that can be sorted without the teacher. In the other cases admin or the HOY forward queries to the teacher to deal with. It also means that we weed out any unreasonable or unpleasant ones before they land in the person’s inbox and can deal with them sensitively.