I’ve received a strongly worded parental email, with my head of department copied into it. All year 12 students were required to do a group project and one person from each group had to contribute to the discussion when they presented. These were all being filmed for the open day in September to give an “insight” into the a-level course offered.
One student has adhd, anxiety, asd. I’ve always been well aware of it and done as much as possible, within my capabilities as a classroom teacher to support her. Due to the presentations needing to be approx 2 minutes per group as the recordings can become copiously long to edit after, I had to stop her and say she was hitting the 5 min mark, but that’s absolutely fine, she could sit with me, condense the speech and go again at lunch time as long as her group were okay with it. They all agreed.
The email from the parent read “a member of staff has been totally unsupportive towards my daughter. It’s extremely distressing for her to have to perform once, never mind twice. The teacher needs to organise their time and understand my daughters needs, it’s unacceptable to place this amount of pressure on my daughter”
I haven’t replied yet, purely because this parent was extremely rude to me and booked a meeting 5 months ago to berate all the support I’ve given her daughter and claimed it wasn’t good enough, even though I have no TA support 7 SEN students and 30 students in one room.
My head of department has said its up to me to respond to this. I’m struggling to find a response to such criticism, would it be inconsiderate to leave it or could that make this situation worse?