Why teachers struggle with parents and what to do about it?
One of the fatal mistakes organisations make is to regard a population they serve as a homogenous mass. For example, how schools’s engage the parents of their pupils?
The first mistake schools make is to see the similarities: the parents all have children, these children go to the same school and they all need communications of one sort and another about their child. So the systems and processes are put together that enable the school to communicate formally and informally with parents and they aim to perform these tasks as well as they can. Emails, newsletters, notes in school bags, parents evenings etc but in a one size fits all way.
But every teacher will tell you that some of their most challenging experiences at work involve parents and that this just comes with the territory. So the nervousness felt by Allan Ahlberg’s teacher in his poem about parents evening is understandable: they don’t know whether they are in for a hard time or not.
I’m waiting in the classroom.
It’s nearly time to start.
I wish there was a way to stop
The pounding in my heart.
The parents in the corridor
Are chatting cheerfully;
And now I’ve got to face them;
And I’m nervous as can be.
The sad thing is that this state of affairs is mostly avoidable – if only schools knew where they stood.
A few years ago the DfES ran some research into parental attitudes to schools. It was hugely impressive because they set about it with a genuine desire to understand how parenst influenced a pupil’s educational attainment. So they ran deep and wide qualitative research, paying attention to the underlying issues of behaviour and discovered something startling: not all parents are the same.
In a nutshell, they discovered that parents fell into three behavioural typologies:
- Those that believed the education of their children was their responsibility not the school
- Those that believed the responsibility was shared 50:50 between school and the parent(s)
- Those that believed their child’s educational attainment was entirely the schools responsibility.
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