Parents Evening grrrrrr

tru

Daughter's parents evening yesterday. Well, it wasn't evening, it was 4-6pm. The teachers allow 5 minutes per appointment, that means out of a class of 30/31 children only 24 can get appointments.
D is choosing her options (sorry, pathways (that's a different rant)) this year, she's already chosen her subjects so I thought we'd just make appts for those subjects. But noooooooo. We couldn't even get to see her English teacher >:( The only ones we managed were Maths, Art, Science and History. The History appt was 5.55pm, most were running late by a few minutes, by the time we'd finished speaking to the Science teacher the History one had left >:( She was there seconds ago, I saw her. We were by the door, she must have seen D as she walked past.

Very peed off >:(

aeuerby

Don't get me started on schools and parents evenings.

My son's school is next to useless. They don't have appointments you just turn up and queue. What fun.

Anyway our problem with the school at the moment is that they want all the children - starting with year 8 - to "help out" in the school office. This is not just for an hour or so it's ALL DAY. We are not happy. All day to show any visitors round, take any messages to other classrooms and lock the toilets ???

My son was told if we are unhappy about all this to send (yet another) letter to school which we are going to do. Also he was told that this is classed as work experience
??? and it is part of the curriculum.

We shall see!!
Angela.

goolieman

We used to have reception duty at our school. The prefects were on a rota of sitting at the front desk to welcome visitors and relay messages etc...
It was viewed as a great big skive!

As for parents' evening, not gone there yet, my eldest is only 3, but I remember it well from school. Although the hassle for me was trying to get appointments from the teachers that didn't give my parents a 15-20min gap inbetween!

Oh memories!! 10 years since I left Senior School!

C

aliasojo

Troo: You should phone or email the school to ask them to send out a short report from each teacher detailing daughter's progress/problems etc.

Explain that time allocated for parents was not adequate and as such you were unable to get the info you needed.

I did this with my son's school and to their credit they sent me out a report from each teacher reasonably promptly. In fact I think it was probably better as each teacher had to actually think about my son and write very relevant remarks, rather than the usual ' oh yes little Johnny is coming along nicely' stuff that you sometimes get when they are in a rush and trying to get through loads of parents. :-/

aeuerby

We used to have reception duty at our school. The prefects were on a rota of sitting at the front desk to welcome visitors and relay messages etc...
It was viewed as a great big skive!

I wouldn't be so annoyed if it was for a short time. An hour or something but all day I find rediculous. It's also they way the school has gone about implementing the system that has annoyed us too.

Spendless

Don't get me started on schools and parents evenings.


Anyway our problem with the school at the moment is that they want all the children - starting with year 8 - to "help out" in the school office. This is not just for an hour or so it's ALL DAY. We are not happy. All day to show any visitors round, take any messages to other classrooms and lock the toilets ???

.

I'm with you with this one. I was undecided between 2 schools where to send my son. I got a place a the first but a had a further 2 months to wait before i found out if i had a place at the 2nd.
I rang up the first school to speak to them about my dilemma. A child answered the phone and told me that the secretary was far too busy to talk to me.

I chose the other school

This is a primary BTW not a secondary school

jellyhead

grrrr! if the history teacher knew she had an appointment with you she should have kept it even if it did mean her staying 5 minutes longer than expected. call the school and make an alternative appointment with her lol! at our school (primary) if you don't get to see the teacher you can make an appointment and they'll see you on another day (after school though, so probably no good if you work until later than then). the year 4 teachers even agreed to put on an extra parents evening because they have 36 children in each class so they can't see every parent in the same night. not all teachers want to or can manage an extra night of their time but they should be seeing every parent with an appointment.

does she really want to take history? to be honest i'd take the teachers behaviour as a sign that she doesn't take her responsibilities/career very seriously. common courtesy dictates that she could have at least spoken to your daughter briefly and told her that she couldn't stay any longer. i realise that teaching is hard and that there are lots of demands on a teacher, but she could have at least cancelled the appointment.

VickyA_2

When I was in the sixth form, we would sometimes be asked to take prospective parents and children around those bits of the school. Only people who were on a "free period" could do the taking around and everyone did it in turns, so you'd probably only do it once a month, if that. I think the prospective parents appreciated it (mine did when they went to look round), and they had the real side of the school, rather than the fluffy side that the head tries to convey.

However, working in the school office is not the way forward. I'm really surprised and shocked about that. There are times and places for work experience which is a week or two in Year 10/11 and again (in my experience of schools) in Years 12 and 13. Not for an hour during the school week.

nearlyrich

My two attended different secondary schools and I had extremes of experiences from very poor to great.

My son's school sent out a notice well in advance asking for parent's preference of early or later appointments.

A week before the parent's evening you got a list of all teachers and subjects and room number where the said teacher would be on the night with a time and space in between to get to the next room. They even left enough room on the form to write comments to discuss later.

If you managed to get in front and a queue was forming for a particular teacher it was sorted by reverting to appointment time.

The teachers had the childrens book or whatever in order of appointment, they knew which child you were talking about and they kept to the 5 mins, any issues which merited longer than this were booked in as another appointment in scholl time. Fantastic.

My daughter's school, they couldn't organise the proverbial in a brewery and I always came out stressed after following some windbag round all night.
One teacher told me how someone else's child was performing cos they had all the work mixed up... :oshambles ....thank goodness it's all finished now!!

Good Luck if you still have to go through it.

Savvy_Sue

Just had mine for the youngest. It's amazing how blase you get about the whole performance when you can't remember how many of these you've been to.

The system with the secondary school is that you tell the child which teachers you want to see, and the child then makes appointments with those teachers. Well that's the theory. It has worked reasonably well with the older two, but youngest came home with just THREE appointments: maths, science and Art. "The other teachers didn't ask about making appointments" was his rather feeble excuse.

I didn't worry too much because we thought we'd be able to do as we have in the past and 'slide' in to see others if they had gaps. Unfortunately his French teacher basically refused to see us "because I 'ave no issues with 'im" - well excuse me but do I just want to see teachers who have 'issues' with my son? I don't think so. And we couldn't find the English teachers he'd written down - the head thinks they were temporary or student teachers, but no-one in the library owned up to teaching him on a permanent basis.

By the time we'd established that we'd lost the will to live and came home. We know what they'll say about him anyway: doesn't put enough effort into presentation, needs to write more and in complete sentences. As if he'll listen to us anyway!

Oh, and in year 8 they spend full days on reception, but we're not officially told that it's happening.

16011996

at our junior school, you go in and take a number for each teacher and wait till they shout your number, last year my number for one teacher was shouted whilst i was sat with another one, so i was told as i'd missed my turn, i'd have to wait till the end, as she had another 30 parent s to see, i gave up, only to get a letter sent home 2 weeks later to say how disappointed she was i hadn't turned up on parents evening as my child was having problems.

there has to be an easier way.