Teach Secondary 13.8

Relationships with parents can create stress Back in 2018, one-in-five teachers reported that parental engagement had caused them regular stress. More recently, those figures have worsened – not least due to the lasting effects of the pandemic. InMay 2024, more than a quarter of teachers and half of headteachers say they’re regularly stressed for reasons related to parental engagement. During the 2024 spring term, the most common complaint headteachers received from parents (84%) concerned a sanction their child had received. Other issues included parents not being supportive of attendance (81%) and parents’ unhappiness with certain school rules (74%). Sadly, verbal abuse of teachers from parents has also become more commonplace, with 25% of secondary classroom teachers saying that they have been subject to such abuse during the 2023/24 academic year. 3 things we’ve learnt about … TEACHERS’ INTERACTIONS WITH PARENTS We look at how teachers really feel about those parts of the job that entail responding to parental queries and complaints... Parental engagement can be demanding Managing parental contact can take its toll on teachers’ time. 57% of teachers state that their school has a policy specifying how quickly it should respond to parental contact. For 48% of teachers, these response times are within 48 hours – even at weekends. The sheer scale of contact can also be a burden, withmore than one in five classroom teachers, and around half of headteachers saying they’d had at least one parent complain to them about a sanction given to their child in any given week. Almost a third of secondary classroom teachers say they’ve had at least one parent contact them three or more times in the same week! Even if sanctions are issued, there’s no guarantee that they won’t be undermined. More than a third of teachers say that in any given week, a parent will have undermined a behavioural sanction that they’ve given out. What’s the solution? With that inmind, it’s perhaps little surprise that many teachers find parental relationships stressful and difficult to navigate – though this may also be due to the fact that half of secondary teachers say they’ve never received any training on how to manage such relationships. Among those who have, this has mostly been delivered internally by other teachers in the school, with just 1% of teachers telling us they received parent relationships management training through a specialist outside course. This type of training seems to be popular, with 42%of classroom teachers saying they would welcome such training if it were offered to them. One in 10 senior leaders meanwhile say that they would prioritise hiring a parent-link worker, if they could secure the funding. Over 75% of secondary teachers say the main thing preventing them from engaging with parents is lack of time. Having a dedicated member of staff managing those relationships would certainly help. HAVE YOU BEEN STRESSED OR UNHAPPY DUE TO RELATIONSHIPS WITH PARENTSWITHIN THE LAST 2WEEKS? 1 2 3 For more snappy insights like this, and to be part of the panel, please join in via the free Teacher Tapp app available to download for iOS and Android. You will learn something new every day. Classroom teachers Middle leaders SLT (excl. headteachers) Headteachers May ‘18 10% 14% 29% 48% 37% 41% 42% 33% 23% 21% 25% 16% 16% 44% 43% 27% 19% 18% 21% 10% 13% 18% 13% 13% 20% 15% 13% Dec ‘18 Nov‘21 Jun ‘22 Jul ‘23 Dec ‘23 Mar ‘24 May ‘24 21% 28% 43% 18% 81 teachwire.net/secondary R E S E A R C H