parents’ evening

Because of the industrial action last term, many union members did not take part in parents’ evening and there were many who sighed with relief. Parents’ evening, especially if you live outside your catchment area, tend to mean a day that starts at 8am and ends at 11pm when you arrive home in a state of nervous exhaustion. I am generally so hyped up it is difficult to sleep until the early hours of the morning and then am tired again the next day.

Like others, then, I felt relief at first, until I ask myself, ”Just how important is parents’ evening to us as teachers and how will we suffer if the industrial action continues?”

Is this just another area where we are hurting ourselves rather than making an impression on those who could alleviate the diabolical position the profession feels itself to be in?

When I asked other teachers what they thought of parents’ evening they all said they never saw the people they wanted to see. Few teachers ever found out anything they did not know before. Maybe because I am younger and less experienced, or just more honest, I would say there have been times when I have been shocked by a parent and have learnt a lot more about a child as a consequence.

Although these experiences are professionally invaluable, they are not what I miss most about parents’ evenings. When day after day you see the same children, then however committed you are as a teacher they become a group and the individuality of one thirty-fourth of that group is less. I need parents’ evening to jolt me back into appreciating those individual needs.

Understanding their parents’ lives and being really moved by the aspirations of a child as voiced to the parents, or the fear that you do not like them, always brings me back to the grass roots of what teaching is about – people, communications and trust.

I always feel very humble after a parents’ evening, but also full of new ideas about how to get through to a child. I also always feel elated because parents who do come often have done so in order to thank you and their appreciation, as much as the pupils which tends to come after they have left, really makes me feel I am in the right job.

Like many others I feel we deserve a decent wage for the increasingly difficult job we do, but at a time when staff-room morale is at its lowest ebb, the last thing I wanted to lose was parents’ evening.

 

My early writing. This got published in the Times Educational Supplement in the 1980s.