According to Bridget Phillipson, the thing that’s missing from our education system at the moment is for schools to communicate more with parents. The Times reports that the education secretary will order educators to 'communicate better' with parents following concerns that relations have deteriorated since the pandemic.
To which I simply have to say to the education secretary oh, please God, haven’t we suffered enough?
Do we really need more emails about the lost property sale that’s happening in five Saturdays time in the playground, strictly between 12 and 2pm, bargain though it may be?
Or that in a heatwave – PING! Here’s an email to all parents who are clearly content to let their child burn – in a heatwave, children are expected to wear suncream at all times. The school - PING! - regrets to inform you that this vital, mandatory suncream will need to be applied at home, due to allergies, after the unfortunate incident that occurred with a Year 7 pupil who came out in hives in 2023. And - PING! - here is a PDF attachment from the local hospital on hives – and how to treat them. Can everyone please also follow this embedded link to a Google form to fill out their name and tick a box that proves they’ve read this crucial email about hives? Thank you, from the school office, signed passive-aggressively.
Yet we follow the embedded link – you bet we do, for we are parents who are switched on and we care, we’re not like those lax mums and dads who just ignore their kids to let them watch YouTube (WhoTube? What even is that? Never heard of it). But the link is broken, of course. So, we email the school office to report the link (because we are responsible parents, you see, we are grown-ups) – and the school sends back a brand new link, but that doesn’t work, either!
And by now it’s 11am and we’ve spent two hours of actual working, office time trying to reply to an email about hives – and you, Sir/Madam, have failed. And yes, you are right to tip headfirst into existential angst, you are correct to infer that maybe you were never cut out for this – to be a parent, an actual adult who is responsible for P.E. kit and packed lunches – at all.
That’s the thing about school comms, you see – like buses, they are never there when you want them until they all turn up at once. It is the Schrödinger’s conundrum of correspondence (if I never received the 25 emails about the Duke of Edinburgh Award – or if I did, but didn’t open them – is my child still expected in a forest with a tent and sleeping bag at the tail end of 2026 or not?).
And focusing on the fact that schools rely on email too much to talk to parents and carers, as is supposedly the ed sec’s concern, to me really does miss the real issue. It’s not that parents want the school to communicate more, we want them to communicate better. About the really important things: like changes to the curriculum, or what they’re doing to tackle the influence of Andrew Tate.
We want the government to focus on the real issues blighting our children’s education, thank you very much: such as the woeful lack of resources, the high turnover of staff (at my daughter’s state high school, they started the new year with a substitute science teacher from day one), the fact that teachers are burnt out and stressed and taking to the picket lines far too often in last ditch attempts to fight for fair treatment, pay and conditions.
When a majority (86 per cent) of state-funded schools and colleges in England – both primary and secondary – were surveyed by the Children’s Commissioner’s office recently, the findings were alarming: with concerns across the board over online safety, poverty (for half of secondary schools and four in 10 primaries) and housing. And the top worry for children in their local area was access to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).
So, when Bridget Phillipson launches her “urgent” white paper later this year imploring schools to take even more on by making communication with parents their number one – the same schools and teachers who are forced into acting as social workers, counsellors, for feeding and clothing kids themselves, on ever-shrinking budgets – I can’t help but feel that something is broken here. That Labour should be focusing on helping schools, by pouring resources into our education system and our children, rather than taking more and more of it away with a nonsense and pointless drive to junk-mail distraction.
But no, you know what will really fix it? More emails. Now, please tick here to show you have read this. We look forward to seeing you at the end-of-term assembly.
