The view from the other side

In my 15 years of teaching experience, I have been on countless trips. Some for the day, some with an overnight stay, some extending over the whole week. All are great fun but incredibly tiring and a little bit stressful. The number of times I have experienced the school trip from the other side, as a parent, are far fewer. Today was my third opportunity to experience a school trip with my son’s school. Last year, when he was in Reception, I was fortunate enough to be able to go to a local church and Cotswold Wildlife Park with him and his class. Two very different trips, but both very structured and involved us moving around the church/wildlife park all together. Today’s trip was completely different again. We went to the Redwood Outdoor Learning Centre for a bit of Forest Schools experience.

A trip viewed from the other side is a very different experience. The parents waited in the school hall for the children; we sat chatting quietly until 5 classes of very excited Reception and Year 1 children filed in and sat down neatly in their lines. I didn’t have to stand outside toilets chivvying children along. I didn’t have to ask 30 times whether everyone had their bags/coats/lunch with them as they lined up. I didn’t have to deal with the possibility of a child turning up without their lunch and have to deal with the frantic scramble to put a lunch bag together. I didn’t have to go along the line with the bag/coat/hat of a child who had missed the 30 times of being told to take everything with them. And I didn’t have to deal with the fallout when someone wasn’t in a group with their best friend.

It was great.

I just waited for the chaos to become organised (chaos) and for the children to arrive. My head counting didn’t extend beyond 5 today. I checked a few seatbelts, but only a row or two in front and behind where I was sitting. When a girl fell over, I started heading her way but retreated when the classteacher began to approach her. When the class all raced to a gate and one fell over, I carried on my leisurely stroll while the teacher ran towards her.

Now, in all this, I’m probably making myself sound like a rubbish parent helper. I wasn’t: I made sure my group were (mostly) where they should be, I helped out with organising the toilet queue and I chatted with the children at lunchtime. I ran through the woods with my group hunting for pictures (and asked for help when I realised we were hopeless!), I dragged logs to build a beanstalk with the best of the children and I reinforced the “no pick, no lick, be careful with that stick” rules. I did what a parent helped should do.

I still came home absolutely exhausted, just like when I’m the one in charge. But I actually sat down and ate my lunch and chatted with a friend, I drank more than a sip of water all day, I watched the children play without having to monitor everything they did and I went home without a pounding headache.

School trips when you’re in charge are a great experience. You get to see your children in a different light. You get to see what they’ve learned and how they behave in a new environment. You see their relationships and how they interact with each other. But it’s even more enlightening when you aren’t the one in charge and the child in the new light is your own.

What parents need to know

I love my job, I really do. I couldn’t get up every day and drag myself into school if I didn’t love what I do. But there is one element of my job that continues to baffle and bewilder me.

Parents.

Now, I’m a parent, and since my little boy has started school, I have perhaps changed my view on what parents do and say a little. I suppose I’m very fortunate to be able to see school from both points of view. But the parents still do baffle me.

I trust what Thomas’ teachers say: if they tell me he’s doing well, I believe them. If they say he’s being challenged, then I believe that he is. If they were to tell me there was a problem, then I would trust that they were doing all they could to sort it. Because that’s what they are there for. I know that everyone who works with him has his best interests at heart. That is the job of a teacher: to do the very best they can for every child in their class.

I understand that parents have their own priorities: for them, their child is the only one that matters in that class. I get it. I really do. I’m the same. But what I don’t understand is why some parents don’t think we want their child to do well.

It breaks my heart when I see a child who doesn’t want to come to school: it means we are failing them. Whether they are unhappy about friends or struggling with the work, it means we haven’t done our jobs properly. And it means we need to sort it out. I wouldn’t like to work out how many year of experience the teaching staff alone have in my school – a rough guess is well over 250 years (perhaps we should start our own “1000 years of experience” blog like @ChrisChivers2!), so between us, we have an enormous array of ideas to support these children. Of course the parents need to be involved; they know their child better than any of us, and they need to know what is happening, but they need to trust in us too. They need to believe that we know what we are doing, that we will sort out their issues, and that we will tell them everything that they need to know. They need to realise that their child isn’t always the same person in school as they are at home, that we know their child far better than they think we do, and that we want them to be happy too.

In these days of continuous assessment and monitoring, we have to watch our children intently. We see if they are struggling, or falling behind, or doing well so need to be pushed. We see if they aren’t happy. We create intervention groups to boost children who are falling behind, and to push those who are racing ahead. We set up Circles of Friends and social skills groups, we give up our playtimes to sit and listen to their problems, and we stand and watch them on the playground to make sure they are getting on with their friends. We give up our lunchtimes and evenings to talk to the parents to find out how they are getting on at home or if there is anything we should know about. We listen to the parents and empathise with their issues, even though on the inside we are panicking about the classroom that isn’t ready for the imminent arrival of 30 expectant children. We raid our own children’s cupboards for spare clothes and PE kit for those who don’t have it, and toy boxes for toys and games to occupy them at wet play time. In short, we do absolutely everything we can to make sure that the children enjoy the 6 hours they spend a day with us.

I wish the parents knew this. I wish they knew that, at the end of the day, we spend hours agonising over the argument that lasted two minutes between two girls who were best friends again by the end of the day, or the one child who didn’t “get it” in a class of 30. I wish they knew just how much we care about their children and their wellbeing.

So if you’re a parent, spare a thought for the teacher of your child. Remember, they are just like you, battling on daily to do the very best that they can.

And the next time you speak to them, whether it’s on the phone to sort out an issue, or at the classroom door at the end of the day, be sure to give them a smile and a thank you. You know they’ll appreciate it.

Parent Power

Working in a primary school, there are often lots of parent helpers wandering around. It seems, on first looking, that we have a good relationship with our parents. However, when you look more closely, there is a definite trend emerging. Most of these parents seem to help in Reception and Key Stage 1, with very few helping further through the school.

So why is this?

Are the parents less willing to help as the children get older? Are more of the parents returning to work? Or are us Key Stage 2 teachers less keen to engage with them?

I think all three are true. Having parent helpers in the classroom opens us up to scrutiny of what is going on. We all know that the odd one or two parents will offer to come in, just to have a nose around at what goes on, and to see how their child is getting on. I have never been keen on having people in the classroom, watching me and talking about what they see on the playground (although I’m sure that is just paranoia – I bet they have far more important things to discuss on the playground than my maths lesson, or what So-And-So said to What’s-Her-Name while I was doing the register!) But on the other hand, most of the parents come in because they know that there aren’t enough hours in the day for us to hear everyone read, that we have a million and one sheets and photos that need sticking into books, and that they have skills they can offer the children.

Before Christmas, my teaching partner and I opened the doors to our classrooms. As we were undertaking a mass sewing session (with needles and thread and sewing machines!), we very quickly realised that we needed all the help we could get. Especially with my rather inferior sewing skills.  So, when we sent out a plea to the parents, an army of mums, sisters and grandmas offered to come in to help. They loved it. The children loved it. And, to my enormous surprise, I loved it too.   The atmosphere was brilliant: there were sewing machines humming in every corner, every group had an adult helping them, they chatted to each other, but most importantly, they sewed. And, on top of that, I learned that my sewing skills weren’t anywhere near as bad as I thought – I knew far more than a lot of them about how to use a sewing machine.  Mrs Eaton, my secondary textiles teacher, had taught me well!  We all achieved together, in just two afternoons, what it would have taken weeks for us to do on our own. And we all came out of it with far fewer grey hairs than we would have done without our parent army. We are desperately searching through our topic plans to find another opportunity to invite them all back in.

Since then, some of those have offered to come in to work with the children on a regular basis. They have, in turn, “invited” others along. So, all of a sudden, those children who never read at home are having extra reading sessions at least twice a week. Those children whose handwriting needs improvement are having time to sit down and practise. Simple interventions which have been put to the bottom of the priority pile for the TAs have time to be undertaken. And my classroom doors, which have for so long been closed to “outside help”, have been flung open for the parents to come in and join us.