No more parents’ evenings?
The parents’ evening is going out of fashion, according to an article in The Guardian, yesterday.
Polly Curtis reports:
Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.
DCSF secretary Ed Balls:
Parents tell us they like having informal contact with their child’s school - whether that’s a chat in the playground or the chance to go online and see their teenager’s latest marks and make sure they are going to all their classes.
The DCSF research was based on telephone interviews with more than 5,000 parents or guardians of children at state schools. This is part of the government department’s ‘Parent Know How’ scheme, which is looking at ways to help parents with support and advice. (Teachernet already offers some bullet-pointed advice for teachers on how to get the most out of parents’ evenings, here.)
The DCSF is approaching this from the parent’s direction. Meeting the needs of parents with online reporting is something we’re very interested in - after all, we already do this with our Maths-Whizz Tutoring, and components for the forthcoming Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools service (click here if you’re a teacher or school administrator to grab one of the remaining places on our summer trial).
We want to make sure Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools features in the government’s 10-year children’s plan, which involves (amongst other things) ensuring access to tutors for every child and online information for parents by 2010.
Despite this enthusiasm from government, access to live school work information has its downsides. The New York Times reported earlier this week on parents (sometimes known as ‘Helicopter Parents’) who use services like ParentConnect, Edline or PowerSchools obsessively to track their children’s performance and class attendance.
The rationale behind such programmes is sensible:
Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.
But the implications aren’t always positive:
…sometimes there is collateral damage: exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension.
The information parents receive means the likes of the seeminly terrifying Mrs Dobbins, featured in the article, can harangue their children as soon as they get home for poor grades or not showing up in class, even if the reasons are perfectly innocent. As a result, some students are getting stressed, and expressing that through the medium de nos jours - Facebook. As one student put it: “I get yelled at bcuz I failed a test.”
Is this an issue that requires further investigation? Of course - we don’t want Maths-Whizz students terrorized by parents for failing an exercise or not meeting allotted targets. After all, we know that students sometimes learn most effectively through reinforcement and correction of mistakes.
Many of our customers are active parents, but we’d like to think that they are still a long way from the helicopter cariacature. In fact, the driving force in Maths-Whizz is really the student, and many customers attest to this.
A little parental prodding and cajoling to study is no bad thing, especially when the weather’s as good as it is now in the UK, but we find that it is the students who are instrumental in deciding when, and how, they use Maths-Whizz. The reporting tools we offer parents allow them simply to keep track of this and give them starting points to talk about their children’s studies.
It’s likely the DCSF and news outlets yield more such findings about parents evenings, student tracking and the like. This is all grist to the mill for us, and valuable information that helps us shape our Tutoring programmes. Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools will be tested in Beta this summer and feedback from teachers, students and parents will help us shape it to perfection for release this autumn.