7.3 Engage with the parents/carers

Understand strategies for working effectively, sensitively and confidentially with parents/carers.

Engagment with parents is so crucial, parents and educators need to be on the same page and work as a team for the educational outcomes of students. My final placement was at a school with a heavily invested parent population that cared a great deal about the school's understanding of their children.

Through this, I was introduced to a simple system for managing parent interactions by keeping a running record of conversations and other communications on a spreadsheet. This highly effective system for keeping track allows a teacher to quickly review previous conversations when contacting parents. Keeping track of previous contact in this way allowing teachers sensitivity in regards parents and any particularities of families can be noted and subsequently passed on easily in teacher handovers to avoid any uncomfortable conversations for families, this is especially true for families going through changes or with less traditional arrangements. 

This reassurance helps parents feel confident that a student's best interests are always at the heart of the teacher's actions.