This week on Parent Ping, we were talking about talking. Who was communicating with who? And how?
1. Parents communicating
First, we asked whether you were communicating with other parents in your child’s school during lockdown. While around half of you communicated with other parents a couple of days a week or a couple of days a month (and a really friendly 4% communicated every day), a third of you did not communicate with any other parents at all. Those who were least communicative were dads (41%) and parents of secondary age children (59%).
We also took a peek at how you were communicating by asking whether you are part of a class WhatsApp group. A third of you are part of a class WhatsApp group, but this is far more common in primary schools where around half of parents are in a group compared to nurseries (23%) or secondary schools (9%). We do not know (yet) how many of those that are in a group mute it!
2. Schools communicating
We also continued to ask questions about how schools have been communicating with parents. Following up on an earlier question about what schools were sending home during lockdown, we were prompted by a user question to delve deeper into the murky world of feedback. We found (as many of your expected) that the type of feedback depended on whether your child is in primary or secondary education (apologies to those of you with younger children – lots of you told us that this wasn’t relevant to you at the moment).
Secondary schools had more requirement for work to be submitted for marking than primary schools (90% compared to 68%) and therefore had more incidences of all types of feedback. Overall though, around half of children in primary or secondary school received personalised written feedback from their teacher during lockdown.
We also checked whether your child had received a report at the end of the summer term. We were slightly surprised that parents were far more likely to have received a report if their child was in primary school. Nine out of ten parents of a primary aged child got a report, but the numbers were a lot lower for secondary where only 44% received a report – perhaps because reports are less common beyond Year 10. We double checked this with a question asked on Teacher Tapp back in December, and the finding was corroborated, secondary schools are less likely to send out reports.
3. Our first crossover question!
One benefit of having daily survey apps for both teachers and parents is that occasionally we can ask the same question and see if responses vary. This week we asked about resilience on both Teacher Tapp and Parent Ping. We found broad agreement from both sets of survey respondents that resilience (that we can cope when things get tough and learn from set-backs) is something that should be taught in school, but with more parents than teachers (18% compared to 9%) suggesting that resilience is something that can be picked up naturally.
And also…
We asked you, ‘Imagine you are advertising your family for another child to join. Which of these words would be most important to you in describing your family?’ The most frequently chosen words were ‘secure’, ‘happy’ and ‘kind’. Mums were twice as likely to select ‘secure’ than dads were, who in-turn were considerably more likely than mums to select ‘playful’.
Finally, exactly half of you got a lie in last Sunday… but which half? Slightly more than half of mums got a lie in, compared to only 4 in 10 dads. Lucky mum! But nearly two-thirds of parents with at least one secondary-age child got a lie in, which just goes to show, good things come to those who wait!
Top tips
Our most clicked tip this week was a blog on why optimism, self-awareness and compassion are essential in the aftermath of COVID-19. If you missed it, you can catch up here: https://bounceforward.com/bouncing-forward-to-a-better-place/
Coming up next week
Next week we will be asking questions about packed lunches and holidays (amongst other things). You should also look out for our tips on snacking & suncream…
Can anyone spot a theme here?!?
