The last term of summer always feels like a spiral of sports days, end-of-term events and conversations about ‘how did I become a parent of a child going into Year…?!’ We’ll be keeping an eye on these topics over the next couple of weeks!
But, to start with we’re reporting on reports and taking a peek at end-of-year gifts.
What would you like to read in a school report?
It’s pretty standard to get some sort of report on how your child got on over the year. Schools have many different ways of reporting to parents (as our friends at Teacher Tapp showed last week) but what is it that parents actually want to know?
What type of information would you like to receive in a report? 6 in 10 of you prefer a mixture of grades and written reports. However, 1 in 4 secondary parents and 1 in 5 primary would be happy just to get a grade – though you say this should be for a range of factors, not just academic performance.
And what are you most interested in? While most of you like to focus on what your children have done well, 47% of dads are most interested in what their kids need to do better.
When it comes to the academic stuff, what is the most useful way for schools to share? Most of you said words about your child’s ‘age related expectation’. This was certainly most popular amongst parents with children in primary school, but as the kids get older (and closer to national exams) having predictions in an exam format also seems useful.
BTW, we also checked if the response to this is any different for parents who work as teachers… and they’re not!
Will teachers get end of year gifts?
There’s a massive difference between primary schools and secondary when it comes to teacher gifts. While three-quarters of parents with kids in primary school are planning to buy a gift for at least one teacher, less than a fifth of secondary parents say they will.
This may be related to the sheer number of teachers that kids come in to contact with in secondary schools… 25% of primary parents say they’ll buy a gift for ‘all teachers that my child has’ compared to only 1% of secondary!
Or, it may be you’d rather ‘chip in’ for a gift with other parents. 21% of primary parents plan to do this. But at secondary school, parents are less likely to have contact with other parents making it much harder to arrange.
Of course, teachers aren’t the only type of school staff… we checked when you (hypothetically) buy a gift for a class teacher, would you buy a gift for the teaching assistant too? Nearly all of you would, and half would spend the same (or more) than you spent on the teacher.
And also…
❤️ Most parents think kindness is their strongest parenting quality, and most want to improve their patience. But…
💙 20% of mums would like to be more playful (while many dads think this is already an area they are good at). And…
💛 17% of dads would like to improve at communication (while many mums think they’re good at this already).
Coming up next week
Next week’s questions include… phones, sports day, mottos and newsletters! Don’t miss a question! Download the app and set your notifications to PING every day!