What do you mean the teacher knows nothing about my child?

Being active at the start of the school year will set everyone up for a year of success.

It happens every year. The holiday spirit is long gone, and you are bombarded with adverts on going back to school. These adverts, tend to create anxiety in students, parents, and teachers alike. New shoes, book lists, stationary, and possibly one or more new teachers, you discover that your child doesn’t have any friends in this year’s class, and the thought of packed lunches sends your pulse raising! No doubt the list goes on, for example, the anticipation of all the parent consent forms that will be coming your way soon. The happy images advertised are not always reality. Worse still will this be yet another year where it takes 7 months for anyone to cotton on to the specific needs of your child?

Does the teacher, not knowing everything there is to know about your child, mean they don’t care?

In short, the answer is no – if a person is a teacher their choice of vocation is to educate young people. Yes it is a teacher’s job to know your child, yes it is the school’s job to pass on relevant information, yes a teacher is there to help your child in broader aspects than just education.

For a moment, let’s look at this from another angle.

Teachers have a minimum of 25 students per class all with specific or special needs. Their families also have needs. If the teacher is in a secondary school or they are a specialist primary teacher, the number of students and families can be multiplied by however many classes. Some teachers can see over 200 students a week. Unfortunately, no one has the capacity to remember them all. Often children’s needs can get merged with those from the year before, if someone has been teaching a long time even more so. For example, when I was a student wellbeing coordinator for 7 years, in this time I heard over 15 individual student stories per day. Eventually, they all began to merge. I can genuinely say the stories I remember today are few. The brain can only process a certain amount of information.

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When there is too much information to process, you may feel cognitive overload. This happens when you reach a point of paralysis of information — not being able to process and then act on what is heard. (Christopher Schimming 2022).

On top of this, teacher’s often have their own families, sometimes with the same complex issues they are facing with students and parents during the day. These could be Illness, elderly parents, running children to and from sporting or social events, let alone dealing with someone in the family who has special needs etc.

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Schools are complex places and on top of human error there is often system error. A child may have a certain diagnosis, but it has not been tagged on the learning management system, the parent has handed in all the right paperwork, but it hasn’t been passed to the right teacher, there is a new staff member, and they haven’t received all of the information etc. While understandably frustrating this is common, especially when dealing with such large volumes of people and information.

These errors can have disastrous effects on a child. For example, the teacher who doesn’t know their student has a bladder issue and doesn’t let them go to the bathroom, resulting in setting back the doctor's training program, or the teacher who doesn’t know a student requires medication and doesn’t remind them to take it, making for a terrible day for the child. This usually causes parents to quickly lose faith in the school. I know it would for me if I was in this situation.

There is a better way though, a win-win where parents and teachers can work together with a little bit of extra effort.

The reason parents get frustrated is because they want their child’s needs to be understood.

What you can do to make a difference in 3 easy steps

1. If your child has additional information send it to the school via email. Send it to:

a. The school email address

b. The classroom teacher

c. Any other teachers who will teach your child this year

d. The student wellbeing coordinator

e. The assistant principal

It is better that everyone knows so all can be informed. If you don’t know all the email addresses, ask the school if you can have them. Do not rely on someone else passing on information even though it may seem tiresome and frustrating.

2. Don’t think extra information is trivial. If you go about, it in the right way the teacher will see you as caring not as difficult.

a. Do not email outside of the hours of 8 and 5 (especially not at 11.30pm as many parents are prone to)

b. Do not send an essay – keep it short and sweet (I have put an example below)

c. Do not expect miracles, change is slow and if you get the teacher on board, they will absolutely do their best for all involved

3. Follow up

a. Gently keep things on the teacher’s radar, once a fortnight is a good amount to keep things on the boil.

b. Don’t make unreasonable demands, for instance don’t email and demand an answer by the end of the day as the teacher is most likely to be teaching.

c. Try to involve your child at all stages even if they are little. Let them know you are talking to their teachers and in time you will expect them to do some of this.

Example email:

Dear __________

Thank you for teaching my child __________ this year. I am looking forward to working with you and forming a partnership so we can set _____________ up for success. ___________ does have a few extra needs I wanted to make you aware of to help you in the classroom. I know you have many children not teach and so my aim is to help make this as easy as possible and additionally ensure ___________ has a great year with you.

In a nutshell _________ needs **********

What this means for any teacher is ********

I have also sent this email to ******** as I know how busy school life is and how quickly things change.

If you would like to meet with me to discuss further, I am very open to this. I am also happy for email conversation. If it is ok with you, I would love to have a quick email check in every fortnight to see if all is on track and if there is anything I can do to help.

Kind regards

I am the principal of a school in Melbourne Victoria. I like to speak about significant topics, at times with a heavy dash of humour and inspiration. My passion is to train teachers and parents in how to work with each other for the holistic learning of all children and young adults. In working in partnership, we can achieve so much more for your children.