Matthew Godfrey's Education Blog

It can be awkward when parents and teachers meet, but usually it is a positive experience for everyone, says Matthew Godfrey This article appeared in The Daily Telegraph on 3 April 2002 TWO events in the school calendar that most pupils dread are parents' evening and the arrival of reports. Even model pupils feel some discomfort when two sets of adults, whom they see every day but who rarely see each other, suddenly start conferring about them. For the pupils at the inner-city comprehensive where I teach, parents' evening is a double whammy, in that school reports and teacher-parent meetings are rolled into one. As parents arrive with their children, they are handed their report, which they take to a waiting area to read together. They then discuss it for 10 minutes with the child's form tutor. Judging by the expressions on their faces, most pupils at our last parents' evening found it horribly embarrassing. But for some of them, it was the behaviour of t...