Parents’ associations: ‘ It shouldn’t be a sounding board for parents to gripe about teachers’

When children go on to secondary level, parents no longer have the daily rallying point of the school gate. This means that parents’ association events may be the only link in between annual parent-teacher meetings.

“One of the most effective ways for parents to be involved in their children’s education is to have a parent association [PA] in place,” says Helen Mortimer, the newly appointed chief executive of the National Parents’ Council – Post-Primary, which is pushing to strengthen PAs around the country. It now has a team of 12 facilitators to offer training and support.

Mortimer estimates that 80 per cent of the almost 750 secondary schools have a PA “in some shape or form – ranging from the totally inactive to ones that are very, very active”.

A good PA is one that is “actively representing parents’ interests and providing a forum for educational discussion”. It should contribute to school policies.

“One thing we are very clear about is that a PA is not a sounding board for parents to gripe about teachers,” she says. “Nor strictly speaking is it fundraising – it is not what the aims of the PA should be.” It must ascribe to the school ethos and “not be a law unto itself”.

Bad image

A common issue is the struggle to get parents involved but if that’s the case, committees need to look at how they are doing things. They can have a bad image, she says.

“Like everything you get involved in on a voluntary basis, you can get in, but how can you get out?” There should be a time limit of, say, three years.

Committees also need to be open to doing things differently, she suggests, and keeping meetings to a set length. Research has shown that the reason people don’t volunteer in their local community is because nobody asked them to – so ask them.

The big challenge for parents’ associations, Mortimer says, is knowing how seriously schools take the whole spirit of partnership, as enshrined in the Education Act. How, for instance, do you get issues on to the agenda of board of management meetings?

“There is a very strong fear factor in some schools of having a strong parent representation.”

There should not be an “automatic assumption” on the principal’s part that they attend all meetings. Parents can be intimidated, and it might be better if the committee takes time to deal with issues itself and then, perhaps, invite the principal to attend the second half of the meeting, she says.

Cahil Doherty, the principal of St Louis Community School in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, generally attends PA committee meetings and it was he who had encouraged a reconvening of the association in 2012.

It had lapsed during a period when there had been three principals in as many years, says PA chairwoman Lorna Elms.

“As a committee we feel it is important to work with the principal and so we welcome his input. If we felt we needed to have some time during a meeting to discuss an item without him present, we could,” she says.

“However, this has never arisen as we work well together as a group.”

The committee of six men and 10 women meets about six times a year, with extra meetings of working groups or ahead of events.

Committee’s aims

Among the committee’s aims for the next two years is to assist the school with integrated fundraising and to work with teachers and students to explore ways of reducing the weight of schoolbags.

Elms, who works part-time and has one child in the school and another having done his Leaving Cert there in June, got involved with the PA because she believes in the importance of having the parental perspective represented in the school. Her experience has “only been positive”, she says.

“I enjoy meeting and getting to know other parents, which ordinarily I may never get to meet.”

As the profile of the PA and its activities and contributions on behalf of all parents are raised, she says, it is becoming easier to get parents involved. See npcpp.ie