How I Address Parent Concerns About My Teaching

Why having a simple email policy for my tutoring business is important

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Parents have a large part to play in their child’s education.

They can help or hinder the way their child is educated at school. I’ve always tried to communicate well with parents, but sometimes I’ve had to face a situation where a parent’s email comes from a mindset of distrust in my teaching methods.

I’ve been teaching maths to children aged 11 to 18 online for six years.

Five years ago I decided that I needed an email policy that addressed parent concerns about how their child was being taught. At the same time the policy needed to be simple, short and helpful.

It took me a year to put one together, and now I use it for addressing parent issues as best as I can. Mostly it works well and I build a good working relationship with parents.

Here’s a brief description of my journey to putting that email policy together.

Emails that just kept coming

The origins of my email policy came from my experiences dealing with parents when I worked full time in schools.

From 1995 to 2019, I worked in large schools. I taught maths and computer science to students aged 11 to 18. I spent a lot of time in meetings with parents talking about the progress their child was making. Most times just chatting worked fine. Sometimes there were difficult parents to deal with but thankfully those were always in the minority.

Then around 2001, emails hit schools. In my school, teachers were now expected to engage with parents via email to help students make better and faster progress in their studies.

The school I was working in at the time saw them as a way to enhance working relationships between parents and teachers. Staff were encouraged to communicate with parents via email whenever necessary, rather than sending a letter home.

Senior leaders in the school believed that this would be a way to sort out issues quickly and more efficiently.

So teachers entered into a new world where parents could send and receive emails at any hour of the day or night. There was no need for parents to make an appointment to come in to school to speak to teachers, and no need for parents to send a letter to the school outlining their concerns.

The theory behind this seemed good. The reality was that the emails just kept on coming.

The school soon realised that it needed to provide guidance to teachers on how to handle this email avalanche. That was late in arriving. One year later a policy on how to deal with parent emails found its way into my inbox.

I read it carefully, wishing that it had existed a year before. That would have saved me so much time and effort.

School policy for handling emails

The long awaited policy arrived in my inbox. It consisted of around 1000 words but I pulled out the key points and worked to make sure that I kept within those.

Teachers didn’t have to respond to parent emails on the day they were received. They had 2 to 3 working days to respond and weren’t expected to work on weekends or holidays.

Parents should only email about homework queries, general school life and updates on their child’s learning needs.

Parents should make sure that they include the child’s class, name and age and should be written in a polite, respectful manner.

An email should not contain any confidential information. Appointments should be made to discuss confidential matters, major academic concerns or well-being concerns about a child.

Abusive emails would be passed directly to senior leaders for further action.

That policy meant that teachers didn’t need to worry about getting back to parents about concerns that were in the email policy straightaway. They were free to get on with their teaching without worrying about how to answer a parent in that time and they could pass inappropriate emails to senior leaders for further action.

My own email policy now that I work for myself

Now that I work for myself, I have an email policy that protects my time, and means that I can give a considered response to parents’ queries about how their children are progressing.

It’s loosely based on that school’s early email policy for parents but I wanted to make it simpler and sharper. I also don’t have any senior leaders for me to pass abusive emails onto. I have to deal with all emails from parents.

So I designed a very short email policy that has worked well for me.

If I didn’t have this policy, then I could quite easily spend a lot of time responding to the many parents who email me concerning their child’s learning. I could spend hours worrying about abusive emails.

I include the main parts of it in my initial email to parents confirming that I will be tutoring their child.

I keep emails short, simple, to the point and transparent.

I ask parents to be respectful and mindful of the time of the day when sending emails. I ask parents not to send emails between 10pm and 7am as that is the time period when I am not working. I advise parents that if they send an email between those hours it will not be looked at until the next working day.

I state that abusive emails will not be tolerated and that those types of emails will result in my declining to work with a student, as it will be clear to me at that point, that if I cannot work with a parent, then I cannot work with their child.

I also ask parents not to send multiple emails on the same issue as multiple queries about the same topic can be answered in a phone call that can be arranged by calling me at a pre-arranged time.

Despite how carefully I word my email, a few parents read my email policy but then think that it doesn’t apply to them.

Working with an anxious parent

Two years ago, I taught a student, Ethan, who had an anxious parent.

Ethan’s father was forever emailing me with concerns about what I was teaching and how I was teaching it. He told me that he had looked up the latest teaching methods and questioned me on why I wasn’t using those to teach his son.

I read his first email, skimmed the second, third and fourth and subsequent emails. By then I had done enough reading.

I was tempted to fire off another email to tell him that he was breaching the email policy I thought I had so clearly explained to him in my initial email. Then I realised that probably that would not be a good idea.

So I took a few minutes and some deep breaths and decided that this man was really telling me that he didn’t trust me to teach his son well.

So I messaged back, ignoring most of the content of his emails on how he thought I should teach, and I offered him an appointment to tell him how I would be teaching his son and how my lessons would be structured with the end goal we had agreed in mind.

That call took place and we got through a lot more in 15 minutes than we could have done through a tense exchange of many emails. At the end of the conversation, he seemed assured that I knew what I was teaching and that I would do my best to get Ethan to achieve his stated learning aims.

Even though I have an email policy, if some parents break it might not be a good idea to remind parents of the email policy as those parents will try to persuade me that my policy doesn’t apply to them.

Instead, it’s easier to call them at a mutually agreed time and explain what I do, how I work and why good communication is an important part of the learning process. That way the parent can see that my response is designed to make sure that I keep them in the picture, and they can be sure that I am teaching their child well.

After that call, I got far fewer emails from Ethan’s father.

What I learnt from setting up and sticking to my short parent email policy

Working for myself means long hours and lots of admin that I need to work through myself. I love teaching students and seeing the progress they make but being a one person business, dealing with emails is my responsibility.

In order to survive and thrive in my business, I’ve had to think about and put together policies that protect my time and professionalism.

At the same time, I want to make sure that I address parent’ concerns about how I teach their child.

I’ve learnt that being simple, transparent, and kind is the best way to be when helping parents to be fully involved in their children’s learning journey with all the policies that I create.

The policy took a while to come together, but persevering with putting one together, communicating it simply, and then making sure I stick to it was well worth the wait. A short and clear statement serves me well and is so much easier to stick to than a long, wordy statement that needs lots of reviews each year.

My simple policy also means I get time to spend on other important things in my life. Those things include reflection time and building good memories with important people in my life.

Those simple things help me move forward towards being the best teacher that I can be for every child I teach and each parent I have to work with.

How do you manage parent emails well?