Jennifer Horgan: Instead of teacher bashing, why don't parents fight for real change?

Their overestimation of power takes the form of commentary on teachers and how they teach. Teacher jokes among parents have become clichés.

Teachers spot them a mile off, like a drunken lech making his approach across a bar. In it for the holidays, you say? Ha! Hilarious!

This is evidenced in class WhatsApp groups, buzzing with parents who seem to believe they have more knowledge, expertise, cop-on, and training than any professional paid to educate their child.

As a teacher, I can assure you that this is highly corrosive in a school community and causes relationships to suffer.

It’s like a daily paper cut for teachers — no matter how thick their skin, eventually, the flesh breaks.

Our devastating teacher shortage is absolutely down to economic factors but anti-teacher nonsense adds oxygen and fuel to the fire.

Before the teacher-bashing descends, there can certainly be problems with individual teachers, as is the case with every profession. Where there is a real issue or concern about a teacher’s teaching, we need a far more transparent process for families, a topic I’ve covered in some detail for this paper.

But aside from this, there is another aspect to this squandering of parent power that is arguably more damaging. This is when parents underestimate their power to change what goes on in schools beyond the actual teacher in the classroom and their teaching.

It’s parent apathy.

Every year the same conversations are trotted out for ‘back to school’ season. Should uniforms be changed? Do we need them at all? Should schools allow mobile phones? Should we have homework?

It’s as if Irish parents imagine that teachers design uniforms and school policies themselves. In most schools, this is the preserve of internal school management, a handful of people, and the board of management made up of volunteers, usually with absolutely no expertise in education.

It’s also as if parents believe that like the smoking ban, some minister will announce a huge societal shift in education and we’ll all wake up to no homework, comfortable affordable uniforms, and a clear policy on mobile phones in all schools.

It will never happen on a national level.

Parents are key in bringing about change in their own communities because they are their children’s primary educators.

Too many parents have forgotten the consequences of that constitutional fact: that every school in Ireland works in its own small orbit, with an induvial board of management, and its own policies and approaches.

Parents in each and every school possess the power to change things such as uniforms and homework policies. The minister and the Department of Education, for this reason, will never change anything on a national level — they simply can’t!

Take voluntary contributions. The minister has stated again and again that these should not be compulsory and yet schools every year present them as part and parcel of attending the school.

This is not because schools are cruelly manipulating parents. It is because they are absolutely broke and don’t get enough funding from the State to cover basic costs.

There is a disconnect between the Department of Education and school communities that parents don’t seem to grasp. Parents blame teachers and schools for shortcomings without a sense of the bigger picture and the power they possess as primary educators, and let’s not forget, as voters too.

Parents must challenge issues on the ground in each and every school. They must prioritise education in the run-up to elections. Only then will the Government be forced to accept they are not spending enough, not nearly enough, on education. Change must come from the ground up, as it did with the free book scheme.

Because yes, the only reason we now have free primary school books is because parent groups and charities like Barnardos put continual pressure on the Government to change it.

In Northern Ireland parents didn’t have to take on this fight; children there have had free books since 1947. But we’re different down south. Here, education is state-funded but in many ways, it is not state-run.

The State handed over control of education to the Church, which split the system into tiny planets in separate volunteer-based orbits.

Some parents are beginning to get the message and the blight of smartphones on young children has perhaps hastened this change.

Parents in Greystones, Wicklow, last May agreed a voluntary ban on smartphones among kids as part of their It Takes a Village scheme. The scheme empowered parents by removing the pressure to get their child a phone because ‘everyone else has one’.

Rather than being apathetic about technology and leaving it to the school to respond to issues inevitably cropping up for children, parents took the lead. They exerted their constitutional right and privilege appropriately.

We need more of it and thankfully schools are finally nudging parents to wake from their torpor. Waterford City and County has just released a powerful initiative. It has called it ‘GEN FREE’ and the aim is to ensure that every child in Waterford has the opportunity to be “free from smartphones, free from social media, free to be kids”.

Schools across the county are inviting parents to sign a charter to display at home, pledging to keep their children off social media while respecting the age rating of video games.

It’s a wonderful initiative brought about by collaboration between principals in the county to protect children. Schools are going above and beyond their role in reaching out to parents on this level. In future, we will need parents to take more of a lead.

It’s happening in other areas too. A parent I spoke with this week in Cork City explained that she is looking to pass on her children’s formal school trousers, shirts, and ties. She needs to make room for their new gear: a non-gendered, affordable tracksuit with a stitched-on school crest.

The Parents’ Association in her school worked with the board of management and conducted a survey on parent attitudes to their uniforms. From September the children’s lives will change.

The Minister of Education has been recommending this type of uniform for years, but she will only ever make recommendations. It takes parents, not teachers, to get change over the line.

So, Irish parents, please leave the teaching to the teachers and respect their expertise in the field. Work on fostering a relationship that benefits everyone but especially your child.

The research on the impact of positive parent-teacher-child relationships is crystal clear.

Spend your time looking at the daily obstacles for your child that you have real power, and a constitutional duty, to change. These are not national conversations. They won’t be solved by the media or the Government. The history of our State has produced an education system that is fragmented and convoluted but it has also given you more power than parents in other jurisdictions. Use it.