A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to comment on a piece in TES on how to work with parents of children with SEND. As I am both a teacher and parent of such children, I was interested in what the research had to say.

It told a tale of fractured and tense relationships between teachers and parents and it got me thinking: one of the things I wonder if we don’t get terribly wrong as teachers is our relationship with and understanding of the parents of children with SEND that we have in mainstream schools.

So often, what we have, instead of teamwork, is a two-way relationship dominated by defensiveness, frustration and conflict. It’s a terrible shame, and a missed opportunity.

I think it’s partly because, while many teachers understand the trials and tribulations of parenthood, the broken nights and the childhood illnesses, not many of us understand what it is to be the parent of a child with special needs. We might think we do, but often, the conflicts between parents of children with SEND and teachers have their roots in mutual fundamental misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

For example, what many teachers don’t understand about parenting a child with SEND is the heightened levels of anxiety. This can be over anything from health concerns (if there is a long-standing diagnosis there could have been many, many hospital visits, and many, many frightening experiences) to fear of the unknown (especially so if there is no diagnosis).

Also, while we teachers might know, in an academic sense, that SEND in a child carries a social stigma, it is not the same as living it. Some parents might be defensive because they face negative judgments every time they go to the shops or the park, or walk the Walk of Shame in front of the world and his wife gathered in the playground at the end of every day, as they are invited over to the teacher “just for a quick word”.

And when someone has her full face of makeup on, when she’s armoured up in her nice clothes and bearing her forced smile, it can be difficult to recognise the long-standing months, even years, of sleep deprivation.

What we teachers really like are nice parents who do as they are told. After all, we are busy people with a million different calls upon our time; we have to negotiate the sort of balancing act that no parent can ever fully understand daily. We want parents who will hear the reading, do the spellings, practice the times tables, create the costumes at a moments’ notice and ensure that their children are in school, in good health, every day and never late, no questions asked.

But what we can sometimes fail to understand is that these parents, who present as overanxious, fussy, pushy, maybe even confrontational - a nightmare, in fact - the ones we wish would just go home at the end of the day, are not a problem. That actually, these parents are fully engaged with their child’s education. That they want to help and be allowed to help.

And that, actually, is what we teachers want. Don’t we?

Nancy Gedge is a teacher at Widden Primary School in Gloucester
@nancygedge

This is an article from the 27 May edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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