Our events were a great success - thank you all for coming

Dear new Meet the Parents supporters,

Thank you so much for coming to our events over the last few weeks and signing up to our newsletter. We ran 19 events all up, not just in Camden but also in Islington and – for the first time – in Haringey. It is always exciting to reach out to new schools, so we were delighted with the audiences at Highgate primary school (more than fifty parents) and at Coleridge, where we attracted an all-time record of ninety four attendees. We encourage prospective secondary parents to come to our events everyyear, because schools can change so quickly.

                                        More schools please!

It is very important to us to get feedback from our audiences, and one of the most frequent comments is that people would like to see more schools on the panel. This is a tough one for us: in our experience the more schools that are represented, the less depth emerges from the questions and answers. Plus our whole philosophy is to invite the schools which are closest to the host primary, and which everyone can get into.  This usually boils down to no more than five schools at the absolute max.  So what we suggest is that, for our 2019 season, you go to more than one of our events so that you can hear from families at other schools that interest you.

                                        What matters to parents

We write up all the Meet the Parents discussions – ensuring the panellists are anonymous – and send these notes to the secondary heads, so they get the very latest information on what matters to primary school parents and how families at the local secondaries respond to questions. It always interests us to see what the key issues are from year to year. We can report that this year there is a focus on the pros and cons of mixed or single sex schooling. A new theme to emerge is the effect of funding cuts – a situation which we hope the government will respond to in the upcoming budget.  Just as interesting is what parents don’t ask: we had very few questions about exam results.

Looking to 2019

We are now working on our 2019 events. We are soon to approach new primary schools which are keen to host events for the first time. We will keep you posted in our next newsletter.

For now, we hope you have a good few weeks and a relaxing half term.

Best wishes, Issi and Madeleine