Gaynor Allen: Why ditching jargon will help parents and staff cross the class divide

IT IS now generally accepted that parents play a big part in their children succeeding at school.

No longer are they little more than a necessary evil, invited in for parents’ evening and nothing else; they are welcomed with open arms as “partners”, encouraged in to see their kids in action, and maybe even help out on a regular basis. This can still be a “tick box” exercise, but the advantages are there for all to see.

Schools and local authorities want to talk to parents – yet there is a huge stumbling block in the way: jargon.

Communication between parents and school is vital. We need to know what’s going on and what we can do to help. But the stack of information sent out by schools is often badly written and near-impossible to understand.

Government and council employees have become so used to taking the English language by the throat and spitting it back out as a total gobbledegook that they probably don’t realise no-one else understands it. If parents can’t understand it they stop reading it, leading to a breakdown of communication.

Jargon backed by “council speak” is the bane of most parents’ lives. Most of us give a school newsletter a quick glance to see if it’s something that needs to be dealt with urgently – before an overwhelming feeling of frustration descends as you realise you can’t make head or tail of it. One of my favourite uses of jargon was in a P1 newsletter from my child’s school about how the children were learning to “self-select”. What? What’s wrong with choose?

When asked what was wrong with choose, I was told it had negative connotations, and self-selecting was more positive.

My four-year-old understands choosing, but hasn’t a clue what self-selecting is. And, if she ever comes home and tells me she wants to “self-select”, she’ll be banished to the garden shed. I think the majority feeling is, “Please stop this, we don’t understand it, we don’t want it, just say it in plain English”.

Some hope. On the website of Learning Teaching Scotland ( www.LTScotland.org.uk), this is the answer to the question “How can parents help their children’s learning?”

“Children who succeed do so because they grow in understanding both at school and at home and are able to build a learning bridge between them.” First, what happened to punctuation? Second, aarrggghh!

Yes, we know what you’re saying, but please say it in a way that doesn’t make us feel someone is scratching nails down a blackboard.

Well, at least we can understand that sentence. Let’s try a couple from my children’s school prospectus: “Formative assessment and personal learning planning are about engaging children in an ongoing discussion about learning based on clearly understood goals and feedback.”

This one from East Lothian Council is about transferring educational data about pupils, and appears in the same prospectus: “The Scottish Government Education and Training Department has two functions: acting as a ‘hub’ for supporting data exchange within the education system in Scotland and the analysis of data for statistical purposes within the Scottish Government itself.”

Read it and weep. Parents are busy people who haven’t got time to sit and decipher this nonsense. We have homework to help with, problems to sort, uniforms to get ready, not to mention fun to have with our kids. Please give us something we can read and understand. Perhaps then, communication between parents and schools will be better for all concerned.

• Gaynor Allen is vice-chair of a school parent council.