College Head of Learning

Parent Teacher Interview survey results

As you are probably aware, we recently asked for feedback about the remote Parent Teacher Interviews held in August via Zoom. We were pleased to receive 265 survey responses from parents – thank you to all of you!

A summary of the most relevant results is shown in the tables below.

	Agree or strongly agree	Disagree or strongly disagree	Unsure or not applicable
The remote interviews were just as effective as on-site interviews	93.21%	4.52%	2.26%
The instructions on how to access the interviews worked	96.18%	3.39%	0.38%
I prefer remote interviews to on-site interviews	74.34%	13.21%	12.45%

	Yes	No
Did you need to use the IT support email address to help you in the interview evenings?	5.66%	94.34%

What did you like most about the remote interviews?	Convenience of staying at home 45.28%	Time efficient 31.32%	Ease of access – no difficulty finding rooms 15.09%

These results indicate that the overwhelming majority of respondents were happy with the remote interview system. We also received many, many comments along that lines that the remote interviews were one of the best things to come out of the COVID crisis. Consequently, it is likely that we will continue to run interviews remotely in future. We are conscious that no system is ever going to suit every single family, but we will be working to improve the system to address some of the problems that were experienced by a small number of participants, identified in the feedback.

Some respondents suggested that five minute interviews with most teachers were not long enough. The College is committed to giving parents and guardians access to conversations with all teachers of their children. A typical secondary teacher at Aitken teaches 150 students each week, and for some specialist teachers this can be as high as 300 students. This means that Parent Teacher Interviews need to be kept very brief to be able to fit them all in, without breaching industrial standards for the time teachers are required to work after hours for such events. Increasing the duration of each interview by just 5 minutes per person would mean that either fewer parents would be able to make interview appointments, or teachers would be required to work on many additional evenings, taking time away from their own families and children – and this would be on top of the many hours per week most teachers already spend at home on lesson preparation and assessment after the school day has officially ended.

We encourage parents and guardians who have concerns about their child, or who would like to check in with their child’s teachers, to contact teachers via email or phone, and to stay well informed about their child’s progress in classes by regularly checking the feedback provided in My Aitken in the ‘marks and feedback’ section.

Ms Kerri Batch

College Head of Learning