You are preparing for a difficult meeting with a parent or carer
A meeting is coming that you expect to be tense, and how you prepare will decide more than what you say in it.
There is a meeting in the diary, or about to be, with a parent or carer who is angry, distressed or strongly opposed to a decision. You may be right about the substance, and that will not by itself make the meeting go well. Most of what determines the outcome happens before anybody sits down.
Presenting symptoms
- The meeting was requested in terms that made its temperature clear.
- You have been rehearsing your defence of the decision rather than preparing for the conversation.
- Colleagues who have dealt with this family have warned you about it.
Possible causes
- The parent may believe something important about their child is at stake, and may not be wrong.
- Something may have been handled badly earlier, by the school or by somebody in it.
- The decision may be sound and have been explained poorly, or not at all.
- There may be a history with this family that predates you and that nobody has told you about.
The decision is sound and they do not understand how it was reached.
Your most useful next step: Before the meeting, prepare a brief, clear account of the reasoning that a parent could accurately repeat to somebody else. If you cannot yet give it plainly, that is work to do before the meeting rather than something to improvise in it.
Lead behaviours
Something was handled badly earlier.
Your most useful next step: Find out what actually happened before the meeting, and be ready to say plainly what went wrong and what you will do about it. Defending something you have not checked is how one mistake becomes a complaint.
Lead behaviours
They are frightened for their child, and the anger is the form it takes.
Your most useful next step: Plan to spend the first part of the meeting finding out what they are most worried about, and correct nothing until you have. Arrange the room so you are not facing them across a desk, and give it more time than you think it needs.
Lead behaviours
There is a history with this family you have not been told about.
Your most useful next step: Ask the colleagues who have dealt with this family what has gone before, and then check what they tell you against the records and against what is currently true. Undocumented history may be incomplete, one-sided or no longer relevant. Where a colleague’s knowledge or role is genuinely relevant to the meeting, consider asking them to attend, provided their presence is proportionate and does not leave the family feeling outnumbered.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
The meeting is one point in a continuing relationship rather than a transaction. What happens in it sets the tone of every later contact with this family, including the contacts you do not yet know about. A parent who leaves feeling heard may still disagree with the decision, and the relationship is more likely to survive that disagreement intact.
Clear reasoning does not produce agreement, and a parent may understand a decision completely and still object to it. What it does is take misunderstanding out of the room, so that what remains is the genuine disagreement, which can be addressed on its own terms. A decision that appears arbitrary produces an argument about the school instead of a conversation about the child.
The stated subject of a difficult parent meeting is frequently not the subject. Finding out what they are most worried about, before correcting anything, is what stops the meeting becoming two people defending positions.
As the school’s representative in this meeting, you carry a professional responsibility to regulate your own response whatever the parent brings to it. That is a statement about your role rather than about them; they may hold professional obligations of their own, and none of them apply in this room. A leader who matches the temperature loses the meeting and usually the relationship with it.
Go in knowing what actually happened rather than what you were told happened. The commonest way these meetings go wrong is a leader defending a version of events that turns out to be incomplete.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where the disagreement is genuine rather than a misunderstanding. A parent may be entitled to disagree with a decision that is nonetheless right, and the meeting’s job is then to conduct that disagreement civilly rather than to resolve it. Leaving with the disagreement intact and the relationship undamaged is a legitimate outcome.
Use this before the meeting. Colleagues who have dealt with this family hold context that appears in no record, and asking them takes ten minutes rather than discovering it in the room. Treat what they give you as context to be checked rather than as established fact: undocumented history may be incomplete, one-sided or overtaken by events, and walking in carrying somebody else’s impression of a family is its own risk.
Use this on whatever you agree to. A parent who was promised something in a difficult meeting and did not receive it has been handed evidence for everything they suspected about the school.
Use this where something was handled badly. Saying so plainly and early costs far less than defending it, and it is the single thing most likely to change the temperature of the meeting.
A useful first action
Before you prepare anything else, find out what actually happened, from the people involved and from the record rather than from the account you were given.
Suggested approach
- Establish what actually happened, from the people involved and the record, before deciding what your position is.
- Ask colleagues who know this family what has gone before, and check what they tell you against the record and against what is currently true.
- Prepare a brief, clear account of the reasoning that a parent could accurately repeat to somebody else.
- Plan to spend the first part of the meeting finding out what they are most worried about, and correct nothing until you have.
- Agree only what you will actually do, write it down in front of them, and then do it.