NVPAC 2014 Parent Priority Survey Results

North Van PAC conducts our annual Parent Priorities Survey each year in May.

Purpose

The purpose of this survey is threefold:

• To identify areas of concern for further investigation
• To consider how the schools are changing over time
• To capture parent suggestions to improve the system.

Results

Our May 2014 Survey asked parents to rate multiple aspects of school activity including: Physical Environment, Social Environment, Educational Fit, Additional Support, School Communication, Teacher Communication, Parent Concerns and Overall Quality. 

With a shortened survey period due to the job action we received 1441 responses and 1053 written comments, representing about 8.5% of parents in North Vancouver.

NVPAC Parent Priority Survey - 2014 Results

NVPAC Parent Priority Survey - 2013 Results

Observations

From the survey results and comments NVPAC identified several parent priorities
Improve teacher communication about school work, homework and ongoing performance.

• Improve mechanisms to enable parents to communicate with the schools when there is a problem with students, teachers or admin Increased support for students on the edge including gifted and special needs students
• Improve teacher quality, grading standards, subject specialists to provide better personalized learning and educational fit to the student.
• Develop stronger mechanisms to recognize and address bullying related issues

Conclusions

Based on this NVPAC has identified expectation setting and parent-school communication guidelines as two areas that need to explored further to find ways to improve this situation for schools and parents across the district.  The next steps should be to gather more parent and partner group input to help us identify and clarify different types of issues and different expectations and to identify the parent resources needed to help parents communicate with the schools better. 

Informal Reporting

What we see from the results is that 20% of parents feel poorly informed about what is going on in the classroom, with homework and expectations etc. The comments strongly reflect a desire for better communication from teachers on classroom activity and performance, many requests for blogs etc but with some specific requests against electronic communication. Parents want to know this so they can help their child, particularly if they are struggling in silence.

Parent-Teacher-School issue communication

The results of our 2014 annual parent survey tell us that 69% of parents need to contact the school to address different issues over the course of the school year. Most parents have good interactions but the survey also tells us that 13% of parents find the timeliness of the schools response poor and 19% find the appropriateness of the schools responses poor.

The comments we receive back this up. We see many comments thanking the schools for addressing their issues but we also see a fair number of comments describing the schools as unresponsive to parent needs and insufficient in their responses.

75% of parents are comfortable approaching the school with issues but the survey also tells us that 11% of parents are uncomfortable approaching the schools about their particular schools concerns. At the same time 34% feel they get at best partial guidance from the schools on where to start and how to address their concerns. 

When it comes to school issues, the resources, processes and guidance vary widely from school to school and there may little guidance available to help parents at the start of the process, when the issues are small and in need of communication rather than formal process. Getting off on the wrong path can impede issue resolution and clarifying these processes could potentially improve the success of many interactions.