Amy knew that the move to secondary school would be tricky. But she didn’t realise it was going to be quite so rough for her until she was invited to join a WhatsApp group for all the parents of Year 7.
Instead of the daily pings of messages from 30 other parents from the primary school class, she was being inundated with the complaints and opinions of 200 of them. Cold classrooms, a lavatory shortage, the uniform, narrow staircases, too much shouting by the teachers, the small lunch hall, not enough seating in the playground, a ban on socialising in the corridors — all were covered in the group chat in one day. “The basic needs of the children are not being met,” one parent raged. It’s a long way from the gentle nudges about cake sales and lost coats at her child’s village primary school near Leeds.
“It can be quite stressful reading everyone else’s grievances about the school,” says Amy, 44, who works in finance. “I wish that, before posting a comment, parents would ask themselves, ‘Is this worthy of interrupting the lives of 200 other busy parents?’ I am tempted to leave, but every few weeks it has something useful, like a reminder about Christmas jumper day.” She muted the chat before the week was out.
• School league tables 2024: the best UK secondary schools revealed
So how can you find the information you need without being driven spare by constant messages? The answer is to set clear rules of engagement. Here’s our guide to surviving secondary school the second time around.
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Divide and conquer
Often there can be several group chats on the go, what with extracurriculars, subgroups to complain about other parents and twice or even three times the complication if you have several school-age children. Split the mental load with your partner or a friend by taking one or two groups each.
“Choose a designated time of the day or week to skim through all of the WhatsApp groups,” says Anna Mathur, a psychotherapist and the author of Raising a Happier Mother. “Alternatively, consider asking a friend or partner who doesn’t mind being in the groups to screenshot the important notices for you.”
• The Times view on WhatsApp groups: Antisocial Media
Take a step back
Seasoned secondary school parents recommend stepping back as much as possible. After all, school communication is usually emailed or handed to children to teach them independence.
“Resist the urge to do it all for them,” says Helen Brown, the deputy editor of MadeForMums and the author of Parenting for Dummies. “When they were at primary school you were the one who remembered PE days, made the costume for World Book Day, signed them up for afterschool football/streetdance, organised the playdates. But now it’s their turn. Do you really want to be organising meet-ups for your 16-year-old? They will forget stuff and make mistakes and you need to let them, so they learn not to do the same next time.”
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Emma Hugill, a former head of the parent teacher association (PTA) at her son’s primary school in Kingston, southwest London, says the culture shift can be “a shock to the system”. “You don’t really have anything to do with the secondary school … you rely on your child to get the information and leave them to it.”
One grammar school teacher advises that “no news is good news”. “Trust that staff will get to know your child well as the term progresses and will always keep you in the loop when they have concerns, academic or pastoral.”
Join in on your own terms
There may be endless WhatsApp groups, but are the parents taking action or simply complaining and shunning responsibility? Similarly, schools that have no groups at all can end up with no social events and very little PTA activity.
Hugill says: “When my son started in Year 7, I went to the first PTA meeting and I was the only one that turned up out of 240 parents. I thought, ‘Forget this.’ ” She took matters into her own hands and asked her son to pass on her number to his friends to give to their parents. “[It] makes it easier to organise parties. I also arranged to meet the parents just to say hi and put a name to a face, which was actually really helpful and nice.”
• Hell is other people (in WhatsApp groups)
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Organising a car share for school or clubs can also facilitate meeting and connecting with other parents. “[It] is a good way to stay in contact and to form a better understanding of your child’s friendships and interests,” says Nicki Chambers, a mother, teacher and writer for the educational resource website Twinkl.
And an active PTA can be a great place to start to build a community. Heena Amin, 48, is the PTA chairwoman at her daughter’s school, St Margaret’s, an independent in Bushey, Hertfordshire. She says: “The difficulty post junior school is that there is no longer the requirement to huddle at the school gates to pick up children, so you don’t get the chance to meet fellow parents in your year group or strike up conversations as you might have previously done.” To boost relationships, the PTA has organised “Macmillan Coffee mornings, cheese and wine nights” and “larger family events such as our own festival”.
Look after yourself
“We are often so focused on helping our children transition that we forget we are learning to let go, which feels like a kind of grief,” Mathur says. Then there are the new hurdles involved in parenting a preteen, including making difficult decisions about everything from mobile phones and social media use to the computer games they can play, TV shows they can watch and whether or not to track their location and communications.
Undoubtedly at some point this will put you at odds with their friends’ parents. But stick to your guns, Mathur says. “Nurture your own confidence, put your blinkers on and remember you’re making decisions that feel right for your family right now.”
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