“Usually such parents barrel into school, have an incoherent shout in the playground, swear at me and whoever is close, tell me their child is an angel and barrel out again. Now in the age of AI this has all changed. Such parents are now sending in AI generated emails of complaint and they are brilliant.” So explains the Head of School of a large London primary. He says that take-up of AI has accelerated in the past half term, giving voice to a section of parents previously unable to reasonably articulate their concerns. What this means positively for parents has varied ramifications for teachers. Best-case scenario, it should improve the classroom experience; worst-case scenario, it adds a massive extra workload for teachers with spurious but legally accurate demands.
The Head shares with me two examples from the summer term of this year. “A Year One student [six-years-old] wet herself. This is not unusual. This child arrived in reception still wearing nappies. It is not unusual for Key Stage One children to wet themselves. We have great teaching assistants who know what to do in these instances. She changed into her PE kit and at the end of the day the class teacher told the parent what had happened and gave her daughter’s wet clothes in a plastic bag. So far so routine. The following week I received a beautifully written email from the mother, copying in the Chair of Governors and the CEO of our Education Trust. The email insisted that she see the school’s CCTV footage around the time of the incident because the mum did not believe her daughter would have wet herself unprovoked. She also issued a subject access request whereby any time her daughter’s name had come up in school communications, she could read the paperwork. I had to spend a considerable time pulling up the CCTV and then anonymising all the other children featured, the same with the paperwork, manually retracting all other children’s names. It took hours....<<<Read More>>>...
