Top Tips for Parents Evening

We know what a busy time of year this is so we've put together some top tips to help make your life easier when planning, preparing and running parents evening.

What parents want to know at the first Parents' Evening of the year

The first Parents' Evening of the year is usually a shorter slot, so you have to cram a lot of information into a 10-15 minute meeting. Parents usually want to know:

• How their child is settling into the class, particularly if they are new to the school, in a new Key Stage, or the classes have been mixed up.
• How they are in school, including what they are enjoying and their behaviour.
• Strengths - it's always lovely to hear about your child is doing in certain aspects of school life, whether that's a particular subject, an after-school club, or out on the playground.

Parents' Evening is also the perfect time to set expectations for home learning - whether you set specific homework tasks, or if fluency and reading practice are the top priority.

Set home learning tasks

To get the year off to a good start and develop good home learning habits, you can set tasks as recurring 2Dos. This works really well for the maths games like Bond Bubbles, or Multiplication Monster and means that you don't have to keep setting it every week, but pupils still get regular notifications. These scores also go into the Data Dashboard to help you track progress.

You can also set tasks in advance such as:

• Spelling quizzes - set each quiz weekly for each spelling group in your class for a term. Quizzes are marked automatically and feed into the Data Dashboard.
• Books - set your reading groups a book in the Purple Mash Library, and then revisit and discuss it in class, or set children books that you think might interest them to encourage them to read at home.

Introduce the Parent Portal

Ahead of Parents' Evening, print out the Parents' Guide to the Parent Portal, and generate parent codes to print and attach. Give these out along with any other documents to encourage parents to sign up, as it gives them an easy way to see their child's work in Purple Mash.

Use Data Dashboard for a quick gap analysis

If you've set work as 2Dos and have tagged objectives, you can use the Judgements in the Data Dashboard on Purple Mash to quickly identify areas of confidence and for development for each child, and the Scores from quizzes can help build up this picture too.

Show off pupils' work

In the lead up to Parents' Evening, get your Digital Leaders to put together a blog showing the work done this year so far. Blogs are a great way to safely share work as they can only be accessed externally with a link or QR code given to parents. For Parents' Evening, they are great to have up on the board in the classroom.

Been doing some of your work online in Purple Mash? Many schools set out books and children's work for parents to look at while waiting for their appointment. With work completed on Purple Mash, it's easy to bulk print pupils' work. Watch the video below to see how.