Partnerships That Maximise Your Investment

If you are a parent at this school, you are making an investment.

You know that it’s an investment when you pay fees. Surely you want to get the best out of your investment. Well, I can help you with that. I have a tip about how you can maximise your investment into your children’s schooling. It is this…

Strong partnerships produce strong results.

There are a couple of critical partnerships that you ought to nurture. These partnerships are the ones that will maximise your investment. To put it bluntly, if you want to get the best results for your money, protect and nurture these two partnerships:

1 – Partnerships between yourselves as parents and your children’s teachers.

Education is a shared responsibility and so when we work together, your children learn more and learn better. Kids do better at school when the parents and the teachers work together.

On the other hand, children won’t trust their teachers if the parents are openly critical. Then the children’s learning cannot thrive.

For example, when parents say things that are critical of their children’s school in front of their children, those children lose confidence in the school.

Of course, if something is going wrong, it is proper to communicate with your child’s teacher, but smart parents do this courteously, with a polite email, and in confidence with the teacher themselves. That just makes good business sense to protect the financial investment you are making.

2 – Partnerships between your children and their teachers.

I have heard there are schools where the students see the teachers almost as enemies. Or they might even treat their teachers like enemies. That is crazy. It just doesn’t make sense. Smart students treat their teachers as a resource, a valued resource. Smart parents teach their children to learn well from their teachers. That just makes good business sense, because surely you want to get the most out of your investment.

Every now and then I hear stories from other schools about how a parent has told their child to ignore a particular teacher, or to show no respect to a particular teacher. That is foolishness. Wise parents protect and nurture the teacher-learner relationship so that their children get the most out of the learning resource that is each teacher.

Sometimes I read school reports from students who are hoping to enrol at our school… but it is clear that the student does well for the teachers they prefer, and does poor work in the class of the teacher that they don’t like. That is nuts! Who suffers? Only the student themselves suffers, oh, and the parents investment suffers too if it is a fee-paying school.

I feel so pleased to work at Melton Christian College. This is a place where parents trust staff because we are open, consistent and committed to every child’s success.

Parents and staff, let’s work hard to nurture the partnerships that make our children successful learners.

DAVID GLEESON, PRINCIPAL