Vulnerable pupils: Parent-school meetings

There is a type of question which gets asked of me a lot by heads and pastoral leads which can be summed up by the following extract from the soon to be published book, Leading on Pastoral Care (Bloomsbury, 2018).

“I’m asked to observe a pastoral meeting; it wasn’t pleasant. The mother walked into the room where a number of staff were sat around the table and she seemed enraged, using threatening language. She was thoroughly upset from the first moment. After a number of quite aggressive verbal outbursts, the head tried to calmly reassure her that we would talk it through, which eventually led to her conceding to give that a go.
“She soon burst out again after the meeting lead explained what we were there to discuss – an incident that was quite serious and needed addressing. The mother started making accusations and raised her voice angrily.
“The meeting went on through a few such cycles and ended with the mother walking out in anger, shouting, full of blame and accusation. Sadly, the student’s behaviour seemed to be quite obviously a cry for help and the school’s solution, which we were presenting to the mother, was to pay for some counselling and provide a nurturing space.
“The mother saw something different: this group of teachers were attacking her and it was her duty to defend her child at all costs. The school was saying X and the mother heard Y. The student suffered and just three weeks later another incident occurred that led to them being permanently excluded.”