At September’s Parent Council meeting, our Chair proposed a new structure for our Parent Council going forward.

To quickly recap, all parents and carers with children at the school are automatically members of the Parent Forum. The Parent Council includes a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25 members of the Parent Forum, and is the business committee which organises and coordinates the activities of the Parent Forum.

The current Parent Council structure includes elected office bearers (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer & Clubs Organiser), as specified by our constitution, as well as co-opted office bearers (Events Coordinator, Fundraising Officer, Class Reps Coordinator, Communications Officer, Website Manager), with regular voting members without a specific role making up the final 25.

 

As part of our ongoing efforts to simplify and improve the structure of the Parent Council, we’re looking to make some changes that will allow more flexibility and encourage broader involvement.

As noted above, the Parent Council includes several individual co-opted roles. We would like to move towards a more collaborative approach by turning some of these roles into working groups. This will help to distribute responsibilities more effectively and allow more parents and carers to participate without taking on an individual role.

The working groups will be open to both parents and teachers, and not limited in numbers. Each working group would then nominate one representative to be a voting member of the Parent Council.

One exception is the Communications (Comms) Group, as this includes some very specific roles. Members of the Comms Group would therefore all be co-opted roles that have a vote each.

The new structure would look as follows:

 

With one exception, all the roles affected by the changes are co-opted roles, so do not require a change of the Constitution – setting up working groups, and coopting voting members, as and when needed is within the remit of the current Constitution. The afore mentioned exception is the role of Clubs Organiser, which is currently an elected role. We are proposing to change this to a co-opted role, within the new working groups structure. More information to follow.

An overview of elected roles, co-opted roles, and working groups in the new proposed structure is as follows:

 

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For any questions, please email [email protected]