“We’re starting from scratch again.”

“I’d been at the school for around six months, and I wasn’t actually sure what a PTA was.”

I think there’d been a PTA at our school before, but children moved on to secondary school, parents left, and the PTA disbanded. 

An email came out from the headteacher to say that she was very keen on setting up a PTA again. I’d done some voluntary work before and I wanted to go along to find out a little bit more about what they did and how we could support the school. 

The headteacher gave us the lowdown on what the PTA had done before, and how it’s such a positive for the community. I was one of the ones that showed the most interest! 

“Another parent and I agreed to Co-chair the group for the first year and see how things went.”

I thoroughly enjoyed that year and being part of the group. Every year after that I put myself forward, and luckily I was voted in every time – eight years later I’m still here! 

The committee has changed a couple of times over the years – I’m the only original member still here. Having said that, we still have a wonderful relationship with the headteacher and the families within our school community. 

“The way we communicate with everyone, and between ourselves, has changed a lot.”

Before, we’d send out emails to the members of the PTA and other parents, but now we’re moving with the times and using social media quite a lot. We’ve also got a WhatsApp group, which I think is better for parents. 

We don’t do face-to-face meetings anymore, either. With everyone having so many commitments to work and childcare we’ve moved over to calls, which is really benefiting everyone. We also send out news via the headteacher’s blog, rather than paper copies of a newsletter. 

We also have more fundraising opportunities since we merged with the Golden Thread Alliance two years ago. We held a welcome back barbecue in the summer and this was a great opportunity to talk to parents and explain what we do. It was a win-win. 

“We always say everyone’s welcome.”

There seems to be a bit of a stereotype around what a PTA does. You see things on television, for instance, like it’s just mums or it’s just a group that get together to gossip, which I’ve always said has never been the case for us. We’re a very inclusive school and everyone knows we always welcome everybody. 

We’ve been delighted to welcome a few men to our PTA over the years as well, and they bring different viewpoints to the group, which is fantastic. 

“Over the years, we have had some absolutely brilliant volunteers and committee members.”

However, the nature of a PTA is that people move on. When you’re doing something and it’s working, you don’t want to change it. But last year we lost a lot of parents due to their children moving to secondary school. 

Now, we’re starting from scratch again. We went back to basics and thought, what do we do now? My vice chair and I made a pretty big decision to spend the next three months rebuilding our PTA. In the long run that’s going to help us, but we were also thinking about the consequences of not fundraising and not putting on the events for the children. Those are the things we really wanted to do. It was a challenge with fewer people. 

“I sent out a communication to all parents explaining what a PTA is and what it does.”

We had some interest, but it was slow, so we took a small break. Then we spoke to the headteacher and the deputy headteacher to see if they had any ideas of what we could do. At this point, the headteacher joined us! 

She bought a lot of experience to our group and she had the idea of doing coffee mornings, which we’ve done previously, but this time it was really successful. I think I actually got 55 new members from just doing that alone. Communication is key, as well as being visible – putting faces to names. 

Now we’re back to the numbers we were at previously. It’s been such a hugely positive change.