What is the Parent Council?

The Parent Council is a group of parents selected by members of the Parent Forum to represent all the parents of children at a school.  Parent Councils are very flexible groups and the Parent Forum can decide on the type of group it wants to represent their views.  Parents might decide they want a representative from each year group in the school.  They might want to include pupils, other teachers at the school or parents from a feeder or secondary school.  This flexibility allows parents to choose a Parent Council which reflects their school and will encourage parents to get involved.

The type of things a Parent Council could get involved in include:

• Supporting the work of the school
• Gathering and representing parents' views to the headteacher, education authority and HMIE
• Promoting contact between the school, parents, pupils, providers of nursery
• Fundraising
• Organising events
• Being involved in the appointment of senior staff.

Main features of Parent Councils

The main features of Parent Councils are:

• The Parent Forum decides on the type of Parent Council and constitution that is right for the school.
• The Parent Council should establish a written constitution, detailing such information as aims, purposes, membership and meetings.
• Only parents of children at that school can be members of the Parent Council.
• The Parent Forum can agree that the Parent Council constitution allows other people to be co-opted onto the Parent Council of a denominational school.
• The Parent Council chair must be a parent of a child at that school.
• The headteacher or their representative has a right and a duty to attend Parent Council meetings, unless the parents and headteacher decide otherwise.
• Schools can choose to set up a Combined Parent Council which would cover more than one school.

Setting up a Parent Council

It is the role of the education authority to establish processes for encouraging parents and schools to set up Parent Councils.  This should include the development of a Parent Council constitution.  Education authorities should do this in partnership with parents.  The decision about what the Parent Council will look like - and indeed whether one is set up - is the decision of each Parent Forum.

One of the most important issues to think about when setting up a Parent Council is that parents will need time to work their way through the process.  The more time that is allowed to work through the process slowly, the better the quality of involvement will be.