Why do parents skip parents' evening?

As a school leader, what can you do when parents simply don't come to parents' evening?

It's a common issue. Under 10% of schools in the UK say that their parents' evenings have a 100% turn-out rate (TeacherTapp, 2025). 

And in a more concerning twist, the statistics suggest that the students who might benefit most from having involved, informed parents are the ones who are losing out.

The secondary gap

Secondary schools are much more likely to find parents skipping parents' evening (TeacherTapp, 2025).

77% of parents attend primary school parents' evening appointments, while only half attend secondary school appointments (either online or in person).

The gap is biggest for secondary schools in deprived areas, where teachers were far less likely to report that all parents attended appointments.

So what's behind the gap? And more crucially, what can schools do to close it?

It's not that parents don't want to attend or be involved. 85% of parents want to play an active role in their child's education (Parent Voice Report, 2021). 

But for many parents, barriers remain.

Why parents don't attend

The biggest barrier for parents is time.

35% of parents say time is a significant reason why they aren't more involved in their child's school life (Parent Voice Report).

This explains one of the biggest mysteries in the data: why secondary schools see so many more parent no-shows. After all, when it comes to a primary school's parents' evening, a parent only needs to book one meeting with one teacher. Quick and easy. But with a secondary school's parents' evening, a parent may need to speak to many different teachers, from the Maths and English teachers to the Chemistry, Physics or Art teachers. Suddenly there's much more time needed both to organise the appointments and to attend them.

For parents with multiple jobs, parents who work nights or parents who are not in a position to take time off work, finding that time can quickly become an impossible task. This, perhaps, explains why parents from more deprived areas are more likely to miss parents' evening.

And time isn't just an issue for parents - it's an issue for school staff too.

While evening appointments are generally most convenient for working parents, the opposite is true for many teachers.

 "Many parents and carers are experiencing increased financial pressures and reduced flexibility in their schedules and, as a result, attending school events in person has become more difficult, especially for those who work full-time or live at a considerable distance from the school. School staff also face time constraints, including extended working hours, which limits their capacity or willingness to organise and facilitate events in the evening. This creates a mismatch in availability, whereby evening events are generally more accessible to working parents, yet less feasible for school staff to deliver." (Brunel University, 2025)

The same Brunel University report gives some insight into another key barrier for parents... the booking process itself.

Information overload

"Parents currently receive a high volume of emails, often from multiple school departments or staff members, which can lead to information overload and confusion."

Booking an appointment, or multiple appointments, for parents' evening isn't always as simple as parents want it to be.

For schools who have not yet begun using a parents' evening management system, getting parents to fill out and send back paper forms is its own problem. These forms are typically sent home in the backpacks of students - and if a student forgets or prefers their parents and teachers do not speak, they will remain in that backpack. In this instance, all the school knows is that the parent never got back to them.

However, many schools do use booking systems. These, in theory, should make the entire process simpler for both parents and teachers. 

But sometimes, these booking systems simply add to the information overload parents are facing. 

Signing up for a new system, downloading it and working out how to navigate it - all for a few evenings each year - can seem daunting to a parent who's already busy and confused. Parents check out, and become no-shows.

Is online the answer?

In a post-pandemic world, online parents' evening appointments have stuck around. Many schools now offer both face-to-face and online appointments, giving parents a choice.

It's easy to see how online appointments could be more convenient for busy parents. A case study in the Department for Education's workload reduction toolkit for schools found that both teachers and parents liked the flexibility and time-saving benefits of online appointments, and attendance went up.

When we compared online parents' evening appointments to face-to-face appointments, we found significant pros and cons for both.

But what came through clearly was this: the online option is great, but parents don't want it to be the only option.

Instead, what parents want is flexibility and simplicity.

Making parents' evening easier

School staff are very busy people, and so are many parents. The result is that neither party has much spare time to spend on parents' evening preparation and admin. 

But school leaders can do a lot to smooth the journey.

Planning the event well in advance is a must. Not only does this take the pressure off school staff, it also means that the date(s), times and sign-up process can be promoted to parents in advance. Catch a parent in a busy week and they may not have a spare moment to book on for parents' evening - but not every week will be equally busy. The more time parents are given to sign up, the more likely they are to find a spare minute to do it.

Giving a choice between online and offline appointments can help include parents who otherwise would not be able to attend. Some parents prefer a face-to-face meeting - but not every parent has the availability to make offline appointments.

Making it easy to sign up ensures that parents complete the booking process, rather than quitting halfway in frustration (or not even starting it). When we designed PEMS, our parents' evening management system, making it easy to use for both schools and parents was our biggest priority. One of the ways we did that was by making sure it integrated with the ReachMoreParents app, rather than existing as a standalone system. For parents, this massively simplifies things: one login, one location, no need to remember different passwords or hunt down another app. 

You can find out more about PEMS and even book a ten minute demo with us here.