Becoming a parent can be one of the richest, most rewarding things you can ever experience. That said, it’s a qualified reward, because to be a parent is often to be forced into joining the school WhatsApp group. In theory, it’s a community of like-minded peers who understand that it takes a village to raise a child. In reality, the school WhatsApp group is a vortex of petty drama, pointless competition and outright hostility.
Navigating a mess like this can often leave a parent feeling bruised and overwhelmed. It is a task that requires diplomacy, patience and – sometimes, because everyone’s human – locking your phone away in a drawer until your blood pressure recovers. With that in mind, using real-life stories collected from friends and acquaintances, here are the top 10 rules of school WhatsApp group engagement.
The group is not Google
If there’s a gap in your understanding when it comes to the machinations of your child’s school – maybe you want to know when the next non-uniform day or bake sale is – always check your email first. Answer not there? Have a look on the school website. Once you’ve done that, then (and only then) ask the group. Because to ask the group anything is to receive an answer from everyone. Do you really want to receive 28 messages reading “Next Friday x”, and another two saying “Don’t know hun”? More importantly, do you want to be the person responsible for ensuring that everyone else in the group suddenly receives 30 unsolicited messages? No, you do not, because you are not a psychopath. The only thing worse than treating the group like Google, from my research, is passive-aggressively responding to these messages with screenshots from the school website. If you do that, I can guarantee that there’s a breakout group devoted to slagging you off. But we’ll come to that.
No external ideologies
A successful group is one that remains on-message. To invite any other subject into the conversation is to plunge the whole endeavour into chaos. Proof? See the friend of mine who forwarded me several long and impassioned screenshots from a group member who was desperately trying to get everyone else to care about the local council’s plans for a roundabout. Another sent a message from a parent who kept asking everyone to sign a petition to deport migrants.
My favourite story of this ilk, however, is as follows: “We have one mum lecturing us not to use sun cream on our kids because of ‘chemicals’. She says that sunburn is just the skin shedding toxins.” Yikes.
Illustration: Stephen Collins/The Guardian
Be the same person in the group as you are at the gates
This is a general rule for all WhatsApp groups. However, in a school setting – where many parents don’t know each other particularly well – it seems to be exacerbated. The rule is this: if you’re nice to someone in the group and then see them in real life, also be nice. Don’t, as seems to be the case in several schools, act like everyone’s best friend online and then blank them at the gates. This is the fastest way to foster hostility. Actually, no, the second fastest.
Don’t let the chat spill out into real life
It isn’t unheard of for conflict that started on WhatsApp to reach its conclusion at the school gates. One friend told me about a squabble that had erupted on WhatsApp, with one parent accusing another of dinging their car on the school run. “It kicked off the next morning with a full-on fight that had to be split up by one of the teachers,” she said. Another told me about a case of bullying at school that ended up with one dad offering to lay out the other child’s dad in the playground the following morning.
This works both ways; sometimes a real-life dispute can leak into the chat, which only serves to amplify the drama. “One mum said in the playground that if she’d had a ginger-haired child, she would kill it,” said a friend. “Another parent heard her and reported it to the school. Now the mum who said it is kicking off on WhatsApp and calling everyone twats.”
Beware the breakout group
On paper, a breakout group seems sensible to keep the peace – if you’re feeling aggrieved, you have a place to vent in confidence to a smaller group. But in practice this never works, thanks to the overwhelming likelihood that you’ll end up accidentally sending something contentious to the main group.
I was sent a screenshot of a long and admittedly quite boring message from a dad that was instantly followed by a mum describing him as a “moaning douche”. This was then followed by a panicked “Haha, sorry, I meant to send that to my mum.” Someone else mentioned an escalating passive-aggressive feud on WhatsApp that culminated in one of them accidentally posting a mocking picture of the other’s Facebook page to the main group. “It sent everyone silent,” my friend said. “Collective intake of group chat breath. She exited the group shortly afterwards.”
Illustration: Stephen Collins/The Guardian
Be grateful you’re not Dutch
This may not be what anyone wants to hear, especially if their phone is buzzing with 30 “Happy birthday” messages directed at a six-year-old who isn’t even on WhatsApp, but we apparently have it relatively easy.
A Dutch friend recently spent a few years in the UK. To my incredulity, she claims she actually enjoyed the WhatsApp experience here. “We were overjoyed at the low level of parent participation in the school system,” she told me. “In Holland, all the groups have zero hierarchy, and everyone needs to be heard and taken seriously. I participated in a group about sex education, in which our discussions had to result in educational goals that we could all agree on. The group included me, a gay father and a few very strict Muslim mothers. The only thing we could agree on was the phrase ‘homosexuality exists’.”
skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Inside Saturday
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
The teachers know everything you’re saying
It’s a big mistake to assume that what happens in the group stays in the group. A handful of teachers got in touch, describing all the times group threads had made their way back to them. One told me of an incident where a mum had accused her of violating her daughter’s human rights for not letting her play in part of a classroom that hadn’t been tidied yet.
Another said that when a male teacher left the school, word quickly (and falsely) spread that it was because he was a paedophile. A third said that after her pupils read a book about a child with two fathers, such a long and angry fight ensued on WhatsApp that she was forced to intervene by meeting everyone at the school gates wearing a rainbow lanyard.
Be very, very, very careful with your nudes
When I asked people for their worst school WhatsApp stories, I wasn’t expecting to receive any responses about nudity. Silly me. On the least terrifying end of the spectrum, a friend told me that: “One of the dads sent everyone a picture of what looked like a half-naked woman, but we were all too panicked and British to say anything.”
More drastically, from someone else: “During Covid, a mum sent a nude picture to the entire class WhatsApp group. She was clearly having an affair. She quickly deleted it, but not before several screenshots were taken.” And from a different person: “I woke up one day to a closeup pic of a mum’s genitals. Her story was that her phone was stolen and the person sent it to the group, but I’m pretty sure her husband caught her in an affair and did it out of rage.”
Don’t forget the legal repercussions
WhatsApp groups can become so toxic that schools have begun to intervene, hiring lawyers to write rules dictating parents’ conduct in the chat, and making it clear that personal and abusive comments about staff and pupils will not be tolerated.
And this year the law got involved. In January, six Hertfordshire police officers were sent to arrest Maxie Allen and his partner Rosalind Levine for messages they wrote on their school WhatsApp group. Although they weren’t charged, they were investigated for harassment and malicious communications. According to the school, the messages sent were inflammatory, defamatory and concerned their daughter’s new headteacher. So really, it’s probably just safer to stick to vagina pics.
And finally: no flouncing off
Regrettably, I must draw on my own experience here. Compared with many of the horror stories I received, the WhatsApp group of my children’s school was actually quite tame. There were no fistfights or anti-vax propaganda, and almost definitely no unsolicited nudes. However, it was incessant, and I am apparently too short‑tempered for that.
For the few weeks that I was a member, my phone would buzz at three-second intervals day and night with people asking if anyone had seen their kid’s jumper or when PE was. And one day something snapped.
I had put my phone on airplane mode while I did an important interview for work. When I switched it back on, it started madly buzzing in my hand. In less than an hour, the group had messaged each other about 70 times. So I left. This was my big mistake.
Officially, only the group admins are informed when a member leaves. Unofficially, what happens next is that the admins then tell everyone else that the only dad in the group has flounced off like a diva. My point here is this: if you’re ever going to have a furious Elton John-style meltdown in front of people, it’s really important that they aren’t people who you’re going to have to see twice a day for the next seven years.