I am gearing up to give a coaching/skills session next week at a school on the general theme of Difficult Conversations. Notably with other colleagues – but especially with parents.

It turns out that I am not the only one sending a stream of idiotic and abusive emails to schools about the scandalous injustice of my incomparable offspring being not given the starring role in the school play or being made captain/prefect of everything in sight. Others do it too, then demand meetings to remonstrate on these and numerous other issues.

Hence, question for teachers: how to handle such awkward meetings?

If you want the answers, you have to pay.

Suffice to say that my mediation training and years of having difficult conversations with Balkanic people who later went to prison for war crimes give me plenty of good practical suggestions for maintaining Control, which in part means finding out exactly what the complaint is ‘really’ about and/or what motivates it.

Sometimes people just need to make a silly noise, and ranting about what goes on at school is an easy target therefor. Teachers have to roll with the punches (and now and again punch back) as part of the sheer joy of being a teacher.

If any schools or other organisations out there want some of this epic training/skills support, just let me know.