Rise in working mothers has led to a shortage of PTA volunteers, says head

WORKING mothers are now too busy to join Parent Teacher Associations, a leading headmistress has said, and people are now less “community-minded” than they used to be.

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady decline in attendance of PTA meetings and this is partly down to more women having high-flying careers, according to Sue Hincks who is head of Bolton School Girls’ Division in Lancashire.

She said that while it was cause for celebration that women are now more likely to be the breadwinners of the family than in previous generations, it also meant that they had far less time to volunteer.

Miss Hincks, who is president of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA), said that over the past 20 years she has watched as PTA numbers decline.

“I don’t mean to criticise parents,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “We are all working so hard. But there is a question about how we manage our resources and our time. There are lots of things people used to do outside the home – Women’s Institutes, Brownies, Scouts – and now we do much less. It’s the voluntary stuff that was very important, maybe 30 years ago. We are becoming much more atomised and less community-orientated.”

The GSA represents the heads of the country’s 148 leading independent girls’ schools. Its members include South Hampstead High School in north London, which counts actress Helena Bonham Carter among its alumnae, and Oxford High School where the pottery tycoon Emma Bridgewater and actress Dame Maggie Smith studied.

Miss Hincks said that within GSA schools it had usually been pupils’ mothers who came along to PTA meetings more than their fathers.

“The men will come and do things like put up stalls for fetes but in terms of turning up to the committees, it is more female,” she said.

“At the GSA we would applaud the fact that women are working. But obviously there has to be a rebalancing sometimes. If women have to do demanding jobs and also do the chores, there is not as much time to devote to the PTA.”

Most schools have a PTA that organises community and fundraising events, as well as meetings to tell parents about what’s going on at the school.

Speaking to head teachers today at the GSA annual conference in Bristol, she will say: “How many of you have parents too busy to join your parents’ association? Or, in day schools, how many of you experience a demand for care between 7am and up to 7pm because those are the times between which adults need to work or be en route to and from work?

“Or, in nurseries, who has had a request for Saturday and even Sunday opening because parents need that time for work or domestic chores?”

Miss Hincks will tell head teachers that GSA schools share an ethos that “altruism creates happiness”.