Dashwood Forum
The Dashwood Forum is a group of parent/carers and Dashwood staff representatives who meet to discuss issues and suggest how we can make positive change.
As a result of the group, we are working on three priorities this term (April – July 2026):
Priority 1
We have updated our mobile phone guidance in school. From Term 5, we ask you not to use your phone on school site for the following reasons:
- All attention needs to be on the children. We have had incidents where children have gone missing at collection time.
- For GDPR (Data protection) – when attending school events, phones can be used as it is in a controlled environment and a member of staff will remind parents and carers not to share photos online of any other children. However, when in an uncontrolled environment re: drop off and collection, safeguarding measures are more difficult to manage.
We will kindly ask you to put your phone away whilst on site.
Priority 2
Your parent voice told us about some improvements needed to the Arbor app (navigation, message titles, reliability)
- School emails sometimes going to junk folders
- Titles in the Arbor so messages can be re-traced
- More communication with parents with incident follow-ups
- Improved information sharing between office staff and teachers
Thank you for this feedback, we are looking into this with Arbor.
Priority 3
This term we will be updating our homework policy. Some excellent parent feedback has already helped us start the process. We have sent a Google Form to gather the views of our parents/carers regarding homework and any ideas they may have for any future changes.
Please find the full Dashwood Forum Meeting Minutes from 18th March 2026 using the link below:
Dashwood Forum Meeting minutes – 18th March 2026.docx
During our recent Parents’ Evening (March 2026) we gathered parent/carer voice through a survey.
Please find the points raised below which, along with the minutes from the Dashwood Forum, have formed our three priorities above:
Feedback – Parents Evening – March 2026