“I think your son has ADHD.”

This sentence, about our eldest, was dropped without warning into the middle of a parents’ evening meeting with my wife a few years ago. An experienced teacher herself, she was able to bat the suggestion away with an immediate, “Er, I doubt that very much.” Our son was a seven-year-old with a tendency to daydream. The conversation went no further.

What if my wife hadn’t had the experience to process and reject such a pseudo diagnosis? Would she have gone away, riddled with anxiety, and dived headlong into Google to work out how to “fix” our son?

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the first parent to be on the receiving end of such a comment - and she won’t be the last. A sentence like this takes two seconds to say, but has the potential to change the relationship between a school and a parent forever.

If we were honest, we’d all admit to having overstepped the line and pseudo-diagnosed a child at some point in our school lives. It’s one thing to have concerns about a child and quite another to go as far as saying: “Have you ever thought about getting your child tested for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/dyslexia/autism/[insert condition]?”

Or worse: “Your GP might be able to prescribe some medication to help your child behave better.”

Avoid overstepping the mark

We’re teachers. We’re not psychiatrists, paediatricians or psychologists. We have a critical role to play in raising concerns about a child’s cognitive or emotional development, but we’re not here to diagnose. If we are discussing issues with parents, we need to be really careful to stick to what we know. It’s in our nature to offer solutions as part of these discussions, but it can be tempting to stray beyond the bounds of our territory.

If concerns go as far as involving professionals, such as those mentioned above, we would then be asked to contribute our opinions and evidence.

The same guidance applies if parents approach us for our views. If they ask whether we think their child has dyslexia/autism/ADHD (these are the big three that dominate such conversations), then it’s important that we stick to our professional domain as teachers and refer to the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) coordinator for further support, if needed.

It can be tempting to stray beyond the bounds of our territory

There’s a wider point here about how we talk to parents in general. Not only must we ensure that we don’t say what we are unqualified to say, we must also ensure that what we can say is properly articulated.

I am still very grateful to Clive Lister, a father whose constructive feedback at a parents’ evening many years ago changed how I talk to families. I was busy explaining how his son, Dom, was going to go from a grade C to a grade A in his GCSE physics when Clive stopped me, politely, dead in my tracks.

“But what does any of what you just said actually mean? What does Dom actually have to do differently?” he asked.

I had been wittering on, littering my feedback with inane teacherspeak that was impenetrable to Clive. I immediately wondered how many parents had sat politely in front of me for 10 minutes, only to walk away shrugging their shoulders, none the wiser about how their child was doing.

Every profession has its own jargon, but the best of us strip that away for parents. Demystifying the language of things like early entry, life without levels, Progress 8, floor standards, and education, health and care plans is crucial if we’re to work with parents as equal partners in order to do the best we can for each and every child.

Poor communication kills organisations

There are some things we should stop saying (and doing) right now. Comparing children with their classmates seems pointless and is in many ways counterproductive. “Your child is in the top five in the class for maths” might sound lovely, but contains no useful information for a parent at all. Of course, it’s a superficially nicer message to hear than “Your child is in the bottom five in the class for maths”, which is equally useless but more damaging.

While we’re at it, those school displays that rank students in the name of motivation can go in the bin as well.

Parents bristle when siblings are compared, too. It’s as pointless as class rankings and rests on the erroneous assumption that, because two children share 50 per cent of their genes, they’ll be similar. It’s far, far worse for twins, I’m sure.

Beware also the inadvertent messages that can be conveyed by seemingly innocuous or ambitious phrases, such as “we’re an academic school” or “we only do GCSEs”. In the name of aiming for the stars, we can give the impression that we don’t cater for some children with SEND.

Our biggest failure, though, is to fail to communicate at all, or to do so when it’s already too late. Here’s an extreme example: the law doesn’t stipulate that you must inform a parent if their child has had to be physically restrained. Does this shock you? It would shock you even more if, as a parent, you learned that this had happened to your child only days, weeks or even months after the event.

I’m fond of saying in our school that “poor communication kills organisations”. This is equally true of relationships with parents. They’re our best allies, and time spent getting this communication right is never wasted.

Jarlath O’Brien is headteacher at Carwarden House Community School in Surrey @JarlathOBrien