School Administrators Editing and Proofreading Services

A head teacher writes to parents at the worst moments and has almost no time to do it. Something has happened — an incident, an allegation, a death, an inspection outcome, a staff departure that everyone is speculating about — and a letter has to reach several hundred families before the version circulating on a class group chat hardens into the accepted account. The letter is written in an hour, will be screenshotted, and may be read by a journalist by evening.

We edit what school leaders and administrators produce — letters home about incidents and safeguarding matters, communications about staff departures and changes, inspection outcome communications, behaviour and exclusion correspondence with families, attendance and punctuality communications, complaints responses to parents, admissions and transition information, policy documents and their parent-facing summaries, staff communications and briefings, governing body reports and papers, self-evaluation and improvement planning documentation, newsletters and routine communications, and emergency and closure notifications. Our editors work to the timescales schools actually have.

The letter home about an incident is where a school either holds the community's confidence or loses it, and the standard version fails in a recognisable way: it is written to disclose as little as possible, in the passive voice, with reassurance about the school's procedures and no account of what happened. Parents already know something happened — their children told them — and a letter that appears to be managing them converts a manageable event into a crisis of trust. We write these so the letter says what happened in ordinary words, at whatever level of detail is genuinely available, and states plainly what cannot be said and why, since "we cannot comment on individual pupils" is understood and silence is not; so what the school has done is described as actions rather than as procedures followed; so what parents should do, if anything, is separated and unmissable; and so it commits to a further communication by a stated day, because the vacuum between letters is where speculation lives. Written this way, the letter is also the one that reads well if it is published.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including safeguarding matters and material about identifiable pupils and staff. We are editors rather than school leaders, safeguarding or legal advisers, and we offer no view on any incident, decision, exclusion or regulatory matter. What we can do is make difficult letters clear and defensible, quickly.