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How to Run a Successful PTA Meeting

How to Run a Successful PTA Meeting

With the start of the new school year, new members who are keen and full of ideas may have joined your committee, and these enthusiastic new members are key to ensuring your PTA continues to be a success. So it’s very important to ensure they receive a great impression of your PTA meetings so that they stay on board even when the going gets tough! A well run PTA meeting will retain the commitment from its members – which is vital for a committee made up of busy volunteers!

Here are our top tips for running a successful PTA meeting:

  1. Plan the agenda of the meeting in advance and send this information out to members at least 3 days before the meeting
  2. At the meeting make sure it is minuted with all agreed actions documented
  3. The PTA committee chair is key to the success of the meeting- the chair must ensure that issues are properly debated and an agreement is reached and minuted. It’s also the chair’s responsibility to ensure all voices are heard – particularly from new members who may feel intimidated or shy, and the chair must remain impartial throughout a meeting to ensure all decisions are fair and reached collectively.
  4. The Treasurer is also an important role and even if they cannot attend a meeting s/he should send a report to the chair for distribution and all members should have the opportunity to comment on the content of the report.
  5. The Secretary is also a key member as they are responsible for writing up and distributing the minutes and communicating the results from the meetings to the school as a whole. They need to ensure they record all the important points from a meeting so that nothing gets missed or forgotten in the next meeting.
  6. Ideally committee members should include at least one parent from each class – these class reps should then pass on information from the PTA to the parents in their child’s class and vice versa.
  7. Try to organise a full PTA meeting once a term and set up smaller groups to meet more regularly for organising specific events.
  8. Creating a PTA newsletter is a good idea to make sure all the school is kept up to date with developments. Allocate one or two people to write the newsletter and ask them to keep it short and snappy with the focus on things coming up in the next couple of weeks rather than months ahead, this will keep people interested and remind them about upcoming events. You may want to upload these to the school’s website to save printing costs, however there’s no guarantee everyone will go on the website to view it. Another way to help increase readership is to speak to the school secretary and try to get it set out with another communication that is due to be sent out to parents.

If you are looking for fundraising ideas for your PTA events download our free Fundraising Pack:

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