A Wuhan School Put Parents on Evening-Study Duty, and the District Is Investigating
Parents at a middle school in Wuhan were assigned to take turns supervising the school's extended evening study sessions — the student's own mother or father only, with instructions to note down misbehaving students. The school calls the rota voluntary 'home-school cooperation'; the district education bureau has opened an investigation.
The notice asked for something schools rarely say out loud: unpaid classroom staff, supplied by families. At a middle school in Wuhan, parents reported being given a rota for the school's extended evening study sessions — each night supervised by the parent of one of the pupils, restricted to the student's own mother or father, with duty parents instructed to keep a record of any student who misbehaved. When the story surfaced on October 8, staff defended the arrangement as a form of "home-school cooperation" — voluntary, they said, with parents free to ask the class teacher to adjust their slot. By October 9 the Wuchang district education bureau had confirmed the arrangement was real, and said it had stepped in to investigate.
It is not an isolated design. In Guangzhou, a primary school's notice circulated online asking families to supply one parent each day to supervise the lunch break, from 11:50 to 14:00, after the third-party operators that used to run the service withdrew. A second screenshot from the same thread goes a step further than the Wuhan rota: it "in principle" discourages grandparents and fathers from taking the slot and asks for mothers instead, "to avoid unnecessary trouble."
The arrangement touches a nerve because it extends a drift the site has charted before — schools that stopped printing homework left parents buying the printers — from money to time. Extended evening study is a fixture of Chinese secondary schooling that already stretches teachers' days past twelve hours; support-staff budgets are thin; and the parents' WeChat group is where the logistics get settled and the resentments accumulate. "Home-school cooperation" is official policy language, and each new notice tests how far it can be stretched before it reads as a school assigning its own work to families.
What the Wuhan rota adds is the reporting function: duty parents were not only to mind the room but to write up the misbehaviour of other people's children. That is the detail readers keep returning to in the discussion under the story — a parent asked to police a classmate is no longer volunteering; the bureau's inquiry is open, and the school insists the rota was voluntary. Between those two statements sits the question the thread keeps circling: when a school extends its hours, whose hours are those?