Agree completely.
Call me a pessimist, but I doubt there'd be the drive or motivation to establish and then maintain/moderate a parents forum by the school - but I'll be very happy to be proved wrong!
It takes ages to establish a forum with regular users - this is something already here, that's taken a long time to get going with a critical-mass of users to keep it going.
I'd also be reluctant to lose any independence, and agree that the school could point parents here without endorsing us, and they could be pointed specifically to the CH Parents section directly.
To this end, I've created a simple auto-forward, which takes parents directly to the parents section:-
www.chforum.info/parents
J