Parent Partnerships – It Pays To Get Them Involved Throughout Reception Year
If you are quick to interact with parents, you stand a greater chance of being welcomed by them when you offer guidance on supporting children’s learning.
How can practitioners work alongside busy and hard-to-reach families to better support their children’s development whilst understanding their changing needs?
Here are some successful strategies that have helped my school move out of special measures…
1. Get to know your families – fast!
Have you debated carrying out home visits, preschool visits or inviting children in to work alongside their key person before they start Reception? I know I did, but it is definitely worth the effort. Doing all these things will help you better understand the children and families you serve.
Persevere through the difficulties around staff cover and timetabling because you will find this a simple way to build trust between school and home. If you are quick to interact with parents, you stand a greater chance of being welcomed by them when you later attempt to offer guidance on supporting children’s learning.
The senior leadership team should support getting families on-side early, too, because it could set a precedent for their future involvement, strengthening their willingness to contribute in later years.
2. Uncover their interests
Interacting with families will enable you uncover whether their interests might prove useful to your school. Are any of them specialists in a future topic focus? Could any of them facilitate an after-school club with support from a staff member?
By taking an interest, you are more likely to be rewarded with their time and expertise. This is something I experienced first-hand when casually discussing plans to enhance our outdoor reading area during an after-school club.
The conversation inspired a parent to form a working party that built a gorgeous structure which fills our Reception children with excitement and an enthusiasm for reading.
Inviting parents in for creative crafting events, local walks, stay-and-play sessions and other activities allows them to work alongside their children whilst learning new things. If you have enough staff to oversee child safety, the adults who attend can be moved into a nearby room and given a demonstration, presentation, talk or brief guided session that will support their needs and build upon teacher/parent relations.
5. Enable them to do more at home
Understanding the things children do at home helps teachers develop opportunities for them to continue their learning in school, which in turn strengthens your bond with parents. To support this process, you should go out of your way to encourage families to send in ‘wow’ moments and carry out home learning observations. You could create a recording template and teach parents how to complete it during a workshop.
Remind and encourage them to create ‘parent shares’ using digital solutions (2simple and tapestry, for example) if you have them. It is also helpful to ask adults to sign to confirm that they have viewed their child’s learning journey whilst commenting on some of the next steps that have been identified.
If you incentivise this by awarding children a certificate, pencil or reward for a predetermined amount of contributions made by their family, you may be surprised by how many you receive…
It is important to also check that parents and families feel the things you have planned and facilitated have improved their understanding of how they can support their child’s progress and next steps. Last year I found that families wanted more ways to communicate with teachers about their child’s progress.
So, I plan to respond this year by setting up termly telephone and email clinics for them to contact teachers during the school day. It is important to be adaptive and learn from parents and families.
Have a go
It is crucial that we create opportunities to interact with families and respond to their needs. By doing so we will help them support their child’s learning, and with strong communication and support that starts when families first join school we can enhance the impact they have.
So, take an interest in the families you work with and ask them what they want from school; this will allow you to effectively reach out to, and support, busy and hard-to-reach homes. You may find it slow progress at first, but with perseverance you can develop the understanding and consistency that will challenge and extend the learning of your children.
Daniel Saturley is the EYFS Lead at St John the Evangelist C of E Primary School in Oxfordshire.
It is important not to underestimate, too, how much can be achieved through activities often overlooked due to time constraints – for example, stay-and-play sessions.
3. Find out how you can help
It is important to ask families where they feel they need support, because they can help to deepen learning in the home. If you don’t do this, there is a risk that they may, for example, unwittingly embed the incorrect articulation of phonic sounds, or create misconceptions in early mathematics.
Using an online survey provider is helpful because they are usually free, and seamlessly send surveys and analyse data. Carefully written questions will give you insightful answers about the specific things parents would like help with.
I find the response rate to surveys is around 40%, which is well above average, and demonstrates how online systems are an effective means of reaching out to busy families during modern fast-paced life. (This approach appears to be more effective than using paper-based systems, which are going out of fashion. They also allow schools and teachers to demonstrate new ways of parent participation whilst streamlining their work.)
Without taking these steps to find out what parents wanted help with, I would never have been able to offer workshops around supporting behaviour in the home and facilitating child learning through open-ended discussions.
4. Invite them in
Once you know what your families would like support with, you are in a position to cater to their needs. So, for example, if your survey responses suggest they would like advice and guidance on how best to support early phonics and mathematical enquiry, you could integrate this into a workshop. There are several benefits to inviting parents into school:
It keeps parents informed about what they can do to support their children. It is easy to give a formal talk about how they can support early reading, literacy and mathematics. It is important to have a well-prepared presentation – show a video if it helps (e.g. correct phonic pronunciation) and allow time for questions within the group at a time convenient to them.
Inviting parents in to work alongside their children gives you a chance to show them how to do something by modelling it to them. I have found this approach is most effective just after the register or before home time. Using this method I have helped families use questioning when listening to their children read.
It is also effective at showing adults how to read to their children using book talk to consider what the author and illustrator may have been aiming to achieve in their work. This usefully allows parents and carers to observe and learn from school staff.
Inviting parents in for creative crafting events, local walks, stay-and-play sessions and other activities allows them to work alongside their children whilst learning new things. If you have enough staff to oversee child safety, the adults who attend can be moved into a nearby room and given a demonstration, presentation, talk or brief guided session that will support their needs and build upon teacher/parent relations.
5. Enable them to do more at home
Understanding the things children do at home helps teachers develop opportunities for them to continue their learning in school, which in turn strengthens your bond with parents. To support this process, you should go out of your way to encourage families to send in ‘wow’ moments and carry out home learning observations. You could create a recording template and teach parents how to complete it during a workshop.
Remind and encourage them to create ‘parent shares’ using digital solutions (2simple and tapestry, for example) if you have them. It is also helpful to ask adults to sign to confirm that they have viewed their child’s learning journey whilst commenting on some of the next steps that have been identified.
If you incentivise this by awarding children a certificate, pencil or reward for a predetermined amount of contributions made by their family, you may be surprised by how many you receive…
It is important to also check that parents and families feel the things you have planned and facilitated have improved their understanding of how they can support their child’s progress and next steps. Last year I found that families wanted more ways to communicate with teachers about their child’s progress.
So, I plan to respond this year by setting up termly telephone and email clinics for them to contact teachers during the school day. It is important to be adaptive and learn from parents and families.
Have a go
It is crucial that we create opportunities to interact with families and respond to their needs. By doing so we will help them support their child’s learning, and with strong communication and support that starts when families first join school we can enhance the impact they have.
So, take an interest in the families you work with and ask them what they want from school; this will allow you to effectively reach out to, and support, busy and hard-to-reach homes. You may find it slow progress at first, but with perseverance you can develop the understanding and consistency that will challenge and extend the learning of your children.
Daniel Saturley is the EYFS Lead at St John the Evangelist C of E Primary School in Oxfordshire.
