FEATURE: PARENTAL ENGAGEMENT
parents take away the message you want to convey.
4. Don’t overcommunicate
Schools using text messages or WhatsApp to communicate can find themselves sending 20 or 30 messages a week per child, ranging from “Please sign consent forms for the school trip” to “There’s a case of nits in 1J” to “There’s a cake sale after school on Friday.”
The more communications you send out, the less likely it becomes that parents will read any of them. Try to limit communications, again thinking about the best medium for each message. Save the most immediate channels – such as SMS or WhatsApp – for genuinely urgent messages. Perhaps some of the messages could be combined into an end-of-week class newsletter, informing parents about upcoming cake sales or school trips, as well as reminding them to fill in their consent forms.
5. Give them enough time
If you want pupils to create a model motte and bailey castle for their history lesson on Friday, don’t send out the message about it to parents on Thursday (or even Wednesday). If there is going to be a spelling test on Tuesday, try to send out the list of words to be learnt before the weekend.
Families are busy. Parents might be juggling work with functioning as a taxi, cleaning and restaurant service for their children. The more warning you can give them of something you expect them to do, the more likely it is that it will be done.
6. Make their lives easier
Rather than adding to the workload of parents, try to ease it. With every message you send, try to put yourself in the parents’ place. Is this message timely, relevant and helpful?
Many schools now use school-communication apps like our own, called Schoolcomms, which allow parents to do everything in one place. The app will notify them of an upcoming parents’ evening, and they will then be able to book a slot with their child’s class teacher. Similarly, it might notify parents of a forthcoming school trip, plus let them consent for the trip, pay for it and tell the school who will be picking up their child at the end of the day.
This minimises the number of steps for the parent – they just read a message and click on a link. The app can store their credit-card information, which saves having to enter it afresh for every different payment.
7. Send home good news, too The ultimate goal of school communication is that it should be useful to the child. This is true of practical communications about school dinners or breakfast clubs. But it can also be true of news that has no purpose other than to inform. If a children’s author visited and spoke to the pupils, or the year group delivered an assembly to the rest of the school, or the class went on a nature walk on a sunny day, tell the parents about it.
Parents’ questions to their children about what they’ve been doing at school that day tend to be met with a level of evasiveness that would impress high-level operatives at MI6: “Stuff”; “You know”; “The usual”.
An update from the teacher gives parents a starting point for conversation: “I hear you’ve been learning about this,” rather than “What have you been doing?” Faced with unequivocal evidence of their activities, most children will open-up.
8. Include all the relevant information The more information you give parents, the better able they are to make informed choices. For example, parents putting their children’s names down to study a musical instrument might be asked for a first and second choice of instrument.
Say a family selected, in order of preference, the violin and the oboe. If a place came up to study the oboe, they might well be inclined to accept it.
However, if the school told the family that oboe lessons were available this term, but that violin lessons would become available next term, the child might well decide to wait until next term and learn the violin instead. But they would not have been able to make that choice unless they were presented with all the necessary information.
9. …and only relevant information The parents of a child with a broken leg may not appreciate receiving weekly reminders of
an after-school netball club that their child cannot participate in. Even if these emails are sent automatically to the rest of the class, these parents could be left off the mailing list until their child’s leg is better.
Personalisation of mailing-list data like this can be automated making this easy to do.
10. Look out for patterns
Most school-communications apps and digital systems will allow school staff to monitor who has opened the message, who has signed the consent form, who has paid for the trip and so on.
Parents tend to fall into certain categories. Some open the message and act on it immediately. Some wait a while, but act on it within the deadline given. Some may or may not open the message and will need repeated nudging before they act on it.
If a parent slips from the first category to the second or third, or from the second to the third, it may be a sign that something unusual is going on for that family. This information will allow schools to ask tactful questions at an early stage, and to intervene promptly, should action be required. Most schools prioritise parental engagement. But if you can demonstrate in your communications that you also understand the pressures that parents are under, that you’re listening to them and that you’re prepared to go the extra mile for them – even if it’s just in terms of making their lives that little bit easier – then they’re more likely to feel reassured that the same dedication extends to their children’s wellbeing and education. Plus, as their engagement grows, you’ll see parents put themselves forward to support the school more actively in its work to help build a better education experience for their child and the rest of the community.
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https://www.parentpay.com/blog/ parentpay-2022-whitepaper/
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www.education-today.co.uk February 2024
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