VIEWS & OPINION
Why parents matter: back to school strategies for engagement
Comment by TOM HARBOUR, CEO and Founder of Learning with Parents
With over a million UK children living in poverty, education is not on a level playing field. By the time they reach age 11, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are roughly nine months behind their more affluent peers.*
Given 49% of the achievement gap is down to what happens at home and just 14% is down to what happens at school1, what happens at home really does matter. With this in mind, parental engagement is key for levelling
education opportunities and narrowing the disadvantage gap. However, it can be a challenging strategy to introduce. Especially when you consider that parents from disadvantaged backgrounds often have low esteem regarding the value they can bring to their children’s education. One area that typically has a low barrier to entry is reading, which makes it a practical place to start - especially at the beginning of a new term.
Getting started with engagement
Reading is a fundamental building block for education. As well as being a skill in itself, reading is a gateway to accessing wider curriculum content. While developing reading skills is crucial for primary pupils, it’s also an excellent way to bring children and parents together.
Paper reading logs have traditionally provided a connection between home and school. Although a tried and tested method, they also come with practical challenges. How often are books lost, damaged or forgotten? Moreover, how accessible are they for parents who struggle with writing?
One way schools can overcome these practical issues and simultaneously break down parental engagement barriers, is to use digital reading logs. Unlike written communication, digital reading logs give parents the option to share reading experiences with images, audio and video. This was one of the drivers behind the development of our own digital reading log, We Read.** Focusing on breaking down barriers, We Read is accessed with a mobile phone and doesn’t even require parents to remember a password to securely share reading updates with school.
Top tips to engage parents
Reading is an excellent place to start with parental engagement, but there are lots of other techniques and approaches that schools can deploy. Using our experience and understanding of what works best, here are some top tips to get started and help embed parental engagement into school strategies.
Making parents aware
Communicate with parents at the beginning of the school year to emphasise how vital their role is and that schools are there to support them. One of the biggest challenges with engagement is that parents don’t realise the importance of their role, and the assumption is that children’s education all relies on the school system.
Targets for the year
Involve parents in the conversation regarding their children’s targets. Explaining how they can help for the year ahead and become an active participant will make them feel valued.
Rethink home-learning policies
Ensure that any homework supports meaningful family interactions between parents and children. Small meaningful interactions can have a big and positive impact, as can celebrating home learning that has happened over the summer.
Keep it simple
Don’t overwhelm parents with an influx of homework tasks, and different logins for lots of home-learning platforms. Overwhelming parents is likely to make them engage less.
Make it personal
Small things like learning parent names and more about them can go a long way. It can help make them feel like part of the team that’s involved in their children’s learning.
Make it inclusive
Ensure activities will easily fit into families’ home lives. For example, when teaching Early Years children about sharing fairly, ask families to have a teddy bear picnic together. They can use any food items and toys they have at home.
Keeping engagement up throughout the year Getting parents engaged at the start of the year is vital, but keeping the motivation and momentum through to the end of summer term is just as important. Considering the strategies for keeping up momentum will help.
Firstly, consider time. A lot of parents from non-affluent backgrounds may be working throughout the whole week or even working multiple jobs. Giving parents more than a week to complete tasks can ease the pressure and encourage them to participate.
Secondly, celebrating participation in home learning rather than overall achievements can have a positive impact on engagement throughout the school year.
If as a school, you are finding it hard to engage families in reading then think about how often you are asking families to read each week. Perhaps reduce and then build it up over time. Learning with Parents found through discussions, that parents do not always feel confident in knowing how long they should spend reading and knowing when they have done enough. Reading for 10 minutes a day might not be suitable for all families, so differentiate this approach to help parents feel motivated. Whatever the activity is, it’s important to celebrate the effort and participation and not the overall achievements. A National Literacy Trust report found that FSM pupils are less likely to enjoy reading and less likely to be encouraged to read by their parents*** - meaning it is critical to get parents engaged. Ultimately, encouraging reading at home is a practical gateway to increase parental engagement, narrow the disadvantage gap and give every child the best possible start in life. Learning with Parents offer a fully funded CPD for primary schools that examines how to design and implement parental engagement strategies - to learn more visit
www.learningwithparents.com
*
https://learningwithparents.com/wp-content/uploads/ sites/5/2023/05/Learning-with-Parents-Our-impact-in-2022.pdf **
https://learningwithparents.com/digitalreadinglog/ ***
https://cdn.literacytrust.org.uk/media/documents/Reading_ trends_2022_-_Final.pdf
September 2023
www.education-today.co.uk 23
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