Best Practice

Five principles for great school-parent partnerships

Parental engagement
We cannot and must not overlook our parents. Sabah Malik considers five tenets for making relationships with our parents effective and for tailoring our engagement to their children’s needs

An effective parent partnership is a sure-fire way to support sustained momentum and ensure long-term progress for all children.

This work can often be overlooked due to relationships with parents being seen as “par for course” – but focused strategic planning to support children through working with their parents should not be brushed aside.

In this article, I want to share some ways in which this work can be supported through a whole-school approach and practical strategies. As a leader, it is important first to conduct an audit for what parent partnerships look like in your school. Asking hard questions and holding a mirror to current practices will ensure a more effective action plan going forward.

 

Clear communication is key

First thing’s first: effective communication with parents supports the notion that they are equal partners in the child’s learning and shows that the school places high value on these relationships and its ability to communicate with parents.

This can be done in a few different ways. Within my setting, we actively communicate with parents across a variety of different mediums to ensure we reach out to everyone in a way which is most comfortable for them. For example, text messages, Instagram posts, the website, newsletters (weekly and monthly) are good places to start.

Clarity of communication is key to ensuring a message is well received and understood and hopefully encouraging parents to become involved.

 

Discussions around attendance and punctuality

It goes without saying that attendance and punctuality at school cannot be ignored. We have all shared the numbers with parents about how much learning their child will miss if they are late five minutes each day over the course of a week.

Instead, rather than isolating this conversation to just the beginning of the year, we have natural junctures throughout the course of the year when we keep this topic a high priority. During termly parent meetings, staff – equipped with information on attendance and punctuality from the management information system – share with parents any causes for concerns regarding punctuality.

Persistent absences are escalated to senior management in a timely fashion before the case ends up with the education welfare officer.

In our experience, parents are sometimes unaware the importance of attendance and punctuality, and the disruption problems can cause, but with all staff having regular conversations with parents we can communicate a consistent school approach.

 

Be unequivocally specific

Generic advice on learning and good routines has its place. However, the power of providing individual and specific advice and strategies to parents is clear.

In our annual “meet the teacher” and curriculum meetings, we share strategies for the core group of learners, but also for those requiring additional support and, at the other end of the spectrum, those working at greater depth.

As an infant school, we focus on activities, games and play ideas that the parents can more easily get involved with and this is differentiated precisely for every year group. We have found that this ensures a relevant and more useful message instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.

We also give out homework workbooks for children at the beginning of big holidays and this has been well received. Although we do not provide specific instructions on what to do, we do provide support on an individualised basis on how these workbooks can be used as part of a wider home learning routine.

This is a subtle shift but so important as it provides parents with the autonomy of setting their own routines during holidays and avoids the feeling of being patronised.

Having an open-door policy has served us well, as parents can ask specific questions pertaining to how to support their children without feeling like they are being stigmatised or judged.

 

Parent voice

Our experience with pupil voice and staff voice shows how the school is a listening organisation and this is no different when it comes to parent voice.

A recent example includes the introduction of an online reading program from Pearson called Bug Club as part of a whole school approach to maintaining reading standards post-pandemic.

Parent voice raised some concerns, with one-third of our parents being worried about the increase in screen time. This encouraged us to reconsider how else we could support reading without compromising children’s exposure to good quality texts.

As a result, we ended up sending more books home during the course of the week and using the bi-weekly soft start mornings to share specific strategies around reading comprehension and skills. We also continued our link with the local library and doubled down on the promotion of a Summer Reading Challenge during the summer holidays.

This proved a motivational fulcrum, tipping the focus back to reading for pleasure with a real book and not just from a screen. In addition, the feedback we received was more positive and there was a shared appreciation for how parent voice can refine the workings of a school.

Another way in which to engage parent voice is to use the already published Ofsted questions (Ofsted, 2022). These are a good place to start and provide a generic base on which to gauge parent voice relating to a range of areas. You can then hone-in on the particular nature of the support you are offering in your school, adapting questions accordingly.

 

Set expectations

Home-school agreements can go some way to asserting the expectations of the school, and that of the parent body, allowing a clear dialogue to be established from the outset.

Following this, expectations can be sustained and built on throughout the course of the year. Consistent regular contact with the parent body can overcome any barriers, misconceptions or other miscommunications that can arise. This might be in the form of workshops or a series of meetings that can target certain groups of parents depending on the needs of their child.

Social and emotional learning support is equally important. At times this may be as simple as letting parents know that this is something that you take seriously as a school.

When you have parents who are understandably aspirational, it can be useful to explain to them how to balance academic learning and the need for a break and leisure time. This functions as a reminder to wellbeing in the context of sustaining healthy habits and improved outcomes.

In the classroom, you may also use the SCERTs program (Social Communication, Emotional Regulation and Transactional Support) to support children in learning to learn behaviours, but it is equally important to be able to communicate to parents how to use these strategies at home. Channelling expectations in this way helps parents to understand the ethos of the school.

Other more practical expectations may include reminding parents that breakfast club facilities are available for everyone to alleviate some of the individual challenges around childcare, particularly in starting school.

School readiness has been a buzz word for some time and yet its meaning in practical terms can be unclear, so providing transition literature as well as unambiguous ideas on what this looks like for a large majority of children can help to set expectations between home and school.

 

Final thoughts

I would like to quote the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report Educational aspirations: How English schools can work with parents to keep them on track (Menzies, 2013). It highlights a key finding: “Engagement is most effective when it is collaborative, builds strong relationships and focuses on learning and when schools meet parents on their own terms by tapping into their needs and interests, creating environments that feel comfortable.”

Getting the balance right and embedding the essence of these key ideas into a school development plan can boost a child’s progress, putting them comfortably on the road to a successful learning journey.

Sabah Malik has been working in senior leadership over the last 10 years across west London. Sabah is currently working in a large infant school in Hillingdon and leads the early years including a large nursery. Sabah has a Master’s in leadership and management focused in particular on the important role parents play as early educators, supporting accelerated learning and progress. Find her previous articles and podcast appearances for Headteacher Update via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/sabah-malik

 

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