Research School Network: Engaging with parents: just another thing for teachers to do? There are lots of benefits to working closely with parents and not all of them are solely about improving academic outcomes

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Engaging with parents: just another thing for teachers to do?

There are lots of benefits to working closely with parents and not all of them are solely about improving academic outcomes

by Huntington Research School
on the

Do you really think that’s a teacher’s job?’ came the challenge from the back of the room Teaching parents how to parent, it sounds like something else for teachers to do’

I was presenting some ideas around improving outcomes for disadvantaged learners and had got to a part where I was sharing some interesting data[1] around the possible impact of the home learning environment, regardless of socio-economic background and suggesting that this is something that those working in schools could seek to influence.

I understand this viewpoint and my stance here is not that teachers should be teaching parents how to parent but to work in partnership with them to support their children learning. There are far better qualified and experienced people out there to intervene where parenting’ is an identified barrier. But then, where is the line? The more I think about it, the more blurred this becomes. The examples I had on screen were all based on positive activities that parents can do to support their child in the pre-school years (shared book reading, clear routines, songs and nursery rhymes, playing with letters and numbers) They seem to many to be natural, positive things to be doing but what about if you don’t know about or how to do these things? Is this then the professional’s job to support parents with this? An easier example might be the parent that is struggling to support their child with their GCSE Business Studies work – most wouldn’t have a problem with parents needing some support from schools for their child, so is that OK? Is there a perceived level of difficulty where it stops being parenting’ (not teacher’s responsibility) and supporting with learning’? If so, who is the judge of this line?

I would like to contemplate a less obvious example – early counting principles. We have been discussing these recently as threshold concepts[2]‘ – points that without securing, children will struggle to access more complex ideas. It is fairly common for parents (particularly those who have promoted what we would define as a positive pre-school home learning environment) to bring their child to Reception declaring they can count to 100’. In my experience, this is rarely true; what their child can do is recite the number names in order to 100. We explore the basic principles of counting [3] (order irrelevance, cardinality, abstraction, stable order and one to one correspondence) and find that actually their child has some way to become a proficient counter’. So we provide support to parents to understand what their child needs to practise, learn and do to genuinely be able count to 100’. Now none of this is difficult, or particularly complex in terms of the subject matter – it is after all, an expectation that the majority of 5 year olds will have mastered these skills but parents need support to know and understand this. I’ve yet to meet a professional or parent who objects to teachers providing support around this level of understanding. So the line between parenting’ and supporting learning’ is less clear – it certainly isn’t about the age or stage of the child.

The EEF’s Guidance ReportWorking with parents to support children’s learning’ clearly acknowledges the complexities of schools working effectively with parents but I like the opening words on the summary page Schools should be optimistic about the potential of working with parents. There is an established link between the home learning environment at all ages and children’s performance at school.’

Parents

This data, taken from the Millennium Cohort study neatly encapsulates that and the idea that what your parents do is more important that who your parents are. Whilst we can see the clear link between poverty and academic outcomes at age 5 in the right hand column, look at the potential difference between those coming from a background of persistent poverty with a strong home learning environment (labelled here as a high parenting index score’) and those from a background of no poverty but a poor home learning environment.

The overarching recommendation from the Guidance Report encourages us to Critically review how you work with parents’. Surveys tell us Most schools do not have an explicit plan for how they work with parents, and fewer than 10% of teachers have undertaken CPD on parental engagement’.

I’ve been really privileged to work more closely with the adult learning team at York local authority recently who are real experts at engaging with parents and it has been interesting to hear the feedback that they gather about why some of the families who we may brand as hard to reach’ find it hard to work more closely with schools and I sometimes find myself inwardly groaning at some of the mistakes I know I have made in the past.

Careful communication is a key theme that runs through the guidance – two way dialogue, on equal terms, that promotes parents’ efficacy and gives positive, practical and realistic strategies that parents can use to support their children.

If you want to find out more about what the evidence suggests about where to focus your efforts on working with parents, take a look at the guidance report here. To start you off, here are four initial steps to take if you are looking again at how you engage with parents:

- develop a clear plan for what you want to achieve
- audit your current practice to assess what is working well and what is not
- listen to less involved parents to find out what they would find helpful
- stop activities that don’t have clear benefits

Ultimately, there are lots of benefits to working closely with parents and not all of them are solely about improving academic outcomes. Schools are communities, full of people and to be successful they depend on positive, supportive and respectful relationships. Maybe the lines between supporting learning and parenting are blurred and it is another thing for teachers to do’ but I’m really glad they do.

Rob Newton is the primary school and mathematics research lead at Huntington Research School and most recently Acting Headteacher of an infant and nursery school.

1 Kiernan, K.E. ; Mensah, F.K. / Poverty, family resources and children’s early educational attainment : the mediating role of parenting. In: British Educational Research Journal. 2011; Vol. 37, No. 2. pp. 317 – 336.

2 Meyer, Jan H.F. (2008)Threshold concepts within the disciplines

3 The Early Math Collaborative – Erikson Institute (2013) Big Ideas of Early Mathematics: What Teachers of Young Children Need to Know

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