Research School Network: Developing relationships with parents and carers Don’t forget the biscuits!


Developing relationships with parents and carers

Don’t forget the biscuits!

by Newcastle Research School
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Sarah Gray

Deputy Headteacher, Kenton Bar Primary School 

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Sarah Gray is Deputy Head at Kenton Bar Primary School and part of Newcastle Research School’s wider research group. In this blog she shares her school’s approach to engaging parents and carers.

Will anyone turn up?

It’s the moment teachers and leaders dread; after hours of preparation and running through your PowerPoint time and time again, the question going around in your head is this: will anyone actually show up to my event?

Parental engagement has long been an issue for schools, and one that seems to have only been magnified by the covid pandemic. No matter your circumstances, there is always a challenge when it comes to engaging parents and carers. Affluent areas struggle to find times to suit working parents, deprived areas struggle to engage families who have faced a lifetime of challenging relationships with schools. Throw into the mix an increasingly diverse population, and the dilemma for many schools is getting progressively harder.

What does the evidence say?

Parental engagement has a positive impact, on average, of 4 months’ additional progress. It is crucial to consider how to engage with all parents to avoid widening attainment gaps. The EEF’s Working With Parents to Support Children’s Learning provides some key pointers for schools to critically review how to work with parents. One of these is recognising that engaging parents is the responsibility of all staff”.

Yet, for us, this school year has been one of the most successful years of parental engagement we have experienced; a picture that does not seem to resonate with many friends and colleagues across the country. Which made me wonder why, in a highly deprived corner of Newcastle, with almost 60% socio economic disadvantaged and 45% EAL, what are we doing to get it right?

In its simplest form, I believe the key is this – know your parents, carers and children well. There is no easy answer, and for everyone the route to success might look different. So, what did it look like for us?

How we take away the barriers

In our school, a big part of that means all staff being present, being seen and being approachable. That includes every staff member standing at their classroom door every morning; every member of SLT out on the gates greeting children and their families, having positive, incidental conversations about the weather, noticing that they are earlier to school today than they were yesterday, or congratulating them on walking to school and leaving the car. In essence, those conversations are fundamentally about removing the barrier and developing relationships. For many parents, a headteacher was someone whose office you visited for largely negative reasons, and that is certainly not what we are. We want to work together and move forward together for the good of the children in our school. Standing at
the gates each morning come rain, hail or shine, is about seeing us as human, accessible, and relatable.

Developing relationships one step at a time

An important part of this is also about taking away any sense of threat, focusing on making school a comfortable environment for all of our parents and carers, regardless of their own experiences. We noticed a range of engagement levels between types of events.

When we held a parent/carer-only workshop about strategies to support reading comprehension, up-take was much lower than anticipated. However, when we hosted a fundraising coffee morning where children could come along and sit with parents and carers, the queues were literally out of the building. We could have filled the school hall two times over. Which made us consider, what was it about that event that was so successful? Was it the charity element, or was it the safety element? A fundamental message from Recommendation 3 is about consulting with parents about the best way to involve them so we talked to our parents. They told us an element of comfort was important to them; they knew that nothing about the event was going to be challenging, embarrassing, or require them to operate outside of their comfort zone; importantly they got to be with their children. We built on this idea recently and held a family bingo event, for no reasons other than for pure fun and to build relationships. We drank tea and juice, ate cakes and more than 250 adults and children attended, filling two school halls. For an hour, one Friday afternoon, parents and carers genuinely enjoyed being back in school. We instantly knew that we were drawing them back in and needed to continue to build on this.

Digger deeper into what works

Once we had started to break down those barriers, and prove that this was a safe, fun environment, we could focus on finding the sweet spot’. We needed to use everything we had learnt to our advantage, so that we could deliver key messages when we needed to. We started to pinpoint what works for our families and responded to it. Trial and error showed us the best time to hold an event is 8.45 am, when the children are dropped off. Any event that requires additional trips to school throughout the school day, resulted in low engagement. We also found there is always a greater uptake when the children are present at the events. For example, we have traditionally had a low turnout at online safety events for parents and carers, but when we combined it and held an interactive parent and child workshop about coding alongside the online safety workshop, attendance was magnified.

Communication Matters

It’s about getting communication right, again a key feature of Recommendation 3 of the guidance report. There might be some parents and carers who see notice of an event in a newsletter 3 weeks in advance and can be sure they will turn up. However, that is not always the case. We opt for the multi-pronged approach when it comes to communication. Of course, it goes in the newsletter but then it’s followed up by email, a social media announcement, usually another email and a reminder text on the morning. We hope parents and carers will sign up online in advance, but we also tell them it’s ok if they haven’t
and to come along anyway. We want to make attendance as easy as possible.

Parental Engagement 1

Pausing to take stock of all we have done, we realise getting it right is far from simple, Recommendation 1 states that Working effectively with parents can be challenging and is likely to require sustained effort and support”; it certainly involves putting in the work to reap the rewards. A year down the line I know I can confidently say it’s worth it.

We haven’t yet perfected it, and like everything in education there is always more we can do, but we are well on our way to re-engaging the previously disengaged! We must remember if all else fails, they’ll always come for a cup of tea and a nice biscuit!

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