Parental Engagement Via KS2/3 SSIF Maths…

9 May, 2019 —
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Parental Engagement Via KS2/3 SSIF Maths Project

Workshops To Encourage Parents to Support Their Children’s Learning

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by Unity Research School
on the 9th May 2019

We define parental engagement as the involvement of parents in supporting their children’s academic learning. It includes: approaches and programmes which aim to develop parental skills such as literacy or IT skills; general approaches which encourage parents to support their children with, for example reading or homework; the involvement of parents in their children’s learning activities; and - more intensive programmes for families in crisis.
Education Endowment Foundation

It has been busy couple of terms on the SSIF Year 4/5 maths project and, over the Spring and Early summer term, a number of developments have taken place with the aim of continuing to support maths in Year 4 and Year 5.

One of the key pieces of the work that has taken place through this term has been on developing parental engagement in mathematics. In fact, how to further develop the engagement of parents and families with mathematics has been a prime focus from the beginning of our work with the SSIF KS2/3 maths project.

Earlier in the year, workshops were run in all of the schools that are involved in the project, to give parents information around the metacognitive strategies that can help support learning at home. These strategies focus on developing language through mathematical conversations.

In addition, we provided ideas and examples of simple and fun maths activities that could support maths at home.

Whilst pleased with the impact of these sessions, one of our reflections was that attendance could still be improved, and that a different strategy was needed to ensure that those hard-to-reach families could be encouraged to attend.

We considered:

the advice from the EEF parental engagement “deep dive” day and the ‘Working With Parents to Support Children’s Learning’ guidance report which recommends keeping activities simple and low threat

feedback from parents following the first sessions where a chance to work with their children was requested by numerous attendees

With all this in mind, we planned for each school to take part in an Easter Maths Experience, where pupils and parents were offered the chance of taking part in one of two activities:

To create a mathematical board game, themed on Easter, which had to include the mathematics studied over the previous term

or
An Easter egg box challenge, where students had to use their knowledge of nets to create their own Easter egg box design.

Both activities were designed to be easy to run and accessible to children of all abilities whilst allowing a degree of complexity that would lead to mathematical discussion between parents and children.

Across all schools, the Easter Maths Experience workshops ran very successfully with many parents commenting favourably on the opportunity to work with their children for an extended period of time on a piece of mathematics.

Attendance climbed from 10%, for the Autumn sessions, to 39% for the Easter sessions which highlights the success of holding a low threat activity and giving opportunities for parents to work alongside their children, engaging in the same mathematical activity.

The next step is to explore other contexts to offer these types of activities, and we look forward to reporting back on our trial of Maths Cafes during the summer term.