Help For Schools To Develop Parent Engagement

 

School-Home Support today launches the first of five downloadable training toolkits. Commissioned by the Department for Education as part of their Improving Outcomes for Children, Young People and Families programme, the first toolkit looks at the subject of Parental Engagement. It is available free from the School-Home Support website and is particularly suitable for schools which are having difficulty with attendance and their relationships with families.
 

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Annually, 400,000 children and young people are persistently absent from school for a total of one month or more (which amounts to over 8,000,000 lost school days). This is equivalent to 1,970 averaged size primary schools lying empty for more than a month every year.  For nearly 30 years School-Home Support has been working independently within the school setting with families of children who are struggling to stay in school due to complex family issues such as domestic violence; mental health issues; poverty; bullying or severe housing issues.
 
School-Home Support has a proven record of improving attendance and behaviour and so impacting on attainment.  Key to this is successful parental engagement, most recently demonstrated during the pilot of the Unlocking Potential programme. This focussed on working with schools and parents in disadvantaged parts of Tower Hamlets, Islington, Hackney and Bradford. The Unlocking Potential pilot was a success as it offered parent’s strategies to support their children’s learning at home that could then be continued in school. The latest independent evaluation report by the University of London’s Institute of Education shows that 74% of parents on the programme felt more involved in their children’s learning. School-Home Support’s work has also been crucial in raising children’s school attendance.
The five toolkits School-Home Support are creating capture its knowledge and experience and enable it to be shared with schools nationwide. All five toolkits will be divided into six 90 minute sessions that can be delivered as stand alone sessions, or combined into a whole day's training. They will all also have a seventh section that enables the user to evaluate their own position and monitor progress they’ve made. The Parental Engagement training pack is the first of five that is being created around the broader subject of engaging parents to improve child attainment, and the best way to approach the complex issues that may be preventing this from happening. It is suitable for staff working in schools at all levels, with the activities divided up into basic and advanced, depending on the existing knowledge and expertise of the learners.
 
Julia Burns, Director of Training and Development said “School-Home Support has been working hard developing this toolkit to share nearly 30 years of leaning and best practice gained through hundreds of School-Home Support practitioners who work directly with children, young people and their families. This toolkit will offer practical solutions and advice to schools that need to improve their parental engagement, and in turn will have an impact on the attendance and learning of children in school”
To download the free toolkit visit www.shs.org.uk
 
“Parent engagement is a key strategy within our school and vital in raising our attendance figures, improving the wellbeing of the school environment and children’s attainment whilst at school. This toolkit developed by School-Home Support is a much needed and is an excellent resource; it will prove invaluable in increasing the number of families who get involved in our school and get involved with their child’s education”  Sally Smith, Deputy Headteacher Fulham Cross Girls’ School
 The six sections of the Parental Engagement toolkit are:
  • Section 1 - Parental involvement and engagement – The aim of this session is to develop an increased understanding of parental involvement and engagement for staff and volunteers working with schools.
  • Section 2 - Raising achievement – The aim of this session is to inform, identify and explore parental attitudes to attendance for learning. Develop strategies to support increased parental engagement in their child’s learning attendance.
  • Section 3 - Effective communication – This session is to help schools understand and explore a number of different aspects and features for effective communication.
  • Section 4 - Managing transfer and transition – The aim of this session is to provide an overview of good practice principles for effective responses to children and young people’s multiple transition issues relating to their education and learning environments.
  • Section 5 - Parents as partners – The aim of this session is to demonstrate the importance of working with parents in partnership and to gain some practical ideas as to how to move this work forward within your setting.
  • Section 6 - Strategies for engagement – This session offers practical skills and ideas to assist learners’ parental engagement work at a practitioner level and whole-school approach level.
All toolkits will also have an Evaluation section, which contains evaluation and action planning resources. For toolkit one these will help the teacher examine the current level of parental engagement activity within their school against Ofsted’s criteria. They will also enable teachers to monitor progress and record actions/strategies for further development.
News Release Ends
Notes to Editor
  • For nearly 30 years we have helped transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged children and their families. In this time we have developed unrivalled expertise in working, at school and at home, with children who have struggled to stay in education due to incredibly challenging home circumstances. Our service has been independently assessed to show that we really do make a difference and we are the only charity to focus exclusively on school-home support for children
  • Last year we engaged with over 20,000 families with over 100,000 interventions
  • We have 98 practitioners working in 164 schools
  • Our training and consultancy work will work with a further 500 schools to provide training, support and advice in areas where we do not have a practitioner base.
  • The toolkit can be downloaded free from School-Home Supports website www.shs.org.uk
  • Sally Smith is Deputy Headteacher responsible for Learning and Teaching and Continued Professional Development at Fulham Cross Girls’ School. Sally joined the school in 2002 as a newly qualified teacher and has held a variety of roles within her time at the school. She is extremely proud of the achievements of the Religious Studies department, which is her subject specialism, as results continue to exceed national expectations.
  • To arrange an interview with Julia Burns, Director of Training and Development, please contact Paul Turner, Head of Fundraising & Communications on 020 7426 of 07976 400 896
  • Preview the Parental Engagement here: http://www.schoolhomesupport.org.uk/images/stories/staff/toolkits/parentalengagement_introduction.pdf

     
   
 
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