Re-establishing rich, rigorous and reflective relationships with your parents

Effective learning behaviours have emerged from the rich and diverse evidence base represented in the EEF guidance reports on, Improving Behaviour, Metacognition and Self-regulation, Special educational Needs in Mainstream Schools, Social and Emotional Learning and the focus of this blog, Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning. Successful learning behaviours rely on layering all these areas to provide a 360° wrap around provision, around every child in our schools. As the EEF What are Learning Behaviours video succinctly explains, each is part of a puzzle makes best sense when all parts click together, building strong foundations for deeper learning.

Parents play such a crucial role in this puzzle clicking together. When supporting their children’s learning, the levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes. The Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective parental engagement can lead to learning gains of +3 months over the course of a year. Yet we know, that it can be difficult to involve all parents, especially if their own experiences of school were not totally positive. So, what can schools do?

When discussing the barriers to parental engagement, the evidence suggests that staff should consider this point from the first recommendation ​‘Schools should be optimistic about the potential of working with parents’. It is easy to fall into the opposite pole, particularly when relationships – whether real or perceived – are challenging. Yet the evidence clearly iterates, that optimism and positivity about our potential interactions with parents can motivate all staff to reframe their thinking from ​‘hard to reach families’ to how do we ​‘reach harder families’. For us at St Matthew’s, this optimism must be driven forward, sustained and enriched by the school leadership. It is our role to stem any negativity and always work towards re-aligning rich, reciprocal relationships.