Welcome back! We’re continuing our discussion on engaging parents and carers in education, focusing on engagement opportunities and celebrating each child’s achievements.
As well as the video and transcript below, you can listen to this and other episodes by going to the website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, or Google Podcasts.
This is the second of two podcasts about engaging parents and carers in their children’s education. To listen to the first part or read the transcript, have a look back at part 1.
Engaging parents in education
Again, we join our brilliant host, Product Marketing Manager Emma McCrea, as we welcome back Richard Morgan, Assistant Head at The Perse School in Cambridge, and Beth Borrett, a parent of three children at different stages in their education. We also warmly welcome Susan Holmes, Head Teacher at the Nehru World School in India.
Emma: Welcome to another episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod from Cambridge University Press. My name is Emma McCrea, and I’ll be your host today.
Following on from our previous episode, we’ll be taking a further look at engaging parents and carers in education and how you can involve them in celebration of their children’s achievements. Our discussion will also touch some more on the impact of COVID-19 as we explore how this has affected schools, parents, and carers alike.
Thank you for joining us today everybody. Just before we start, a quick note that all the links and info that we discuss will be linked throughout. And if you want to get your voice heard on the show, you can get in touch by tweeting us @CambridgeInt using the hashtag #BrighterPod.
Favourite quote
Regular listeners will know that we like to start our episodes with a quick ice breaker question; I’d like to ask each of you to share a quote that inspires you. It could be a quote from a book from academia, from history, or even from someone that you know personally. So Richard, if we can start with you please, which inspirational quote have you chosen and why?
Richard: So my quote comes from the ancient world, from a poet called Juvenal who wrote: ‘Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.’ Literally, that means:
‘everyone should pray that they have a healthy mind in a healthy body.’
And I think it’s advice that was so true for the ancients and still carries through to every child and every adult nowadays as well.
Emma: Excellent. Thanks Richard. Beth, same question to you.
Beth: I have picked:
‘It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’
And that’s from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I’ve chosen it because I think J K Rowling is a superb writer. She has done for reading for my children’s generation, certainly what Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton did for my generation. And I just think it’s outstanding.
Emma: It’s a wonderful quote! It’s Dumbledore, isn’t it?
Beth: Yes, he says it to Harry.
Emma: And finally, Susan, what’s your favourite inspirational quote?
Susan: I’ve chosen an African proverb, which I often hear our directors say in interactions and engagements with parents. And I thought it was very fitting for this context.
‘It takes a village to raise a child.’
Which means educators and parents working together in partnership and trusting one another in the best interest of the children.
Emma: That’s such a lovely quote. I really like that. Excellent. Thank you everybody.
What opportunities are there for parents or carers to engage with teachers?
We’re going to move on to today’s main questions. We’re going to start off with quite a broad, open question. So in your experience, what opportunities are there for parents or carers to engage with the school and teachers? Beth, can we start off with you?
Beth: At the Perse, which is the school that my youngest two children are at, we’re very lucky. There are lots of opportunities for parents to engage with teachers. There are the formal ones, such as parents’ evening and meet the tutors evenings. And they’ve actually continued during lockdown, obviously online, but that’s been really helpful.
But the school runs less formal evenings too, such as quiz nights and career evenings. It’s not so educationally based, but the teachers are around and you can talk to them over a cup of tea or a glass of wine.
For me, I find the best way to communicate with teachers is via emails. And certainly at the Perse School, you can send an email and within half an hour, very often you have a response. And that for me is the most important thing. You’ve always got somebody there and somebody knows what you need and can get back to you. Because of that, I feel really involved in school life. I think there’s lots of ways that I can communicate with teachers and with the admin staff.
Emma: Thank you. You pick up on that point of less kind of formal opportunities to connect and speak with your children’s teachers as well.
Beth: Sometimes they’re more important. I think they’re more important because you don’t feel that pressure.
Emma: Absolutely. I’m very aware our parents’ evenings is seven minutes long, and you think to yourself, I’ve only got seven minutes to get through this stuff! Whereas if you’re just having a general chat, it brings up more and you cover topics you perhaps wouldn’t have covered. Thanks for that, that’s really helpful. And Susan?
Susan: From our own context, I’d like to mention our open door policy. Parents can make contact and address issues that are of immediate concern to them in the moment, rather than having to wait to the next parent-teacher meeting (PTM). They’re still taking place – one to settle in at the beginning of the academic year and then a minimum of four more in the course of the year.
We’re still in the situation of being in school closure and are working virtually. We’ve switched our open door to an open virtual classroom and this has been even more important to keep that interaction going with the aim of maintaining those high levels of parent satisfaction.
One thing that we have done successfully is set up a technology support team, which is there for helping parents with any technological issues that they have on a day to day basis. That’s proved very, very valuable. One other thing I’d like to mention is at the beginning of an academic year for our new parents, as well as a current parents, we provided an orientation meeting, which is either an orientation to the school or the next academic year that the child is moving to. And that’s very helpful as well.
Emma: Richard, anything for you to add?
Richard: Parents and carers engage with the school pretty much every time they visit and the more welcoming experience it can be, the better that relationship between school and parents will be as well.
And I think that’s not just true of physical visits to a school site. Obviously that’s been very difficult in current situations, but I think every element of communications and, as we’ve been talking about just, the online experiences as well. With that in mind, I feel that there are some crucial points on that school journey where it’s possible to really gain parental engagement.
It ties in with what Susan is saying about orientation evenings. I think the transition points, particularly when you might be moving from a junior school to senior school or between exam phases, between GCSE and A Level, for example, are good opportunities to really bring parents into the conversation about that child’s learning. But that said, I think if parents don’t feel part of their child’s education at those key points, then they can very easily feel left out of the school experience. And if that happens, I think it can be a real challenge to win them back around and get them to engage again.
Emma: I think that’s so true. It’s, quite easy to become disengaged from what’s going on in the school. I know when my children come home, I ask how was your day? It was all right. What did you do? Can’t remember. So it’s really important to have those touch points with teachers – just so you can actually understand what’s happening!
Celebrating achievements
Let’s go a little bit deeper into this topic. Due to the pandemic, and more specifically lockdown, parents’ and carers’ involvement in their children’s education has been transformed during this time of uncertainty. It’s perhaps more important than ever that parents and carers are involved in the celebration of their children’s achievements. I’d like to ask you all, in what ways can they be encouraged to engage in this? Susan, let’s start with you this time.
Susan: We follow the International Early Years Curriculum and as part of each unit of learning – and there’s five in total throughout the academic year – parents are invited to engage and reflect, share, and celebrate what their children are doing.
Another point I’d like to mention is that towards the end of last year, we started to use Tapestry for our Early Years. It’s an online learning journal, which some of you may know, to record the learning journey of our Early Years children. So using photographs, diary entries, and sometimes videos, the teacher along with the parents creates the story of the child’s development and progress both at school and at home.
This really strengthens communication between the staff and the parents, and also continuously creates that opportunity to celebrate success, which we think is really, really important.
Another example, is at the beginning of an academic year, we award scholar and co-scholastic badges for academic excellence and notable contributions to the co-curricular programme.
Parents are actually invited to come up onto the stage and receive those awards with the students, which they really, really appreciate. Now what we’ve done this year is switched more to using social media, to celebrate that success and narrate the story of children’s learning. This has been done through creatives and visual images or short videos where senior students have spoken about their academic achievements.
Yes, it’s celebrating the success of the given student, but it’s also motivating others to try out similar strategies with regards to the why and how of their success.
Emma: Thanks, Susan. I loved Tapestry when my little ones were in kindergarten. We used to get little photos of them playing in the mud kitchen! And it’s something that you don’t get as they get older, certainly not in my children’s school. I can absolutely see how that helps to really engage parents in what their children are doing.
And I love the idea of those awards as well, where you bring the parents up and they get to celebrate in the success. Richard, what’s your approach?
Richard: One of the biggest challenges is always going to be finding the personal touch. That’s especially true when you start dealing in quite large schools, because it gets harder and harder to run centralised events.
You can have structured award systems that will celebrate achievement across the whole school in their own right, but they can actually be quite difficult to manage. And perhaps sometimes don’t capture all of the different achievements from every part of school life.
It’s important to have things like official prize awards, but use them alongside newsletters which highlight pupil achievement. Susan mentioned things like social media – things where you can constantly update.
I think social media is really helped us by being able to drip feed information, which means there’s a little bit more focus on what’s been achieved. Because if you get 30 different achievements all at once, you may not go into it in such great depth, whereas a little bit each day can actually really help to celebrate those successes.
From a pupil perspective, it’s very difficult to remove the fact that the thing they value most highly is probably recognition of their own individual achievements by an individual. Actually seeing someone that they know and that they respect taking a really close interest in what they’ve been doing, what they’ve achieved and really understanding that and taking the time to congratulate them and share in that celebration with them. So I suppose coming back to that personal touch, I think it’s one of the hardest things to achieve, but I think it carries the most value.
Emma: Excellent, thank you, Richard. Just picking up on the point of social media that you raised and that Susan raised as well. It’s a really interesting move for schools to start sharing things on social media because you’re capturing parents in a place where they would naturally be. And I think you’re right, Richard, that drip feeding a little bit of information is a really good way of getting the information across. And Beth?
Beth: I’m quite pushover, actually! I do tend to celebrate my children’s successes – it ranges from a plate of biscuits to a shopping trip, depending which child it is. I’ve got three children and they are all so different. Success for each of my children looks very, very different. For some of them, it is getting top marks and being top. And for others it can just be finishing the exam, you know? Because it’s not just about exams. It’s about everything.
I also like to see what my children have done in terms of a test. It’s difficult now because it’s not really on paper, but I like to be able for them to bring home a math test and say, ‘oh look, I got 60% and last week, or last term I only got 55%’. I like to be able to go through it and sit with them enjoy it. That’s what you’ve achieved this time.
It doesn’t have to be the top of the top, but I like something physical to actually see, or the teacher to email me and say they really have improved – however they revised this this week has obviously worked because they’ve done so much better. As a parent, it is natural to want to celebrate that.
One final point – success should be about children going into school wanting to be their best every day. Not just for tests or exams. It should be what they strive to do every single day of their life.
Emma: I think that’s a really interesting point to pick up on. Success looks very different depending on the child and that isn’t always about academic achievement and getting the top marks. I really relate to what you’re saying about your children being very different.
How to support children
Let’s look at this a little bit further. I’d like to read some thoughts from Joanna Bell on the Cambridge Maths Panel, who says:
‘there are parents who cannot be actively involved in their child’s learning, either due to their work or simply because they almost or completely forgot their knowledge on a particular subject or topic, meaning they’re unable to teach their children. What could be possible ways they can still be actively involved in their child’s learning in spite of these constraints?’
This is particularly relevant in the current climate where there’s often a lot more pressure on parents to support children’s remote learning and we’re having to be involved in ways that parents wouldn’t have done before.
I’d like to ask you, how can they still be engaged and support their children’s learning in spite of the constraints and how can parental engagement initiatives be improved to include parents who might not be as forthcoming? Beth, let’s start off with you this time.
Beth: I’m totally with you, Emma. I cannot academically help my children. I tend to use a lot of online resources, which the children can use too. So there’s BBC bite-size and all that type of thing. I’ve got every single revision book going, which helps the children. And if I’m honest, it helps me as well!
I don’t work, so maybe I can’t come at it from a time pressure point of view. I think for parents who work, it must be exceptionally difficult to fit it all in. And ultimately just because you can’t academically help your child, it doesn’t mean that you’re not engaged in their education. It doesn’t mean that you’re not engaged in the school.
I don’t think the two are necessarily linked. I like to know what my children have done during the day. I don’t necessarily ask them what they did in maths, because it would go totally over my head. But just by knowing who they’ve talked to and what they had for lunch and you know, who was wearing what in my daughter’s case, that gets me involved in their education!
I think you can either do the academic stuff or you can’t, and I can’t. But you can read up with them and maybe learn with them and help them to learn their French vocab. But for me, that’s as far as it goes.
Emma: There’s also a lot to be said with helping them have the right attitude to learning and developing their resilience so that if they do get something wrong or they can’t get it right the first time, they don’t give up, they keep trying. And I think that’s something that is really valuable that parents can add, even if they can’t remember their quadratic equations or something specific in the subject. Richard, can we come to you on that next?
Richard: Certainly, I’d quite like to pick up on the point of how you engage some of those parents who might not be as forthcoming. I’d build on Beth’s points by emphasising the fact that obviously you’ve got different parents who will want to engage in very different ways.
While some will pick up textbooks and get involved at home – will flip through the exercise books and see what they’ve been up to – you’ve got others who will attend lots of school events, and some who will join various committees that are parent run.
But then there’s definitely others who might prefer to do something a little bit more and perhaps rely on offering their insight from feeding back in a survey online or feeding back on what their experience has been when they’re asked in a more remote fashion.
I think one area that we found has actually been an unexpected bonus in the current climate has been using digital parents’ evenings and digital welcome events.
It’s been a bit of a change from what you’d normally find – which can be a slightly chaotic evening where times aren’t kept, and perhaps you end up in a group conversation, or you get one or two parents who take up all of the time with the teacher when actually there might be 15 different families who are all trying to talk to a new tutor.
In a sense, removing that and knowing that there is some dedicated time where the conversation is purely going to be between that member of staff and the parents – and we’ve also had parents’ evenings where we’ve got the child there as well – I think that can actually be a great way of getting parental engagement because they know that for that set period of time the conversation is going to focus entirely on what their child is doing without there being a risk of being talked over, having other ideas coming through. It is purely focused on them.
That has been a nice little positive that really brought everybody into the whole idea of being fully engaged with what’s going on and all the different strands of learning.
Emma: Thank you, Richard. And Susan, over to you.
Susan: The feedback surveys are a great idea and so is engaging parents where their expertise exists. To pick on this last point, we had a ‘get to know your doctor initiative’, which was essentially inviting medics from our local community to come and talk about health. For example, health issues, whether it was nutrition or diet or personal hygiene, these sorts of things.
The children knew the visitor was coming so they had a great opportunity to prepare questions and it was integrated into the curriculum.
And then we’ve got a database of our parents work and we run one initiative called Startup Superstars, where every class sets up and runs their own businesses. So we invite some business parents from the community to come and talk about aspects of their business as a means of inspiring the children with their learning. And both of those initiatives have proved very successful.
Picking up on this idea of parents concerned about subject knowledge, we actually run parent pedagogy sessions where we invite the parents to come in and they become learners in our pretend classroom.
The Cambridge curriculum is something that’s relatively new in our school and the approach to teaching and learning is a little different. Parents take part in a 20 minute lesson, bit of micro-teaching, which they really enjoy because it helps them support the children with the same approach to learning. This means they’re not going back to the rote methods that they learnt when they were at school, which they think are still happening.
It’s really important to establish in the very first meeting with parents the importance that the school attaches to their role and the partnership with their parents. And that’s a great way to set the tone.
There is a very strong culture of communication and engagement with parents in our school – these are certain expectations that we have. From our point, we want teachers to be flexible on times and meet the parents when they can – if they can’t come to the given time slot of a PTM, then create another time for them. And we try and be flexible like that because we do value that engagement.
Emma: Thank you, Susan. I really love the idea of Startup Superstars and getting parents involved – bringing that knowledge, background and experience into the school. I think that’s wonderful.
And I also love the idea that you bring parents in and actually do a pedagogy session with them. Because you’re right, so many parents have been taught in a very, very different way to the way the teaching works now. Things that we know are successful in terms of building core skills and key competencies don’t work the same way that a lot of parents have been educated. Bringing them into the classroom and helping them understand why their child is learning this way and the value of it is really, really important.
Three things
Before we finish for today’s episode, we have one final bonus question. What are three ways that parental engagement can impact children’s learning? We’re looking from one point from each of you. Richard, would you like to start us off?
Richard: Having parents engaged just reinforces the idea that a child’s learning is achieved just as much away from school as it actually is during the school day. And I think that’s great. The key element for me.
Emma: Thank you. And Beth?
Beth: My engagement tells my children that despite everything that’s gone on, their education is still very, very much worth investing in.
Emma: Thank you. And Susan?
Susan: The feedback from all parents – what’s going well and where it’s perceived that we can do even better – is incredibly important so that parents feel involved in contributing to that whole learning process.
Emma: Wonderful! Thank you everybody. We have unfortunately run out of time for today. So I’d just like to wrap up and say a huge, thank you again to Susan, Richard and Beth for joining us in the virtual studio today. It’s been really interesting hearing all of your insights, your different perspectives, and actually, there’s a lot of similarities coming through in what you’re saying.
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