Involving Parents

Involving Parents

Also available in the Classmates series: Lesson Planning - Graham Butt Managing Your Classroom - Gererd Dixie Teacher's Guide to Protecting Children - Janet Kay Tips for Trips - Andy Leeder Stress Busting - Michael Papworth Every Minute Counts - Michael Papworth Teaching Poetry - Fred Sedgwick Running Your Tutor Group - Ian Startup Marking and Assessment - Howard Tanner and Sonia Jones

Involving Parents Julian Stern

continuum LONDON

•

NEW YORK

Continuum

The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

15 East 26th Street New York NY 10010

www.continuumbooks.com © Julian Stern 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-7071-8

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

Contents

Series Introduction

vii

Preface

ix

A cknowledgemen ts

xi

1 My Dad's a Traindriver

1 9

Task 1: Letters to parents

2 Policies and the Law

11

20

Task 2: Policy and practice

3 First Impressions

26 34

Task 3. Compare impressions

36

4 Classrooms

47

Task 4: Curriculum dialogue

49

5 Special Events

53

Task 5: Present with pride

6 Homework and Holidays Task 6: Holiday homework for one subject

1 Reporting and Parents' Evenings

54 69

71 80

Task 7: These were good times

V

Contents 8 Special Needs Task 8: Meeting special needs write now

9 Relationships Task 9: A retirement speech (a long time in the future)

Bibliography

81 88

90 95

96

Series Introduction

Dear Teacher Classmates is an exciting and innovative new series developed by Continuum, and is designed to help you improve your teaching, and your career. With your huge workload both inside and outside of school, we understand that you have less and less time to read around your profession. These short, pithy guides have been designed with an accessible layout so that you don't have to wade through lots of dull, heavy text to find the information you need. All our authors have experienced teaching first hand and have written this essential series with busy teachers in mind. Our subjects range from taking school trips (Tips for Trips] and dealing with parents (Involving Parents] to coping with the large amounts of stress in your life (Stress Busting] and creating more personal time for yourself (Every Minute Counts]. If you have practical advice that you would like to share with your fellow teachers and think you could write a book for this series then we would be delighted to hear from you. We do hope you enjoy reading our Classmates. With very best wishes, Continuum's Education Team P.S. Watch out for our second batch of ten Classmates, to be launched in March 2004. vii

Preface

The aim of this book is to help teachers understand how best to involve parents and other carers in school work. Advice is offered on every aspect of involving parents, from the legal context, through to the curriculum, approaches to homework, and supporting pupils with special educational needs. The book is written for teachers in both primary and secondary schools, as teachers in each phase can learn from the other phase, and there are many common opportunities and problems: despite some beliefs to the contrary, children at the age of eleven do not as a matter of course exchange one set of parents for another.

ix

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Acknowledgements

Many people and documents have been helpful and influential, especially Marie Stern, Pam Rauchwerger, Dave Lison and David Waugh, and two documents (and their authors, with both of whom I have all-toobriefly worked): Gary Hornby (2000) and the DfES website (DfES 2003b) which has the involvement of Alwyn Morgan.

xi

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1 My Dad's a Traindriver

There are more people involved in education than you might think. (The picture on page viii is an interesting way of representing this: how many people can you see?) Parents are involved, as are other carers, older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, grandparents, friends of the family, people who live nearby and many others. This is a book that is about involving all of these people: the shorthand way of referring to them all is 'parents'. The only people excluded from the book are peers: friends of the same age as pupils themselves. Friends are very important, and are seen as especially important by pupils themselves, but they are not the subject of this book. Headteachers sometimes say, when asked about involving parents, that the best advice they can give is to keep parents as far away as possible from school. That is understandable, but wrong. Involving parents is not an option. It will happen anyway. This book is intended to help teachers involve parents most effectively. It is aimed at teachers and teaching assistants in schools, many of whom are themselves parents, so there should be no secrets here - no badmouthing of parents, for example, just to gain the sympathy of teachers. If the book is useful, it should be recognized as useful by those who teach and parent, as well as those who teach and do not parent. 1

Involving parents is not an option. It will happen anyway. This book is intended to help teachers involve parents most effectively.'

My Dad's a Traindriver Some basic principles, underlying the whole book: •

School is about the whole of life, and teachers need to draw on the outside world, including the world of pupils' families.

•

The curriculum should be applicable to the rest of pupils' lives. The curriculum is not for the benefit of the subjects taught, it is for the benefit of the pupils - it should help them understand, grow, take hold of the world, become more 'real'.

•

Parents know more than teachers about their children, and are likely to have taught them more, too.

•

Parents are not cheap substitutes for teachers: teachers are, at best, quite expensive substitutes for parents.

Each of these principles is addressed again in more detail in later chapters, the first principle in chapters 2 and 4, the second principle in chapters 3 and 6, the third principle in chapters 5 and 8, and the fourth principle in chapters 7 and 9. The remainder of this chapter looks briefly at schooling and at families, and the relationship of each to the other. In various ways, for well over a century, state-run and private schooling in the UK has been distinguished by its concern for the whole lives of pupils, not just the value of the subjects taught. This was well described in the legal phrase describing the role of the teacher as in loco parentis, 'in the place of a parent', or, in bad translations for over a century, 'my dad's a traindriver'. This links teaching and parenting 3

Involving Parents in a way that we all need to remember: teachers are properly regarded as substitute parents. Among the implications of that principle are those related to control, to safety and to the progress of pupils. Since in loco parentis was established in the UK in 1893, further statutory and inspection guidance has included the requirement of schools to promote pupils' spiritual development (since 1944), to promote pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (since 1988), and to promote social inclusion (since 2000). If schools were only concerned with subjects, then these requirements would make little sense. As schools are expected to be responsible for the whole lives of pupils, these ways of looking at the responsibilities stimulate professional interest in the family-nature of schooling. Involving parents in school, then, means involving the people who have the responsibilities and duties that teachers borrow. Families themselves have changed in many ways. Some of these are changes in the responsibilities of families, some are changes in the structures of families. With increasing time spent by pupils in fulltime schooling (now at least 1 5,000 hours over the years), and in colleges and so on, and more responsibilities taken on by social and welfare services, families have fewer things to do than they did half a century ago, and far fewer than a century ago - although of course the remaining responsibilities still seem to take up every hour of the day (there are over 140,000 hours in sixteen years) in work or worry. Changes in employment, especially since the 1960s, have meant that parents are likely to have less influence over their children's job 4

'Involving parents in school, then, means involving the people who have the responsibilities and duties that teachers borrow.'

Involving Parents prospects, too, as children rarely follow in their parents' employment footsteps. Meanwhile, the families have become more fluid and complex. Many children will have a range of parents and step-parents and friends of parents (who may be referred to as uncles and aunts, as they often were in the past), siblings and step-siblings, along with associated grandparents. Asking children to draw a family tree, or to 'ask their parents', can be a genuinely difficult and embarrassing task. A large number of children have lost a parent through separation or bereavement (often 'invisible' to schools: see Holland 2001); many others are looked after by more distant relatives, foster-parents or by the local authority. A large number of children are themselves carers - of siblings and often, if adults need help with their basic needs, of parents and other older relatives. All these family forms have long histories. For example, sending children off to boarding school, or to be apprenticed to a distant relative with a trade, has long been done by the English upper and middle classes. What seems to have changed is any expectation that there is a 'normal' family structure, to which other family structures can be compared. This is not a moral point: clearly, people have the full range of views on what family types are more or less appropriate. It is just that teachers must never assume that the words 'family' and 'parents' mean the same to any two pupils. It is hardly surprising that the relationship between parents and schools is the source of considerable worry on both sides, despite everyone thinking it 6

My Dad's a Traindriver should be a good idea. As Penny Lacey says, parents and teachers working together is 'largely unproblematic in principle', yet it 'is highly difficult to achieve in practice' (Lacey 2001: 135). Here, therefore, are three notes of caution: •

Teachers are hard-working and stressed. Even before the numerous post-1997 initiatives and changes in working conditions, teaching was described as the fourth most stressful job (after prison officers, police and social workers) out of 104 occupations studied, and the job with one of the highest increases in stress since 1985 (Gary Cooper, quoted in Stern 1999: 29). Despite the hard work and stress, teachers want their pupils to succeed and, themselves, want to improve as teachers if at all possible. Even if involving parents is seen as a good thing by teachers, many will feel it is an extra burden, and quite a few will want to avoid it altogether. This does not mean that teachers do not care.

•

Parents are hard-working and stressed. This does not need research evidence to support it. The story is told of the mother telephoned by her son. 'How are you?' asks the son. 'I haven't eaten for 24 days', cries the mother. Shocked, the son says 'why on earth not?' She replies, 'Because I didn't want to answer the phone with my mouth full.' In such ways, parents can tell their children how much they worry. Yet, despite the hard work and stress, parents want their children to succeed and, themselves, want to be as good parents as possible. As I said in a previous book, 'all parents 7

Involving Parents love and value their children, though we all know a few who have strange ways of showing it' (Stern 1997: 98). Even though getting involved in their children's schooling is seen as a good thing by parents, many will feel unable to be involved or unsuited to such work. This does not mean that parents do not care. •

There is a great deal of easy talk, by politicians and others, of 'partnership', 'community', 'stakeholders', 'inclusion', and so on. As a person who lives on such words, I would not want to say that they are merely rhetorical or that partnership, for example, does not matter. Yet 'constant practical difficulties with making partnership work and misunderstandings about the meaning of partnership between families and professionals has, in many cases, devalued its principle' (Lacey 2001: 1 35, but see also Bastiani and Wolfendale (1996) for many good examples from primary and secondary schools). So involving parents in schooling must go beyond rhetoric, and recognize realities of life in families and life in schools. For those wanting to give it a go: good luck. For everyone else, good luck, too.

At the end of this and every other chapter is a task. The tasks are not intended as pieces of formal research (although some are derived from research projects), and are not intended as a test of understanding of the chapter. Completing the tasks should help teachers involve parents more effectively.

8

My Dad's a Traindriver Task 1: Letters to parents Teachers often write to parents. Other than reports (which are covered in chapter 7, below), the two most common forms of correspondence are complaints and requests for money or support. More rarely do teachers enter a real dialogue with parents. This task (and Task 4, below) is intended to promote such dialogue. The first thing to do is to choose pupils from the class you know best (for most primary teachers, your class, for most secondary teachers, your tutor group). A simple exercise is to make a list from memory, without using a register or markbook, of all the pupils in that class. After you have made the list check it against a register, so that no one is missing. Now, pick the first and the last person on your list. Most teachers will put first on the list a pupil who is memorable for all kinds of reasons perhaps their behaviour or how they make you feel. Most teachers will put last on the list a pupil who has managed to avoid attention throughout the year. How a pupil makes you feel, and whether or not you remember them, are issues well worth considering (and are tackled in detail in Salzberger-Wittenberg et a/. 1983). Having checked with the school policies or school managers on appropriate ways of contacting parents, write to the parents/carers of both of these pupils, describing the best things they have recently done in school. These should

9

Involving Parents be genuine achievements, not 'consolation compliments' (such as 'turned up at school' or 'didn't get into much trouble'), and of course not sarcastic comments. The letters should offer unqualified praise for these achievements, without phrases such as 'why cannot all the work be like this?'

10

2

Policies and the Law

The key principle in this section: School is about the whole of life, and teachers need to draw on the outside world, including the world of pupils' families.

Schooling is complex and it is professional and accountable. Legal structures, policies and other formal rules, may seem like - and sometimes may be - annoying distractions from the 'real world', but they are in essence the instruments that give us the right and the responsibility to be teachers. It surprised me when I heard a senior academic, working with voluntary organizations, say that the great advantage of voluntary groups over schools was that voluntary groups 'could ignore health and safety regulations', for example by 'filling the minibus so full, no one could move'. Of course it is not true, anyway, that voluntary groups can ignore health and safety regulations, but if it were true, would that example fill you with excitement at the prospect of working in the voluntary sector, or fill you with horror at the prospect of some awful traffic accident? It seems to me that if teachers are to have the right to teach, it is reasonable that they should do so within a system of regulations that supports and encourages teachers, and that supports and encourages the education of 11

Involving Parents pupils. Such regulations are formal descriptions of what can and should be good practice in teaching and learning, and good practice in the relationships between school and the wider world. Schools are a part of society, and not an escape from it: schooling is about the whole of life, and it is quite right that regulations govern both the internal and the external relations of the school. How else can teaching be called a profession?

Looking at policies Legal and policy issues may seem boring at times, but they form the foundation of all the other work in this book. 'Policy' is not a word for the piece of paper in the head's office that no one reads, a document written by an expert with all the fluency or buzz-words that money can buy. Policy is what schools actually do and, if they do well, and if the paper reflects that, it is a good policy. A good policy, then, is just formalized, written-down, good practice, making the description of good practice the principle behind future practice. It is also worth saying that UK schools contain a great deal of internal variety, so that schools generally have within themselves all the examples of good practice, and therefore potential policy, they could possibly need (and for more examples, try the TES online staffroom, at TES 2003). Three kinds of policies in schools are important for involving parents: informing parents, eliciting help from or the support of parents, and working together. The school needs to be known to parents. Who 12

Policies and the Law writes the prospectus, and how and when is it updated and reprinted? Who is responsible for the school's website, who can contribute to it, and what kinds of information are there? How are visitors to the school treated? Each of these areas needs a dose of formalized good practice. I have been given a tremendous impression of a school, when the staff have put some thought into such information, and I have been put off schools when they have slipped up. Who is to blame when things go wrong? If I ask for a prospectus and cannot get one, or I visit a school and have to wait until a passing teacher can let me in, who is at fault? Perhaps I was just unlucky, as the person responsible has been ill, or this is the one day in the year when the reception was unstaffed. However, in general, when I do ask, people say how sorry they are, with the conversation trailing off into 'but, you know, funding ... the LEA ...'. There appears to be no one to blame within the school, which is clear evidence of a lack of what I would call a policy. In contrast, when I am welcomed in a school, asked for my name and reason for visit, offered a drink and a place to sit, and so on, I also ask who is responsible. 'But that's my job', someone usually says, a little puzzled, I'm glad you like the school.' Hidden behind the phrase 'that's my job' is, in general, a good job description and, more important, a good system of supporting staff in fulfilling their job descriptions. In other words, a good policy. The same can be said of prospectuses and websites, the curriculum, special events and information about the parents' own children. And are parents themselves asked, systematically, to contribute to prospectuses (are they 13

Involving Parents quoted in prospectuses?), to welcome people to the school on special occasions or to help build a better website? Information about the curriculum is in even shorter supply to parents, who are often only informed when the school needs something from them ('we are studying marriage in RE: could you supply us with any photographs of weddings?'), or when there is something particularly 'controversial' happening such as sex education (where parents may wish to withdraw their children). Every school - every teacher - will know what will be taught for the whole year ahead, so it should be easy enough to have a policy on letting parents know what is planned. Uninformed parents are less able to support their children's schooling. Policies on special events should include being inclusive (for example, having a creche, and writing invitation letters in a language understood by parents, if that is not English, and in a style welcoming to parents), being regular (as such special events are often useful informal ways for teachers and parents to talk to each other about the children), and being broadly educational (covering a number of subjects, and being educational without being dull or unentertaining). Schools already inform parents about their own children. Policies on such information should follow three golden rules: •

Inform parents about good things as well as bad. This is often well-established in annual reportwriting (which are so positive that they stretch the 14

Policies and the Law language: lively' really means 'naughty'), but less well-established during the rest of the year. •

Inform parents in ways that make sense to them. Schools should have - or hire - the skills to write in parents' languages when this is not English (with the DfES now having standard letters in different languages, at DfES 2003c). When writing in English, the language should not be condescending, pompous or needlessly bureaucratic.

•

Inform parents very, very, regularly. Many schools have a home-school liaison book, and/or a homework book, for each pupil, which parents are expected to read every week. This seems a reasonable degree of contact - especially if it provides a real opportunity for parents to write back to the school, too.

When eliciting help or support from parents, policies should stress the need to be genuine about the voluntary nature of help or support: parents are likely to respond badly, or grudgingly, to requests that involve what might be called moral blackmail, such as 'if you want the best for your child' or 'if you value education'. On schools and parents working together, there is much talk of 'partnership'; what should be avoided is what John Bastiani (in Munn 1993) refers to as partnership as 'empty rhetoric'. Partnership with respect to the education of an individual child is often best formalized in a home-school agreement or home-school contract; partnership with respect to education more broadly is a political issue that should include work on the aims of and funding for 15

Involving Parents schooling, the relationship to LEAs and other organizations, the governance of the school and so on. An absolute minimum requirement of any policy in this area should be that, whatever schools are aiming to do, if they cannot agree this with the families of the pupils, and work together towards those aims, then school and family will be forever in conflict or, as more often happens, in a state of truce based on ignorance and mistrust. School should be about the whole of life, and teachers therefore need to draw on the outside world, including the world of pupils' families, and not oppose or ignore them.

Looking at legal issues The law relating to, and having an impact on, parental involvement has increased in quantity and complexity in the last couple of decades. •

All school governing bodies must include parent representatives.

•

Governing bodies must provide an annual report to all parents, including specific information on the governing body, pupil authorized and unauthorized absence rates, admission procedures, and test or exam targets and results.

•

There is parental representation on education committees.

•

Schools are legally required to operate homeschool agreements.

16

Policies and the Law •

Ofsted inspections of schools are required to include the views of parents.

•

Police checks are required of almost all who have contact with school pupils.

•

Child protection legislation has changed relationships between parents and a variety of professional groups.

It would be foolish of me to attempt to give definitive legal guidance in such a short book, and one not exclusively dedicated to the law. Readers should refer to specialist guidance, for example from official sources (such as DfES 2003a and related websites), professional associations and organizations such as the NSPCC (2003). Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning some general principles: •

An important legal principle is the employers' duty of care to its employees. This means that if certain aspects of working with parents puts you at inappropriate risk, then your employer may not be looking after you. Being expected to do a home visit on your own, or being expected to deal on your own with an angry parent who visits the school, may come into this category. The school should have systems in place to protect you from potential harm - perhaps simply by registering all home visits and only visiting in pairs, or by having a good signing-in system for the school, with senior staff available to support teachers dealing with difficult situations.

•

Parents, too, have legal rights of course. Among 17

Involving Parents these is the right to complain about a teacher or a school, with the complaint being systematically investigated and followed up as necessary. It is important that teachers feel properly respectful of these rights: perfect as they usually are, teachers, too, can make mistakes. •

Parents have a legal obligation to ensure that their children are educated in school 'or otherwise' - i.e. at home. This does not mean that parents can simply keep a child at home: if officially recognized as home-educators, parents are open to an inspection of the education they provide. In any case, for pupils on a school roll, it is for the school, not the parents, to decide whether a pupil absence is authorized or unauthorized.

•

Someone in school, often the headteacher, should know or should be equipped to find out about specific legal matters: this should not be left to individual teachers or their professional associations.

•

Teachers who are cavalier with legal issues are demonstrating a lack of professionalism and a lack of concern for their colleagues: they are not demonstrating their love of education, their care of the pupils, or their originality or imagination. Common examples of such cavalier activity include unscheduled and unapproved home visits or meetings with parents in pubs because 'you were just passing' or 'you didn't want to go through the official channels', taking a few extra parents on a school trip without checking on the 18

Policies and the Law legality of this 'because there were empty seats on the bus', and promising confidentiality to a parent who wants to tell you - well, just about anything. •

The legal issues are particularly sensitive, of course, when it comes to Child Protection. There is a named person in every school (and every member of staff in the school must know who this is), who must be informed of any member of staffs suspicion or evidence of child abuse. Teachers (and other member of staff) should never promise confidentiality (to pupil or parent), because they must always be prepared to report to the named person (who in turn must be prepared to report to the relevant authorities). And a teacher should never actively elicit information on such a matter from a pupil or a parent, as this might jeopardize any further legal proceedings. As a teacher, you may think you know best (and decide not to report something that you think was 'only a joke' or was 'just too absurd'), or you may be flattered into thinking that a child or parent who trusts you with a 'confidence' means that you should carry on a personal investigation or therapy session. Happily, there are limits to a teacher's responsibilities and, in these cases, overstepping the limits can undermine the work of those who do indeed have responsibilities in these areas.

The law, then, links schools to the rest of the world, including families and other agencies, so schools, like families, need to be conscious of such links.

19

Involving Parents Task 2\ Policy and practice It is useful for a teacher to complete this exercise three times. The first time, fill in the gaps with what actually happens now - not what you would like to happen, or what is in the school's paper policy. The second time, work out what you think should happen. The third time - which might be out of your hands - would involve presenting a version of this exercise to be negotiated and agreed by all the people involved in the school, its staff, governors, pupils, families and so on. General policy: •

This policy on involving parents and carers is developed by ... and reviewed annually by ... and is the responsibility of...

•

The school prospectus and website are the responsibility of ... and are kept up-to-date by...

•

Visitors to the school should be welcomed in this way ... and this is the responsibility of...

•

Parents/carers are informed about what their children are learning every ... and this is the responsibility of...

•

Special events, to which parents are invited, include ... and are held at least every ... and these are the responsibility of...

•

Parents/carers are informed about their children's educational progress by these 20

Policies and the Law means ... and the balance of positive/ negative information aims to be ... and these are the responsibility o f . . . •

Parents/carers are also contacted when ... and this is the responsibility o f . . .

•

Communication with parents/carers is clear and respectful, and translation is available if appropriate and possible, and this is the responsibility o f . . .

•

Specific help and support of parents can be elicited when ...

•

The school and parents should work together on ...

•

The school looks after staff dealing with parents/carers by ... and this is the responsibility o f . . .

•

The school looks after parents/carers dealing with the school by ... and this is the responsibility of ...

•

With respect to Child Protection, the named person in the school is ...

•

A home-school agreement for each pupil is developed and reviewed by... and this is the responsibility o f . . .

•

A parent-teacher association [if there is one] is supported by the school, and is intended to ..., and school support for the organization is the responsibility o f . . .

21

Involving Parents Home-school agreement (adapted from several examples of primary and secondary school agreements available from DfES 2003b): Together we will: •

Ensure the children reach their maximum potential, by ... and the people responsible for this are ...

•

Provide a safe and secure environment where children can grow and develop, for example by ... and the people responsible for this are ...

•

Establish open and respectful communication, for example by ... and the people responsible for this are ...

•

Share common goals and expectations for the children, including ...

•

Encourage the children to value and respect people from all cultures and communities, by ... and the people responsible for this are ...

The school will: •

Ensure your child's physical and social well being, and foster feelings of confidence, selfworth and belonging, by ... and the person responsible for this is ...

•

Deliver a balanced and carefully planned curriculum that meets the needs of your individual child, by ... and the person responsible for this is ... 22

Policies and the Law •

Provide a range of after-school extracurricular activities designed to enrich your child's experience, for example ... and the person responsible for this is ...

•

Ensure that all homework tasks are given regularly on an agreed day, and that they reflect your child's learning needs, and the person responsible for this is ...

•

Keep you informed of your child's progress and achievements in a variety of ways, including at least weekly feedback in the home-school book, and the person responsible for this is ...

•

As we value your knowledge, expertise and opinions, we actively welcome parents/ carers into the life of the school, and make school events as accessible as possible, for example by ... and the person responsible for this is ...

•

Ensure that teaching staff are always available, by mutual arrangement, to discuss any concerns you might have about your child's progress or general welfare, and the person responsible for this is ...

•

Make home visits where these are appropriate, and the person responsible for these is ...

•

Provide you with support ideas and access to expertise as necessary, and make every effort to provide translated documents and 23

Involving Parents interpreters where needed, and the person responsible for this is ... •

Keep you informed about the school's policies and guidelines on behaviour and equal opportunities, and other general school matters, by ... and the person responsible for this is ...

•

Ensure that all teaching staff keep up to date on important educational developments and initiatives which might effect your child, and inform you of these at meetings where appropriate, and the person responsible for this is ...

Parents/carers: I/We undertake to; •

Ensure that my/our child attends school regularly, and is fit for school (for example, has had enough sleep), and that absences are properly notified.

•

Ensure that my/our child arrives and where appropriate is collected promptly at the beginning and end of the school day, or that a named adult is available to receive my/our child from school transport.

•

Support the school's policies and guidelines on behaviour and equal opportunities, for example by ...

•

Support my/our child in his/her homework and wherever possible promote opportunities for home learning, for example by ... 24

Policies and the Law •

Attend Parents' Evenings and discussions about my/our child's progress at school whenever possible.

•

Notify the school of any change of circumstances that may affect my/our child, for example .,.

•

Keep the school informed of my/our child's progress and achievements in a variety of ways, including at least weekly feedback in the home-school book. Examples of progress and achievements include ...

Pupils: I agree to: •

Respect learning, by always trying to do my best in my lessons, for example by ...

•

Respect people, by always trying to remember to be polite and thoughtful towards others, for example by ...

•

Respect the school community, by always trying to look after the school buildings and making the school a pleasant place to work, for example by ...

25

3

First Impressions

The key principle in this section: The curriculum should be applicable to the rest of pupils' lives. The curriculum is not for the benefit of the subjects taught, it is for the benefit of the pupils - it should help them understand, grow, take hold of the world, become more 'real'.

Years ago, I created a complex questionnaire for student teachers to fill in, asking them about the schools in which they were placed. Questions were asked about the school as a whole, about the pupils, the teachers and the school managers. After a single day in a school they had never previously visited, they filled in the questionnaire. They completed another questionnaire after they had been teaching in the same school for six weeks, and a third after four or five months. The responses were as varied, between students and schools, as anyone might expect. The surprise for me, as a researcher, was that the responses by each student after one day were almost exactly the same as their responses after six weeks and after several more months. In other words, the students' views were as fully developed after a day as after months in a school. There was a time when I thought Ofsted inspections were unfair because no one could get to know a school in three or four days: I 26

First Impressions now think that the short time for the inspection is not a problem, as it seems that even inexperienced teachers develop clear and long-lasting views after only a few hours. First impressions count, then, for student teachers, for pupils, for visitors - and are absolutely critical for parents. There are several 'firsts' in a parent's relationship with a school: first knowledge, first visit, and the first day for the pupil and the first day of each new year or phase. Underpinning all the advice, is the idea that first impressions are likely to tell people about your real aims: after that, it is hard to change people's minds about anything. Your real aims, coming out in these 'firsts', should be the key principle that the curriculum (i.e. the whole learning experience) should be applicable to the rest of pupils' lives, and is there for the benefit of the pupils, not the subjects taught.

First knowledge A parent's first knowledge of a school usually comes from friends and neighbours, who may themselves be parents of current pupils. The 'reputation' of a school is likely to speak for itself, although how the reputation was achieved is often mysterious. It is helpful for teachers to be aware that a school's reputation, good or bad, and however achieved, may easily last five or ten years after it is deserved. As all schools have cycles of better or worse times, schools with 'good' reputations are therefore generally not as good as they were when the reputation was 27

Involving Parents achieved, and schools with 'bad' reputations are generally better than they were. (Some people recommend that parents should look for a school with a reputation for being 'improving', as that means they are likely to get the best years of the school as it improves and is 'good', and before it declines.) A deceptively simple way to improve the reputation of a school is therefore to talk to as many parents and other local people as possible about the good qualities of the school. This is not a matter of insincere hype or of being negative about 'rival' schools. If you do talk to parents about what is happening in the school - what you are genuinely proud of - then this will not only be helpful in your dealings with those parents, but will also help build a better reputation for the school with potential future parents. Avoiding being negative about other schools will also help convince parents of your fairness and sincerity. Other sources of first knowledge are the school's prospectus and website, other organizations in the community, and reports in the local press. In each of these cases, as with the reputation of the school as propagated by current parents, the key to creating a good first impression is to involve as many people as possible. A prospectus that has no quotations from staff and pupils and parents, a local shop or leisure centre or church that wants nothing to do with the school, or a local newspaper that says nothing good about the school, all need addressing. I offer the advice, obvious as it might seem, because so many schools are unable - for whatever reason - to follow it. Prospectuses and websites I see fall into three categories: 28

First Impressions •

Good ones that make the school sound exciting, make the staff look efficient and highly skilled, make the pupils seem keen to learn and make parents seem actively involved.

•

Adequate ones that include enough information for me to think about whether to visit.

•

Ones that make me think the school is inefficient and poor, even if I know the school and had until then thought it excellent.

Of prospectuses, anything up to a half are in the third category, and websites, perhaps because schools have less experience in producing them, are much worse. I have worked for organizations myself, whose websites give such a poor impression that they could have been funded by a rival organization as ways of putting people off dealing with us. Too many schools are in the same situation. Involving parents, once again, is both the purpose of producing good prospectuses and websites, and part of the solution to the problem of producing such good publicity. At parents' evenings or as part of any regular correspondence with parents, ask parents what they think is the best thing about the school; ask pupils, too, and members of staff - not just teachers. You should find that this produces a clearer picture of what attracts people to the school than you could have thought of on your own. More active involvement might include asking current parents if they could be available on special occasions such as open days to answer questions about the school. All teachers, according to their interests, profes-

29

Involving Parents sional expertise and responsibility in the school, can reasonably be expected to seek and support the involvement of all kinds of local organizations. The most obvious involvement is through the curriculum: •

When teaching literacy, you can involve local bookshops and newsagents - surveying reading habits, recommending good sources of information or entertainment.

•

When teaching geography, you can involve local industrial and environmental groups - investigating arguments for and against changes to the local area.

•

When teaching RE, you can involve local religious and non-religious groups concerned with how to live - looking at what difference your beliefs make to your lives.

•

When teaching science, you can involve local medical services or garden centres - finding out the value of good nourishment, for plants or people.

All will be made easier if the approaches to such organizations can be made through parents of current pupils. And all such work would justify contacting local journalists, who enjoy a simple story of school pupils doing something a bit different. (Parental permission will need to be obtained if pupils are to be named or photographed by journalists: there are likely to be school or LEA policies on this issue.) All these activities are good in themselves, for the education of the pupils, and are not distractions from the real job of teachers. If you are a teacher who has 30

First Impressions been given responsibility for all or part of the school's website, and you think there is no time to do it, why not get the pupils to design and present webpages that explain some aspect of their learning? It could enhance the pupils' learning and also give an excellent first impression to parents thinking about sending their own children to your school.

First visit The first visit to a school starts long before the front door: it starts with the local area, the signposts to the school, access to the school grounds (for cars and for pedestrians and cyclists) and parking. Then the door itself (is it labelled 'reception' or 'visitors'?), the way of entering the door (do you need a password?) and then the reception itself. Is there someone to greet you, do they take your details and ask you what your visit is for? Apologies if this sounds obvious, again, but, as someone who has visited hundreds of schools over the years, I have to say that the majority of schools do not do these basic things in a way that gives a good first impression. It is not that schools need to spend a fortune on a luxurious entrance hall. There are many cheap or cost-free ways of improving the quality of someone's first visit. These include signs in and around the school (which can be completed as school projects by pupils, if necessary), a good signing-in book (that duplicates information, so you can wear a re-usable badge with your own information on it, and the school also has the information permanently in the visitors' book) and an attitude of 31

Involving Parents wanting to help visitors. Personally, I am most impressed when pupils are involved in this reception process, either formally (with each pupil in a year group acting as a 'student receptionist' for perhaps half a day a year) or informally (passing pupils being asked to escort visitors to their destinations). Along with individual first visits, potential parents should also be able to visit for events such as open days, when the school is specially organized to 'show off what it does. These may simply be ordinary school days, advertised in the local press, when everyone is on their best behaviour, and there are refreshments and a senior member of staff (in that order) available to all the visitors, and the school is looking its best. Schools work very hard to give a good impression to Ofsted inspectors and visiting dignitaries (and quite right, too), but this must go alongside a concern to give a good impression to all visitors, especially parents of potential pupils, and to all who work and study in the school every day.

First days The first day a pupil spends in a school is likely to be quite nerve-wracking to the most confident children, whatever their age. (It is nerve-wracking for teachers on their first days, too.) Parents want to know, well in advance, exactly what should happen on that day, what equipment and clothing their child should bring, and what to do if things do not go as planned - for example if they might be late, or be unable to collect their child. A good first day for a child is one that turns 32

First Impressions out to be surprisingly normal, reasonably predictable and at least a little bit exciting and intellectually challenging. A good first day for a parent is one that gives the parent confidence that the school will look after their child (the child will be safe) and will educate their child (the child will learn). Schools should not have the attitude 'trust us, we are a good school', but the attitude let us demonstrate how good we are'. There is an old saying, said to those who provide inservice training to teachers, that a good training day should have 'something old, something new, something to think about, something to do'. The same could be said of first days for pupils in new schools. Every year, a pupil will have another 'first day', and these are of particular importance when the child changes key stage or courses. Any teacher of a year group, or head of year in a secondary school, will easily be able to think of what is special and different about their year, in contrast to the pupils' previous year, and this should form the basis of information sent to parents. Information will include 'technical' things like clothing and equipment, and also 'educational' things like the subjects, methods of studying and amount of homework. Again, parents want to know what is needed on that day, and what kinds of support might be appropriate then and in the future: is this a year in which it would be worth getting a (better) computer, or specialist sports equipment, or (less expensive opportunities) visiting museums or galleries, clearing out the attic and sorting through old photographs, or getting your child to cook a family meal once a week? In such ways, the school is 33

Involving Parents showing how the curriculum is applicable to the rest of pupils' lives, and is giving parents more power to help with schooling. First impressions are important to parents. They can help or hinder a school's attempt to show how good it is, and can help or hinder a teacher's attempt to educate children. Most of all, they can help parents understand the school, and understand how to work more effectively with the school, to the benefit of their children's learning. Last impressions count too, of course, but these are addressed in chapter 9, below. Task 3: Compare impressions There are three parts to this task, intended to investigate your own impressions, the impressions of your pupils and the impressions of parents. •

Compare a set of prospectuses or websites of your own and at least one other school. Prospectuses may be available in education centres, or you or a colleague may already have a whole set if you are parents yourselves. Websites can be found through most LEA sites, or by completing a general internet search for '.sch.uk' or (to cover a single LEA) by searching for the LEA name plus the other suffixes (e.g. '.hull.sch.uk'). Evaluate them according to how dull, exciting, old-fashioned, efficient, educationcentred, discipline-centred, easy to contact, welcoming and so on, they seem - or whatever qualities you think are most

34

First Impressions important for you and your school to promote. •

Complete an evaluation survey (i.e. a description, followed by an evaluation and recommendations) of a visitor's approach to your school site, completed by you and a group of pupils. The pupils may be doing the work as part of subject studies (for example in English, design and technology, geography, history, personal and social education, art, or citizenship), or as part of their involvement in a school council or involvement in community work. If the pupils can also be involved in redesigning or reorganizing aspects of the site, then that is a helpful piece of citizenship education, as well as a helpful piece of school improvement.

•

Write to a group of parents, asking them for stories about their first impressions of the school, perhaps comparing these to first impressions of other schools - including their own former schools. Responses could then be analysed by you and (as part of the previous exercise) by pupils too. The responses might also be used in future prospectuses.

35

4

Classrooms

The key principle in this section: School is about the whole of life, and teachers need to draw on the outside world, including the world of pupils' families.

This principle provides a description of what classrooms should look like, as well as a reason for involving parents in classrooms. With no pupils or teachers about, a classroom says more about the teacher and pupils who use it, than any official report could tell. Some people are palm-readers, some look at tealeaves or at astrological charts. I look at classrooms, starting with empty classrooms. Does the room look like the people who use it care about it, and care about each other? Does the room look like a place where learning happens? Does the room look a bit familiar (addressing issues I know about) and a little bit strange (telling me something new)? Now, put the people back in the room: think about how much more information there is. The pupils are learning, the teacher is teaching, things are happening. Again, does it look like the people are caring about each other, is there plenty of learning going on, and, most important of all, can I recognize some things and do I find others things a bit strange?

36

Classrooms •

Is history about recent times as well as distant times? (I shuddered when I first saw in a history book something I remembered living through.)

•

Is geography about where we live as well as about the other side of the world?

•

Is science about familiar problems such as breathing as well as about unfamiliar things such as - say - pollination?

The teaching profession should be an ecological profession, connected to what is happening locally, nationally and globally. Parents are clearly part of that context, and their knowledge and understanding of, and interests in, local, national and global issues must be made use of in classrooms.

Parents in classrooms There is a long tradition of parents helping regularly in primary school classrooms. This tradition is distinctive of UK primary schools. In French primary schools, for example, I am told that parents are not allowed past the front door, as teachers would regard parental involvement in classrooms as something akin to parental involvement with surgeons in an operating theatre. And in secondary schools in the UK, parental involvement in classrooms is rare, not least because it would be seen by most adolescents as excruciatingly embarrassing. For primary schools, regular parental involvement in classrooms should be encouraged where it

37

Involving Parents enhances the pupils' learning by tapping into the knowledge and skills of parents. Seeing parents simply as unpaid assistants, rather than as sources of special kinds of learning, is likely to exacerbate some of the friction that is already being seen between unpaid and paid teaching assistants. My four recommendations are: •

Clarify your school and LEA policies and regulations related to parent helpers. This is likely to include a requirement for police checks, perhaps a written agreement, signing-in procedures and so on. It should certainly include giving parent helpers guidance on how the school works and how adults and children go about their business. These policies, regulations and guidance are so varied around the country, and over time, that giving much more detail in this book would be likely to be misleading. The principle to be followed, however, remains the same: we think it helpful to get important information from new pupils and staff, and to tell new pupils and staff all about the school, to help their induction and avoid misunderstandings, so the same should happen with parent helpers. One way of working out roles, commonly used with paid teaching assistants and the teachers with whom they work, is the negotiated production of a list having three columns: what the teacher does, what both the teacher and the parent do, and what the parent does.

•

Invite parents into classrooms for specific tasks. The task most asked of parents is listening to 38

Classrooms children read, and related help with literacy. This is indeed a very useful activity that matches parental expertise as listeners and helpers with reading generally. Sometimes schools are less keen to invite parents to help with other areas of the curriculum, yet parents are likely to be experts in a whole range of subject matter in the curriculum. Parents - simply as parents, never mind other work or life experience - are likely to be scientists (bringing up children generates a great deal of medical knowledge), historians (simply by being older than children, and by comparing different times), geographers (either through a very detailed knowledge of the local area, or a knowledge of a wide range of contrasting areas), ICT experts (as parents of today's primary children tend to have to compete with their children for computer access), food technologists (feeding families, or trying to prevent families from misfeeding themselves), RE experts (having thought about and either answered, discussed, or batted-back questions that all young children ask on the meaning of life and death, why people live the way they do and so on), and much more. Teachers can ask for help from almost all parents on the whole curriculum, and it is a good sign of parental involvement that parents themselves feel their varied expertise is recognized and used. •

Expect some things things to go wrong. teachers and pupils. include you making

to go very well, and some This is the same as for all Things going wrong' may mistakes as a teacher (for 39

Involving Parents example getting angry with a pupil, or not planning a lesson), the parent making mistakes (for example getting angry with a pupil, using inappropriate language), or the pupils making mistakes (misbehaving, refusing to work, being rude to the visitor or teacher). Having parent helpers in the classroom is a little like having an inspector in: teachers need to be especially careful to do the right thing, and to follow-up rather than ignore the wrong thing. I can remember the name of the school where the teacher left the pupils with the parent helper while he went round the back of the school for a cigarette: and the parent helper remembers, too, as she told me. This does nothing for the reputation of the school. I am sure that no one reading this book would do such a thing, but other things will inevitably go wrong. What is most important is to deal with the situation rather than hope no one notices. Talk to the parent helper about why you might have got angry with the pupil (having already talked to the pupil), and discuss ways of avoiding getting angry. Talk to the parent helper about why you would prefer them not to use certain words with the pupils, and discuss ways of avoiding doing so (which is much easier if you have gone through school policies with them). Discuss why the pupils seem to be as they are, and what the school is doing to help them concentrate on learning. In other words, involve the parent in a serious way as an educational partner. If you do not address problems, the school's reputation (and that of the pupils and yourself) is at risk, and everyone is missing out on an opportunity to learn. 40

Classrooms •

It is important that the work of parents in classrooms is not simply accepted and left. However busy a teacher is, some of the time saved - it is hoped - by having a parent help in the classroom should be spent discussing with the parent how the pupils are doing in their learning and how the parent is doing in their support of the pupils. Some schools formalize this into review sessions, perhaps in part based on the lists of roles' described above, but all schools need some kind of evaluation. Parents who might want to develop a career as a teacher or a teaching assistant are likely to be particularly welcoming of all kinds of feedback and review.

For secondary schools, parental involvement in classrooms is likely to be less systematic and regular. There is an increasing number of teaching assistant posts in secondary schools, and these posts are of course open to parents, and may have a similar beneficial effect as parents working and volunteering in primary classrooms, but such employment is not the subject of this book. There may be a 'virtual' presence of parents in secondary classrooms, visits to places where parents are, and involvement in special events: each of these activities is described later in this and subsequent chapters. One quite specific form of parental involvement that is becoming more common in both primary and secondary schools is the involvement of governors including parent governors. Many governing bodies will give each governor an individual subject or aspect of the curriculum as a link' area, and governors are 41

Involving Parents encouraged to visit the teachers and pupils working in these areas, in order to find out more and to support the teachers. Teachers can take the initiative, and ask for the relevant link governor to visit their classroom, to provide support and advice. Parent governors may feel more comfortable being involved in classrooms as governors (who run the school) than as parents (who run families), and teachers, too, are likely to see parents in a different light.

Parents virtually in classrooms Parents may be involved in the classroom even when they are not there. I am not recommending having webcams permanently on in classrooms so that parents can see what their children (and the teachers) are doing: as frightening as having webcams in homes to see if pupils are doing their homework. Rather, I am recommending that parents can have a presence even if it is in writing, photographs, videos or emails. This is of value for both primary and secondary parents, and is particularly important for the latter, who have less of a 'real' presence in classrooms. •

How much parent writing can there be in classrooms? Parents may be asked for short responses to questionnaire questions set by pupils on significant topics in most subjects. It is important that questions are asked on topics that parents could reasonably be expected to be interested in answering. A viewpoint is more

42

Classrooms easily elicited than a fact, so 'what do you think about revolutions?' is a better question than 'name three revolutions', and 'what would you think if a nuclear power station were to be built in this area?' is better than 'describe the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power'. More extended writing might include stories, either as fiction or description, with favourite childhood stories, or life histories, being more popular than more selfconsciously 'composed' stories. Hilary Claire provides many ways of using family stories in primary history (in Claire 1996), and teachers should be able to think of stories of relevance to almost any aspect of the curriculum. Writing in a language other than English is of course of special value to those pupils with English as an additional language, and collections of such writings can be made into an archive of use to a school for many years, and of use to many other schools with pupils sharing the language. This is a good example of teachers seeing themselves as 'ecological', as working within a global community. •

Photographs and videos are understood and analysed with great subtlety by today's pupils. Effective teaching in art, history and English, especially, has given pupils the critical skills to deal with complex visual meanings. 'When we were young' is a popular topic in all three subjects, at all levels, and photographs of parents when they were children can provide an excellent curriculum resource. Photographs of teachers when they were young, should also be used, but 43

Involving Parents photographs of parents are likely to provide opportunities for a wider range of analysis, as teachers, frighteningly, often look, in childhood photographs, as though they will indeed be teachers when they grow up. Wedding videos from families are better resources for teaching about marriage (in RE, PSHE, or English) than most commercially available videos. (A video I used many years ago of a family wedding in Bangladesh provided a surprising learning outcome: 'so, they have mopeds in Bangladesh!' said a fascinated and not-very-well-travelled year 8 pupil.) The backgrounds of holiday photographs (or the foregrounds, if the family are more 'arty' photographers) can provide more information than geography textbooks about the environment, development and climate, around the world. •

There are many 'expert' websites, but using parents as experts can provide a far more personal, local and effective means of supporting the curriculum. Emailing and texting have overtaken letter writing, and all other forms of writing, in the quantity of literary outputs in the UK and many other countries. Advantages of email and text correspondence include the ease of response, in your own time, as well as the ability to email or text from many different locations. Parents can be asked if they are willing to be 'email experts' or 'text advisors' for particular classes or on particular subjects across the school. A huge proportion of parents will have skills and knowledge well beyond that of teachers, in some areas, and will 44

Classrooms have useful skills across a wide range of issues. Rather than, or as well as, having parents in the classroom, you could arrange for them to be available to support pupils' work via email or text messaging. Where online computers or mobiles are not available or allowed in the classroom, pupils could still compose questions to be sent by the teacher, or a responsible pupil, at lunchtime or after school. Replies, often channelled through the teacher, can be given back to the class when they arrive, and with any luck, a continuing correspondence can begin. Anyone can be asked to be an 'email expert', but parents have the additional advantage of a real interest in and commitment to the school. (A list of possible 'specialisms' can be based on the curriculum, or on your knowledge of parents, or on sites such as AIIExperts 2003.) A virtual presence of parents and other adults in classrooms has been achieved in some challenging circumstances. Ann Lovelace and colleagues in Croydon produced a video of young people and adults from religious and non-religious communities, talking about their beliefs and ways of life. Initially, this was a response to the difficulties of getting members of communities to speak in schools, in part due to mistrust on both sides. In the end, it provided a way of 'breaking the ice' for both the schools and the local religious and other communities, as all were seen to have valuable things to say, and the video and accompanying teaching booklet (Lovelace 2001) are used to support 'real' visits to schools, as well as directly supporting the RE and PSHE curriculum. 45

Involving Parents Similarly, in North East Lincolnshire, John Trevitt, David Lee and colleagues have been responsible for teachers and pupils making videos about the subjects they are studying. Parents responded with their own views, too (in Talking Parents, Talking Pupils, Talking Teachers], and the whole production was made available to schools and broadcast on the local television station (Channel 7).

Classrooms where parents are Turning the situation around, along with getting parents into classrooms, schools might try to get the classrooms to where the parents are. Teachers 'drawing on the outside world, including the world of pupils' families' can therefore include some possible school trips. School trips to nationally famous sites are exciting, memorable and educationally valuable. What teachers sometimes underestimate is how exciting, memorable and educationally valuable a trip can be to a less-famous local place. Trips to a local supermarket, a parish church, a set of streets with old houses, a workshop or industrial estate: all of these can be just as striking, when matched to effective learning activities. This means that parents of the pupils in your school are likely to be involved with the places you are to visit. Eliciting the help and involvement of parents can then be integral to some of the most striking ways of enhancing the curriculum. (See also Tips for Trips in this series.)

46

Classrooms Task 4\ Curriculum dialogue Write a letter to parents of your pupils, telling them about your work with their children in one curriculum area, and asking them to reply, explaining what they, in turn, are doing. It will only make sense if you really want to tell parents about what you are doing, and if you really want to know what they are doing. Here is a writing frame for the task, although you should of course adapt it to suit your circumstances. Dear Parent/Carer In [name of subject], we have been studying ... You may have [seen, read about, heard about] I enjoy teaching the topic because ... The most important reason for studying this topic, though, is to help pupils to be able to and also to understand ... and ... This will be useful when [or because] ... It would be good to hear about anything that interests you about [name of subject]. If you have any ideas, or any information that is useful, do let me know. You could fill in the slip, below. To: ...

Date: ...

When I/we did [name of subject] in school, and since leaving school at home or at work, my/our favourite topics and activities were/are ... 47

Involving Parents I/we have these ideas or resources that might be useful for learning about [name of subject]: Name of parent/carer: ...

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5

Special Events

The key principle in this section: Parents know more than teachers about their children, and are likely to have taught them more, too.

Parents may know more than teachers about their children. The problem, for teachers, is getting access to that knowledge. Too often, parents are judged by teachers - especially by secondary teachers - mostly by their attendance at formal meetings such as parents' evenings or the presentation of the governors' report to parents. If this is the main way of determining parental interest, teachers may well feel that many parents are not interested in their children's education. This would be misleading. Formal meetings are important (as in chapter 7, below), but however well they are organized, they are not always the best or the only ways of teachers finding out from parents how best to support their children's learning. It is worth considering some other, less formal, special events that might be held in school, and how these can be used to involve parents. Schools are likely to have a variety of plays, concerts, fairs, sports days and other productions. All of these have their own value, and all can help schools involve parents. Schools may ask for help.

49

Involving Parents information and resources, either in a general mailing or by asking parents with particular skills or access to materials. This will add to the publicity for the event, as well as helping parents get involved. When asking for this kind of help, make sure that you are not making some parents feel bad if they do not have access to money or many (spare) material possessions. Have a list of what would be useful, and include on the list plenty of no-cost items. For example: •

An American accent, for preparing West Side Story.

•

Playing an instrument, for rehearsals or performances.

•

Setting up stalls, for fairs.

•

Coaching, if appropriate, for sports days.

At the events themselves, in order to provide opportunities for informal discussions, make sure there are gaps: long-enough intervals, and perhaps food or drink or some kind of display or exhibition to justify standing around chatting. It is probably better for teachers and parents not to expect a detailed report on a child, but teachers and parents may welcome the chance to have a quick word: praise for a child's improvement, a question about family circumstances, a worry over homework and so on. There are plenty of events that pupils take part in, that might justify an 'event about an event' for parents. •

A school trip to France might be followed up by a reporting-back session with some French food and 50

Special Events drink (as recommended in Tips for Trips in this series). •

Work on a particular festival in RE might be followed up at the right time of year with a small celebration - again, with food and drink appropriate to the festival, perhaps with parents from the religion concerned being invited to contribute to the food or the event as a whole.

•

After learning a technique or piece of software in ICT, pupils might make a presentation or even a lesson for parents.

•

A visit to a castle might be followed up by a small medieval presentation by the pupils to parents.

•

A big art project might be presented in the form of a temporary art gallery for parents.

•

After building or refurbishment work in the school, there might be an event to introduce the new facilities to parents.

Many primary and some secondary schools have regular 'presentation assemblies', where pupils read out or show their work and receive some kind of reward. If these are on the same day each week, parents might be invited to call in - with a special invitation if their own children are on stage. With all of these events about events, there are opportunities for brief informal contacts to be made between teachers and parents. There are many other opportunities for giving parents information and guidance, including open days and leavers' days, often at the start and end of 51

Involving Parents their child's journey through the school. Special events could be arranged on homework, on health, on behaviour, on national tests and exams, on work experience and many other topical issues of importance to schools at different times. A useful practice is to offer a list of such events to parent-teacher association meetings, and to governing bodies, and in general mailings to parents, to ask which would be most helpful. Schools may have visiting speakers on these topics, and invite parents as well as teachers. Or they may arrange for some parents themselves to give presentations or advice to other parents. Sometimes, teachers and parents just want to meet for a social event or party. If the party is what the school staff want for themselves, and parents are invited too, then at least the staff are unlikely to feel too upset if few parents turn up. All staff, of course, should be invited and, in most schools, the non-teaching staff live more locally, and have more non-school contacts with parents, so they are a good group to organize or advise on such events. Parents often enjoy a chance to meet all the staff, and it certainly helps the school if premises officers, lunchtime staff, teaching assistants, administrative staff, and so on, as well as teachers, can chat to parents. For all of these kinds of special events, there are several common themes: •

Frequent informal contacts (as well as formal events) are preferable to rarer formal events.

•

Try to provide food and drink and time for chatting.

•

Do not expect such events to take the place of 52

Special Events parents' evenings or to involve very detailed discussion of individual pupils. •

Provide some kind of creche if at all possible.

•

Finally, remember to keep things professional. A social event for teachers and parents is probably not the best place for a member of staff to see how drunk they can get, or to see how rude they can be about the headteacher. Task 5: Present with pride Discuss with your class or tutor group what bits of the curriculum, and what out-of-class events, they are most proud of, and would most like to present to parents. The curriculum discussion should cover current work, and perhaps also work completed in earlier years. Out-of-class events may include any kinds of lunchtime and after-school activities as well as visits and longer school journeys. Once you have discussed the activities and events that parents might most like to find out about you can discuss ways of presenting them. It could be a special assembly, an evening event, an exhibition, a newsletter, an item on the school website or a little party. If it is possible to coordinate such work across the school, you are very likely to come up with a number of useful ideas, that, with some coordination, should provide a wide range of occasions for informal parental involvement in the school.

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6

Homework and Holidays

The key principle in this section: The curriculum should be applicable to the rest of pupi.ls' lives. The curriculum is not for the benefit of the subjects taught, it is for the benefit of the pupils - it should help them understand, grow, take hold of the world, become more 'real'.

By tradition, homework and holidays are at the opposite ends of the spectrum: homework hated by teachers and pupils, holidays loved by them. It was upsetting for me, years ago, to find out that a large survey of pupil attitudes indicated that, although 50 per cent of pupils enjoyed their lessons, only 2 per cent enjoyed their homework (quoted in Stern 1 997). Should homework really be so many times more unpleasant than classwork? This, despite the fact that the most important learning takes place in families, not schools, and that carrying on studying outside and after school is one of the main aims of schooling? And what about holidays: do teachers and pupils really love them (wait before you answer that), or are they sometimes rather depressing, empty or purposeless times, full of boredom?

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Homework and Holidays

Homework A teacher friend of mine was burgled. When the police came around, they were tremendously sympathetic, as the burglar had not only stolen the video and jewellery, but had wrecked the house, too, throwing things all over the place. The burglar had in fact been very tidy: it was teaching that had left no time for housework - just like in the advert for the telephone directory. Suppose that teacher decided to get a grip of the housework, and when there was no time to do the ironing at home, it was brought into the staffroom, and during staff meetings, the teacher stood at the back, doing the ironing. What would you, as a colleague, do? Whenever I have asked this question, incidentally, the respondents have said that they would ask the teacher if they would do their ironing as well. Nevertheless, most people recognize that school is not the best place for ironing. Housework is best done in the house, and it disrupts the school to bring housework in and complete it there. Likewise, much of schoolwork is best done in school, and it disrupts the home to complete schoolwork there. That kind of homework is the first of three kinds of homework that schools can set, each having different implications for the involvement of parents. First we could use homework to 'expand' the 15,000 hours of schooling currently suffered by children, making parents into cheap and unqualified school teachers, working in the worst possible conditions. This is perhaps based on the Vanity' model of governments and schools, suggesting that no learning happens outside school without schools 55

Involving Parents making it happen. The most common 'expansion' homework task is 'finishing off - the most common homework task of all, and the one that most disadvantages slower workers who generally need most help from teachers. Other expansion tasks might be to complete lists of questions or general 'research' tasks (such as 'find out about the Second World War'). It is no wonder that expansion homework is rarely liked and is likely to have little impact on learning (as in Stern 1998). Involving parents means using parents as prison guards ('you're not going out until you finish your homework') or as pupils themselves (Til look it up for you'). Parents may welcome this, as homework can be a genuinely helpful means of control: a bargaining tool in the battle of the generations. And parents may really enjoy looking things up in encyclopaedias, or completing maths questions - even if this means they will also get upset by low marks for their work. However, these ways of involving parents are not generally the best ways of exploiting what parents are good at, and can distance parents further from the whole schooling process. Expansion homework is also one of the main reasons why parental support for their children's homework is so reduced as children move to secondary school - with 57 per cent of primary pupils getting regular help from parents, and only 1 7 per cent of secondary pupils getting regular help from parents (MacBeath and Turner 1990). A second way of looking at homework would be to use it in such a way that the 15,000 hours of schooling could be applied to the rest of the child's world. 'Application' homework is based on the idea 56

Homework and Holidays that school subjects need to be relevant, or that school learning consists of a set of 'apprenticeships' in the world: •

Food technology should help with food preparation in the home, and is about being an apprentice in catering.

•

History should help pupils understand causes and implications of current local and national situations and the community's place in history, and is about being an apprentice historian.

•

Science should help pupils understand how the physical world works and how to test this, and is about being an apprentice scientist.

•

PE is about physical and sporting understanding and control, and is about being an apprentice sportsman or sportswoman.

These and similar ideas, more popular in secondary than primary schools, are often popular with members of subject-based professions and with governments concerned with the usefulness or value to the economy of schooling. When it comes to application homework, parents are more likely to be enablers than helpers. For example, parents might allow a child to shop for and make one meal a week, or investigate the home in order to find evidence of the age and original use of the building, or grow plants on a window sill. Similarly, pupils studying musical styles might analyse the music used in a range of adverts on the television, pupils studying French could choose a song they like and write some French lyrics for it, or 57

Involving Parents pupils studying moral systems in different religions (such as the ten commandments and the five precepts) could see how many moral rules are broken in particular soap operas. Parents are invited, not assumed, to be enablers. For example, letters sent home from a primary school (quoted in DfES 2003b as examples of good practice) said: Today we have been learning about floating and sinking. You can help your child continue the experiments by putting some objects made of different materials in the bath to see which float and which sink. See if your child can guess what will happen!

And: Today we made some fruit salad. We used You could ask your child to look at and name any fruit you have at home. Also, children could look at the fruit in the market and supermarket, and practise saying the names as often as possible.

The th/rdway of looking at homework is based on the imbalance in time mentioned at the start of this book. There are 1 5,000 hours of schooling up to the age of sixteen, which leaves 125,000 hours spent by pupils with their families and friends, or on their own, outside school. Homework could be used to ensure that these 1 25,000 hours of childhood be made use of in school. The homework tasks capture the child's world for the schoolwork. 'Capture' homework sees school as largely derivative of non-school life, especially home life. It recognizes that schooling and subjects are primarily about humanity and the world, rather than being about subjects for their own sakes. Parents and other adults can be 'interviewed' 58

Homework and Holidays by their children about their views or experiences of life, rather than their knowledge of subjects: •

How could the area best be developed (for geography)?

•

What was school like when they were young (for history)?

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What sports do they enjoy watching or participating in most or least (for PE)?

•

What do they think is the most important moral principle (for RE)?

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How do they choose a candidate, or choose whether or not to vote, when it comes to elections (for citizenship)?

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What were their favourite stories when they were young (for English and other languages spoken by parents)?

•

What five pieces of music would they take to a desert island and why (for music)?

Parents and other adults can be sketched for art, measured to provide a set of data for work in statistics, asked to rank a set of statements about or pictures of types or styles of clothing (for technology), and so on. To involve parents with capture homework, means to capture the worlds of parents, including the languages of parents, and use them in school. Then, when parents visit classrooms or look at pupils' work, they will recognize a little bit of themselves, and will recognize aspects of the lives of other parents. There will be something familiar (as

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Involving Parents well as something unfamiliar) in the classroom, and school will be that much more inclusive. It is a puzzle that parents who are themselves teachers, and who are incessantly 'educational' with their children ('Ooh, look at that interesting cast-iron Victorian lamppost!' accompanying a walk to the park), still often feel stressed by the need to support homework. 'Homework is hell', a teacher-parent once wrote to me, and causes 'endless friction between concerned and caring parents and their teenage children'. If homework includes plenty of capture homework, grabbing hold of the world beyond the school, then parents can be involved more painlessly and imaginatively. Whatever kind of homework is set, teachers should be aware of the variety of pupils' home circumstances: •

All pupils, and especially pupils who themselves have family responsibilities, may welcome breakfast, lunchtime or after-school homework clubs. This means that they are less stressed by multiple responsibilities around the home, and the family is less pressured.

•

Pupils who split their time between two homes, for example of separated parents, may welcome a full week to complete homework tasks. This means they will be able to make use of people or facilities - such as computers or books - in either home.

•

Pupils whose parents are less likely to be in a position to help with homework, for whatever reason, will welcome tasks being set that say 'ask 60

Homework and Holidays an adult' or 'talk to a grown-up, such as a parent or someone who works in the school'. Providing opportunities for pupils to ask other adults around the school - non-teaching staff of all kinds - has the advantage of bringing the whole school together to support learning. I remember a quiz set by a history teacher, where the pupils had to ask adults in the school what famous women they could name from history. This created a real 'buzz' around the school, as all through break and lunchtimes teachers and administrators and premises staff and supervisors were being quizzed by very competitive pupils. •

When there is homework about families or homes themselves, make sure that you do not make things difficult for the pupil by asking for information they may not want to share with you or other pupils, or may not know. Avoid questions such as 'draw your family tree' (who is who on the tree, and whom shall I call 'father'?), or 'count the number of rooms in your house' (which house, or if a local authority care home, how much of the house?). A simple alternative would be 'think about a family/house you know well either your own family/house or the family/house of a friend or someone else you know', followed by the task. This allows pupils to put a little distance between themselves and their responses.

•

Sleep is a good idea. Children and adults alike, these days, apparently get too little sleep. Homework should not mean that children get even less sleep. It is important to say to pupils and parents 61

Involving Parents how long homework should take, overall, and to see this as a maximum rather than a minimum amount of time. Even though a teaching contract does indeed look like this, few adults welcome a work contract that says 'be at work for a certain number of hours, but the work may take much longer', and few children would like a lesson that started 'this lesson may take an hour, or it may last for several hours'. Yet this is a common attitude to homework, which therefore seems endless and more stressful - and more likely to be completed at the expense of much-needed sleep. I recommend asking pupils to write at the end of each piece of homework how many minutes it took to complete. They then have an incentive to complete the task in good time, and to underestimate, if anything, how long the task took - as they do not want to appear too slow. If there are to be breakfast, lunchtime or afterschool homework clubs (popular in UK schools at least since the 1930s, as in Great Britain Board of Education 1936), then these will need financing and staffing - providing further opportunities for involving parents in school, either as fund-raisers or paid or unpaid helpers in the clubs. If there are effective family learning activities, then these will help parents become more confident in their dealings with their children and with the school, as well as supporting parents' own further learning (as described in Stern 2003).

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Homework and Holidays Holidays Holidays are often enjoyed more when you are not on holiday - when you are expecting them or when they have finished. I blame holiday photographs, in which everyone is smiling, while in fact, of course, only a few people actually smile for the whole period of the holiday. Schools and parents can work together to make holidays more productive and perhaps even more enjoyable. It is most important that this happens when parents take their children on holiday during the term. Schools and parents are increasingly arguing about term-time holidays, so it is helpful to think about strategies for making something more educational out of a difficult situation. I would suggest that there are three ways in which schools can make use of holidays to involve parents more in school work: by providing holiday activities, by recommending places to go, and by giving information about useful presents. However, teachers will hardly need reminding that holidays are not their responsibility, and these suggestions are by no means intended to encourage teachers to take over the whole year. It is warning enough, seeing those teachers who cannot switch off - organizing the games on the beach and telling people off for dropping litter in shopping centres. Teachers may provide a range of activities for pupils to complete in the holidays, and many activities could also be useful for pupils who have long-term illness, who are excluded from school, or are schoolphobic. These activities should be more imaginative and flexible and suited to holidays than simple 63

Involving Parents extensions to school work. For example, you may want to recommend games to play to help the long journeys pass. Counting games and word games are already popular: perhaps a school might have a competition, among pupils and teachers, to create a new counting game, and publish the best games for all pupils. You could ask pupils to make more systematic records of journeys and destinations photographs of places, tickets, places passed by, newspapers or magazines from different places, what kinds of shops or food can be found and so on. Such a record can be successfully completed by pupils who travel to their aunt's house on the other side of town, as for those who travel round the world, and it is important that teachers are clear about this. Games and activities should be 'prepared' in advance of the holiday, and followed up after the holiday. In this way, schools will be tapping into the pupils' own lives, and making the curriculum important outside, as well as inside, school. There are some published materials for holiday activities (such as the maths tasks in Merttens (1994), and the publications from English Heritage available in shops on their properties, which address science, maths, geography, artefacts, storytelling and much more), but teachers can quickly produce their own, especially if they work with parents to see what is most needed. Teachers of every subject in the curriculum can think of something of value to do in the holidays. Schools should not be telling parents what presents to buy for their children, but they can make present-buying a little easier. Going around toy shops, I am struck by the division often made between 'toys' 64

Homework and Holidays and the hushed corner containing 'educational toys'. The puzzle is that children learn from all the toys they play with, so why call only a small group of toys 'educational? Teachers can certainly advise better than the toy shops, I think. A teacher, or the school as a whole, might provide lists of books that would be useful for particular age groups or individual pupils, along with computer software or DVDs. Fiction is useful at all ages, and libraries can provide wonderful temporary gifts just as bookshops can provide the whole range of presents. For young children, board games are useful for counting, card games for matching and following rules and prediction. Cooperative games may be recommended for developing social and communication skills. A camera with a book in which to collect photographs can be used in all kinds of ways (with teachers recommending some interesting uses), and certain kinds of art materials might be more useful than others. Could parents' evenings include a display from a local shop or publishers (who enjoy providing 'book fairs') of things that parents can look through, or is that a little too commercial? How tempting for teachers to tell parents where to go (and vice versa): •

Trips to ponds or to the seaside might be especially useful when the school is investigating floating and sinking.

•

Trips to castles help when the school is looking at medieval history.

•

Visits to an industrial or science museum are 65

Teachers of every subject in the curriculum can think of something of value to do in the holidays.'

Homework and Holidays useful when the school is covering the industrial revolution. Visits to markets, to farms, to older relatives, to families with babies, to places where another language is spoken, to places of worship, to hardware warehouses: all might be particularly suited to particular times of the year, or particular years. Again, teachers working with parents on which places may be most useful is a good way of involving parents and explaining more about the curriculum at the same time. Coming back from these places, parents might be encouraged to bring items that could be used within the school. Indeed, the most trivial items can be of use in classrooms. Here is some advice from a primary school about the curricular use of certain objects: •

Please help by sending us corks. These can be used in maths for counting, in art for printing, and in science when we build objects which float.

•

Please help by sending us old curtains and other lengths of fabric. These can be used for backdrops and drapes in displays, for scenery and costumes in drama, for collage work in art, and for investigating patterns in maths.

•

Please help by sending us photographs. These can be changes over time in history, clothing in technology, and environments in geography.

some old family used to look at at the design of at a variety of

Some schools, when parents ask to take their children on holiday during the term, say that the 67

Involving Parents absence will only be authorized if the pupil completes a project about the place visited, to be used in the curriculum. It is a good idea to provide a disposable camera and a special book or file to keep materials and to write reports. Parents and children may like to choose a curriculum area on which to focus (as long as subject specialists have ready-made projects to hand), or the school may determine the topic or theme, to suit both the child and the holiday destination. The Indian subcontinent might be wonderful for RE topics, Italy and Greece for ancient history, the USA for understanding sport and the Caribbean for geography. Of course, be wary of stereotyping countries - it is not necessarily true what they say of Canada, that it is a country with too much geography and not enough history. For those long holidays spent at home, watching television or playing on the computer, teachers may also wish to provide a guide to different programmes to watch or websites to visit. Surely teachers could think of at least one programme and one website for each subject of the curriculum, easily making a couple of dozen recommendations. Rather than parents having to say 'switch off the television and do your homework', they might be encouraged to say 'why don't you look at this film?' The programmes and websites should have a real entertainment value, and should not all be too intensively educational: Robin Hood films are likely to be better than televised lectures on medieval history, although the latter have become very popular in recent years. Meanwhile, teachers themselves can relax in front of the television, saying to themselves they are merely 68

Homework and Holidays researching on behalf of their pupils. In such ways, the curriculum has more meaning in pupils' lives, and parents can be actively involved at times when they often welcome a bit of support and advice, and can find out more about the school curriculum. The school, the home and the rest of the world can become more meaningful, more real, for pupils. Task 6: Holiday homework for one subject For primary teachers, review this chapter and work with some parents (perhaps including parent governors), to produce a 'holiday homework guide' for three subjects. For secondary teachers, produce a 'holiday homework guide' in your main subject, relevant to three year groups. Each guide should exploit what pupils and their families actually do on holiday - not what teachers hope for, or what teachers themselves do on holiday. They should make the holiday more enjoyable, and the time back in school more interesting than the age-old 'what I did on my holiday' activity. Parents should be involved in the activities, but more as 'subjects' (e.g. of interviews) than as supervisors or teachers. Each guide should also say how much time should be spent on the tasks. As with homework tasks in general, you can reduce stress by setting a maximum amount of time rather than a minimum, although pupils will be learning - will be learning something, whether or not 'approved' by a teacher - wherever they go.

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Involving Parents Once a number of guides has been produced, it is helpful if these are shared around the school, and if the school as a whole develops a whole bank of guides. When parents wish to take their children out of school in term time, when a child develops a long-term illness or is excluded from school, or when the end of term approaches, the school will be ready to make the most of these situations.

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7

Reporting and Parents' Evenings

The key principle in this section: Parents are not cheap substitutes for teachers: teachers are, at best, quite expensive substitutes for parents.

All teachers are used to writing reports to be sent to parents, and to attending parents' evenings or daytime events for the same purpose. Whereas the rest of this book focuses on ways of involving parents where parents may not be involved, this chapter focuses on ways of involving parents more effectively when they are already systematically involved. Many years ago reports involved one or two words (often from the range from 'excellent' to 'poor') for each subject, and a general summary such as 'could try harder' or 'a good year's work'. Parents' evenings were often simply animated versions of the same process: 'your son/daughter could try harder' or 'has had a good year's work'. Since then, there has been a whole raft of policies put in place and the processes have become far more sophisticated. Reports may be hundreds or even thousands of words long, perhaps generated by expensive specialist computer programmes, and parents' evenings are about 'consultation' or 'partnership'. Nevertheless, little has really changed. Of the hundreds of words on reports. 71

Involving Parents parents are generally looking for words like 'excellent' or 'poor', and just as likely to come away from parents' evenings saying 'that teacher didn't even bother to brush his hair'. I suspect this is because the words added to reports are words with meaning to the teacher not to the parents, and the changes in stated aims of parents' evenings have not always been accompanied by changes in real intentions. The rest of this section, then, will look at words and intentions: how to improve written and spoken communication between teachers and the people who are likely to know the children better, and who are likely to have educated the children more.

Reports Parents and children tend to want similar things in reports. They want to know what the children are doing, how they are doing and what they should be doing in the future. To involve parents more effectively means to write about these three things in ways that are meaningful and specific. A phrase like 'could try harder' is meaningful, but unspecific as everyone in the world, including Olympic gold medallists, could try harder. A phrase like 'should critically analyse primary sources' is specific but probably meaningless to most readers. Bearing in mind school policies and the use of computerized methods of reporting, I would like to provide some advice that should prove useful to parents and pupils alike. Just remember that if parents cannot understand what you write, that is your fault, not theirs. A 72

Reporting and Parents' Evenings child reported as being 'diffident' was severely chastized when she got home: forty years later, she still wonders what her parents thought the word must have meant. The 'what' of reports is sometimes missing or, when present, often obscure. It should be the easiest part of the report to write, especially as all the children in a group are likely to have tackled much the same material. Teachers can write sentences like: •

In history, we looked at changes in transport over the years, and the effects this has had on what we can buy and sell.

•

In music, we listened to music from Brazil, and we tried to make up some Samba dance music.

•

In French, we looked at ways of describing people and at what they eat and drink.

A short paragraph can cover a whole subject, and should make the subject seem interesting. It should not be an opportunity for using all the phrases you can remember from National Curriculum such as 'we asked and answered questions about the past' or 'we were selecting and combining resources within given genres, taken from a variety of cultures'. What else did you do? Perhaps you had discussions or presentations, perhaps the class took part in a competition or were helped by older pupils. Was there a visit or a visitor, and did the headteacher really like something, or was something made into a display for the school entrance hall? And were the pupils working so hard one day that they did not even notice when a pigeon flew into the room? All of these 'what' parts of the 73

Involving Parents report can make parents feel they know a bit better what was going on in a subject. There should be familiar things there: familiar because they have seen their children working on a topic, and familiar because they know something about it themselves. And there should be unfamiliar things there, because the children (especially older children) did not want to tell their parents what they were doing in school, and because the parents may not know about that topic. There is more argument, among teachers, and between teachers and parents, about the 'how' of reports. Most schools have policies that require reports to describe positive achievements and targets for the future, and to avoid negative descriptions. Sometimes teachers feel that this means reports on lower-achieving children have to be bland and meaningless: parents, meanwhile, find such reports bland and meaningless, too, and are likely to ask at parents' evenings how their children are really doing. There is an important principle at stake here, highlighted for me by a piece of research completed at a very successful, caring, primary school. The teacher (part of a group of people studying social inclusion) asked her own pupils to describe the three most recent or memorable ways they could remember that the school helped them to feel positive about themselves. Higher-achieving pupils in the class could write and talk about achievements in the curriculum for which they had received praise and certificates and so on. Many lower-achieving pupils, however, despite having been praised, could not think of any ways, or could only think of one or two, and these were mostly about friends - someone letting them 74

Reporting and Parents' Evenings play - and out-of-class activities, often one or two years previously. This was not an unpraised class, so something else must have been happening. It seemed that most of the lower-achieving pupils had not 'accepted' much of the praise that they had been given. This may be explained by some work by Shereen Benjamin (2002), who writes of three kinds of success-talk in classrooms. 'Normal success' is contrasted with 'consolation success', with a third kind of discourse (what she calls 'really disabled success') for pupils 'separated' by labels of special educational needs. It seems as if many lowerachieving pupils hear the praise they get as 'consolation' praise. When writing reports, then, it is vital that being positive does not mean giving 'consolation' praise, which may seem like a rather condescending pat on the head. One of the most important jobs a teacher can do is to set up lessons in such a way that every pupil can experience real success, and report these successes. In the hierarchy of positive comments on reports, top of the list are comments on real successes; next on the list, and usually covered by the previous items, are what the pupil does best (i.e. which, of the ten topics or activities or skills experienced that year, did the pupil complete most successfully); next on the list are objective descriptions of achievements in terms of National Curriculum levels or their equivalent. Falling off the bottom of the list are descriptions of how each pupil succeeded in comparison with other pupils in the class or school. Involving parents, when reporting on how their children are doing, means telling parents what good 75

Involving Parents things their children have done. However, the 'how' of reports is not the end of the story. Reports will also need to include targets, or what the pupils need to do in the future. To help parents as well as pupils, the targets will need to be clear and meaningful. 'Read more' is not as helpful as 'read a story for ten minutes each evening'; 'try harder' is not as helpful as 'ask a teacher when you are not sure what to do'; 'behave better' is not as helpful as 'express your own views without trying to hurt, annoy or upset people' or listen carefully to what people say, even if you disagree with them'. If you have managed to write well about the children's achievements, then the targets may well be derived from these. How about writing of a pupil: When completing practical work in food technology, you work well with your friends and have really understood all the health and safety regulations. . . . The target for next term is to work just as well with your friends when we are doing written work.

Overall, reports should at all costs avoid seeming 'pompous and bureaucratic' and written in a 'semiexasperated tone', as described by Caroline St JohnBrooks (2003). She continues, saying that the teacher often sounds 'as if the author had forgotten that he or she were addressing responsible adults ... and not kids who enjoy making teachers' lives difficult'. Inevitably, some parents simply will not believe what you say about pupils, either because they believe the pupils more than the teachers, or because they do not trust the teachers. Building up trust with meaningful and respectful reports (and

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Reporting and Parents' Evenings following the other advice in this book) will help, but it should be remembered that children are as skilled at playing parents and teachers off against each other, as they are at playing one parent off against another. This is a healthy defence mechanism for children, preventing them from being over-dominated by one person; it is also a very annoying defence mechanism, for those being played off in such a way.

Parents' evenings Parents' evening are often tied to reporting systems, and are therefore a chance for parents and teachers to follow up what has been written in the report. Clarifying what has been written is one purpose of the evenings, and is central to the advice given by parent-teacher organizations (as in NCPTA 2003), but this should not be their only purpose. What else, then, do teachers and parents actually want from the evenings? •

From a teacher's point of view, the evenings should provide opportunities for saying how parents can further support their children's learning, and for asking parents whether there is anything else the school should know, to help support their children's learning. The kind of information exchanged might be about home or school circumstances, emotional or behavioural problems, or the choice of courses at 14. (In chapters 5 and 6, I also recommend providing information and displays that might be put on for a parents' evening.)

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Involving Parents •

From a parent's point of view, the evenings should provide opportunities for explaining any special circumstances or concerns that the parent or child might have, that might affect learning. Many parents are anxious at such events, and anxious about their children's progress, behaviour and potential. Occasionally, this anxiety will be expressed in ways that might annoy some teachers, and some parents will, in any case, want to use the evenings to complain about the teachers or other pupils. This is reasonable. It would not be reasonable for teachers to be annoying and to complain at parents' evenings. The inequality is not unfair, it is a consequence of teachers being professional and getting paid to do the job, and parents, as parents (notwithstanding parenting classes and training, as in Topping 1 986), being unpaid amateurs.

•

From both points of view, the evenings should provide opportunities for seeing that teachers and parents are all human, and that all, in their own ways, are trying their best for the children. You might want to thank each other for the work you have all been putting in, and praise each other and the children for successes.

A few more mundane things to say about parents' evenings. If you were inviting someone round to your house for an evening, would you clean up, dress up, ask them whether they wanted to bring their children and provide food or drink? You probably would, and I am sure you would if you were being paid as a professional host. The same goes for parents' evenings in schools. It may be a teacher's everyday 78

Reporting and Parents' Evenings place of work, but the evening should be a little special. I have heard people recommend that teachers 'dress down' when meeting parents, so as not to 'embarrass' them: this seems perverse to me. If you dress professionally then this may enhance the idea that you are a professional; if you 'dress down', then this may enhance the idea that you think parents are not worth treating professionally. The school, perhaps through a parent-teacher association, should provide drink and enough food to stop stomachs rumbling - important for parents and teachers who have rushed to the event direct from work. There could be a creche for parents' other children, if the facilities and staffing can be provided (perhaps with the help of parents themselves), and such facilities, and access to toilets, a telephone and so on around the school, should be explained to parents well in advance, and well signposted on the evening. And the school should be looking as good as you would want it to look for inspectors. For some, though, even a well-prepared school may not be the best place for a parents' evening. Emma Beresford and Angus Hardie (in Bastiani 1997: 140-1) suggest 'greater use of the telephone, meetings outside the school environment, i.e. in a local library, leisure centre or centre frequented by the community', and also 'home visits, more effective two-way written communications, using tapes, videos or CD Roms or the use of mediators such as education welfare officers'. In such ways, parents' evenings can be good ways of showing parents that you are trying your best to educate their children, treating the job professionally, and that you welcome the involvement of parents.

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Involving Parents Anything less, and you are giving negative messages about your own work and about the work of parents in bringing up their children. Task 7: These were good times Try the research exercise described earlier in this section. Ask a set of pupils to think about one subject in the curriculum, or, especially for younger primary pupils, about school as a whole. Ask them to describe (in writing, if they are able, or in brief interviews with a teacher or teaching assistant) the three most recent or memorable ways they can remember that the school helped them to feel positive about themselves. Analyse the responses. If all the pupils can think of many good experiences, then the task should be to make sure that these experiences are included in reports to parents - if necessary, suggesting that the reporting systems be changed to allow such experiences to be included. If, on the other hand, some of the pupils find it hard to think of any good experiences, then the task should be to make sure that there are opportunities for them to have such experiences before the next reportwriting deadline.

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8

Special Needs

The key principle in this section: Parents know more than teachers about their children, and are likely to have taught them more, too.

When studying the law, morality and civil liberties, I occasionally try a rather scary thought-experiment. Pupils are asked to imagine what it would be like, if they had a video camera attached to their shoulder, recording everything that happens to them, all day every day. If the video had been recording for the last year, is there anything it might have recorded that the pupils would not want other people knowing? With whom would they be willing to share the recordings? Over the years, I have never found a pupil who was comfortable with the idea of such a contraption although more and more of our lives are indeed being recorded by video cameras, with a headteacher recently reported as having installed CCTV systems, not for keeping a watch on burglars or misbehaving pupils, but for keeping a watch on unqualified exam supervisors (Stewart 2003). We all need some sense of privacy, and we need to know what people should know about us. Issues of privacy and of knowledge are central to understanding how to involve parents in schools in order to meet the special needs of pupils. (I 81

Involving Parents use the phrase 'special needs' as well as 'special educational needs': the former can incorporate giftedness, talent and other kinds of 'needs', while the latter has a narrower meaning.) Pupils with special needs can suffer from a kind of invisibility summed up in the title of a radio programme about disability: 'Does he take sugar?' In other words, certain aspects of a person, or the person as a whole, may be disregarded or made invisible. Yet these same pupils may, conversely, be all too visible and 'watched over' relentlessly. Parents and teachers all need to understand the 'need to know' and the 'need for privacy', the need for a good balance of visibility and invisibility. As a general rule, parents are likely to know, and to need to know, far more than teachers, but it is the children themselves who are likely to know most of all.

Formal structures for involving parents in issues related to special needs For over twenty years, parents have had a statutory role in the processes relating to the identification and meeting of special educational needs. It would be fascinating to work out why parents are expected to be more involved if their children have special educational needs, than if their children do not have such needs. Perhaps the reasons are related to parents having specialist knowledge or understanding lacking in teachers, or to teachers having a sense of their own limitations. Perhaps the reasons are related to the multi-agency approach to meeting special

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Special Needs educational needs, where parents are seen as one group of many to be consulted. Whatever the reasons, the opportunities provided by the (frequently changing) frameworks should be exploited. Parents should be informed and, more than that, involved at all stages of assessment and the meeting of needs. The processes relating to statements of needs and how they should be met should provide teachers and SENCOs with reasons for dialogue and an endproduct of the dialogue. Yet, despite a couple of decades of regulation in this area, many parents feel excluded from much of the activity. Exclusion can be the result of the language of meetings and statements being obscure, over-technical, or ambiguous; even more, it can be the result of a failure to make a genuine attempt to have a dialogue with parents. The philosopher Martin Buber talked of dialogue as being central to human nature, and warned of the temptation to take part in 'monologue disguised as dialogue'. In a different style, Gary Thomas and Christine O'Hanlon note that 'far from enabling inclusion, the constructs used to frame parents' place in education often in fact marginalize and exclude' (in Vincent 2000: x). Teachers aware of the temptation of monologue disguised as dialogue in themselves, when working with pupils, should apply that awareness when working with parents. Teachers leave on average less than half a second between asking a question and moving on. When pupils do manage to answer a question, the average answer is often very short: a single word appears to be the most popular response in literacy activities. Formal meetings with parents can be similar, 83

Involving Parents and can have the additional problem of being associated with some of the most complex diagnostic and prognostic aspects of education. And so: •

Write and talk in a style that can be expected to be understood by a parent, without making clarity an excuse for condescension. All teachers are skilful writers for different audiences, as they are constantly writing for their pupils. This skill has to be applied to correspondence and talk with parents. (Where skills in other languages are needed, translators may be employed, and some standard letters are available in several languages, at DfES 2003c.)

•

Include positive descriptions of the child. No teacher should come to a statementing or review meeting without genuinely good things to say. This is not being artificially generous, or giving 'consolation' praise, it is having the professional skill to find what all pupils are good at, and the determination - in meetings that can so easily be dominated by 'problems' - to keep mentioning them.

•

Listen to parents with all your skill, and as though they really do know more than you know about their children - it is generally true, anyway. Everyone, at some time, has come across a professional who listens, and one who does not listen: it may be a doctor, an estate agent or a teacher. Be the one who does listen.

I have seen superb work on individual education plans and targets completed with primary pupils who 84

Special Needs have moderate to severe learning difficulties. The pupils were certainly able to engage in the process, and, as with all good 'assessment for learning', the process itself was part of meeting the targets. If pupils can successfully engage in statements and individual education plans and so on, parents must surely be involved. Parents who themselves have special educational needs should be as involved as those without, and proceedings should be managed in a way that makes this viable. (Teachers with special educational needs should also be able to be involved, of course.) Parental involvement in formal meetings has not always been as effective as might be hoped, and one of the consequences of this is that parents have been given a right of access to a parent partnership service, along with various mediation and appeal or tribunal procedures. Parent partnership services generally cover local authority areas, but, even if run by the local authority, they should be independent. Their purposes include advising and representing the wishes of parents, especially with respect to the formal proceedings around special educational needs. It would be good if schools could involve parents in such a way that parent partnership services were rarely needed. If the service is used by parents of children in your school, it is vital that the school learns all the lessons it can from their involvement. Perhaps the situation might be helped by finding out more about the local service in advance of formal involvement. Sheila Wolfendale (2002) has excellent descriptions of the varied work of parent partnership schemes around the country. Local and national 85

Involving Parents organizations can be contacted through the National Parent Partnership Network (NPPN 2003, a website with good links to provider organizations such as Kids).

Informal ways of involving parents in issues related to special needs When it comes to involving parents, all the advice in earlier sections of this book should help with the involvement of parents of pupils with special needs. There are particular additional strategies that are worth mentioning here (with more details in Hornby 2000). •

All events which parents attend, and all aspects of the school that involve parents, should reflect and take account of the different needs of pupils.

•

Parents of pupils with special needs should not have to ask for separate prospectuses related to the meeting of these needs, and should not have to go to a different part of the school to see the exhibition of work by pupils with special needs.

•

Parents of all pupils should be able to be involved in supporting homework tasks: all too often, sadly, homework is not even set for pupils with special needs.

•

Although there may be additional review meetings and so on, reporting and parents' evenings should follow the same pattern as for other pupils: there should not be different kinds of reports for 86

Special Needs some pupils, although there should be specialist support available (for parents and pupils) to enable the systems to work well. •

Often the most helpful way of involving parents is to encourage them to observe particular lessons. Teachers can explain and demonstrate how they use puppets to develop turn-taking skills, games to promote language development, word-processing to make text more easily readable, or philosophical exercises to develop the most gifted.

•

Being able to observe how a teacher asks questions (where the teacher is confident enough to wait and to encourage long as well as short answers), and how long is left for pupils to think of answers, can be tremendously useful. Patiently awaiting an answer is crucial in developing all pupils, and especially those who may be significantly ahead of their peers (and therefore needing encouragement to think beyond what might be a facile answer), and for those who may be significantly behind their peers (and therefore needing encouragement to think that their answer is worthy of a wait).

•

Finally, it is important to mention that some parents of pupils with special needs find that their only contact with school is about the special needs. The needs should be visible enough to be able to be met, but the needs should not dominate all contact and all conversation. Children with special needs are children - happy, sad, capable, troubling or whatever: if everything is 87

Involving Parents interpreted as an aspect of the special needs, then the needs have taken over and the child will be lost. Writing home about a child's achievement, then, should not always be accompanied by reference to their special needs: 'Lisa completed a superb piece of work in maths, today, working on questions to go with the answer 100', is fine. You do not necessarily have to say 'Lisa completed a superb piece of work in maths, today, almost reaching the same level as the pupils in the mainstream group' or 'Lisa completed a superb piece of work in maths, today, and will be promoted to the gifted and talented set next week'. Task 8'. Meeting special needs write now You should have access to some statements of special educational needs for pupils in your school, along with the individual education plans for those pupils. Pick one such statement and individual education plan, preferably of one of your own pupils and a pupil whose parent you have met. •

Write a single side of paper, describing the content of the statement in a way that is absolutely clear for the parent of that child, without missing out important information.

•

Write another single side of paper, describing the individual education plan in a way that is absolutely clear for the parent, again without missing out important information. 88

Special Needs •

Write a list of questions you would like to ask the parent. It is important that you are able to think of things you want to know from the parent and that the parent, and perhaps no one else, may know.

•

Discuss with the SENCO and anyone else who might need to know, whether it is appropriate for you to send your summary and your questions to the parent, and how you should approach such dialogue in the future.

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9 Relationships

The key principle in this section: Parents are not cheap substitutes for teachers: teachers are, at best, quite expensive substitutes for parents.

This book is not about helping parents, it is about teaching children. Involving parents more effectively in schooling can help pupils learn more effectively, and parents are already involved in their children's education, whether or not they are involved in schooling. Building good relationships with parents is therefore based on acknowledging the teacher's role as a specialist, professional, educator adding to, complementing, the work being done by parents and other family members and friends. Parents are not simply consumers (or second-hand consumers) of schooling, or partners with schools: they are citizens in their own right (as in Vincent 2000), involved in learning of all kinds and, it is to be hoped, involved in schools (see for example the lobbying activities described in NCPTA 2003). Parents must, above all, be treated as adults and educators. According to Roland Barth, 'the biggest problem besetting schools is the primitive quality of human relationships among children, parents, teachers, and administrators', as 'many schools perpetuate infantilism'. He continues.

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Relationships 'this leads to children and adults who frequently behave like infants, complying with authority from fear or dependence' (Barth 1990: 36). In Chapter 1 of this book, the four principles underlying the whole book were described, along with some background information on schooling and families. Chapters 2 and 4 (on policies and on classrooms) focused on the idea that schools need to draw on the outside world, including the world of pupils' families. The implication for relationships between parents and teachers is that teachers need parents (as comprehensively researched and described in Wolfendale and Bastiani 2000). Teachers are involving parents because the world of parents is needed in school to make school work meaningful, and not simply as 'helpers'. Surveys of housework have been criticized for assuming that gender equality can be measured by investigating how much men 'help' with housework. A helpful man may be more use than a helpless man, but if men merely help women with housework, rather than share responsibility, there is no real equality. The same can be said of parents and teachers: the world of parents, and of the rest of local, national and international communities, is needed in classrooms. Chapters 3 and 6 (on first impressions and homework) looked at how 'applicable' school work was to the rest of pupils' lives. Effective marketing of a school (central to 'first impressions') and effective homework and support for holidays, are both based on teachers knowing what their subjects are for. Relationships between teachers and parents should therefore be based on teachers being trusted to 91

Involving Parents understand and explain the curriculum - not just being good at studying, themselves, but understanding the purpose and meaning of the curriculum, and explaining this to parents. I have been keen, throughout this book, to describe the importance of parents; I am equally keen to describe the importance, professionalism and specialist skills of teachers. Good relationships are built on such mutual understanding of distinct interests, not on an abstract or insubstantial sense of 'equality'. Is it really true that parents know more than teachers about their children? Of course, although parents and teachers know about different aspects of children, and children often seem to have different personalities at home and in school. In Chapters 5 and 8, on special events and special needs, there are ideas on how the 125,000 out-ofschool hours for which parents have responsibility, and in which parents teach their children more than they will ever learn in school, can be used as a basis for good working relationships between parents and teachers. The fourth principle, that parents are not substitutes for teachers, but rather that teachers are at best quite expensive substitutes for parents, is the basis for Chapter 7 on reporting, and this section on relationships. A vegetarian may point out the difference between chickens and pigs, and suggest the bacon and egg theory of parent-teacher relationships. In a meal of bacon and eggs, it is said, the chicken makes a significant contribution, but the pig is fully committed. Without wishing to cause further offence, who, of teachers and parents, are the chickens and 92

Relationships who are the pigs? Teachers have a professional and specialist commitment but, I suggest, it is parents who are fully committed, who more-or-less literally give up their whole lives for their children. Inevitably, there are parents who may be identified as 'problem parents' just as there are teachers who may be identified as 'problem teachers' and pupils who may be identified a 'problem pupils' - and just as much disagreement and controversy concerning each of the categories and who may be categorized. Some parents may seem to be uninterested in or hostile to schooling. Teachers should first understand the origin of any such problem. For example, difficulties parents have coming to a school may be a result of bad previous experiences of their own, or with other schools their children have attended. Parents with children with special needs may well have gone through a complex and draining process of trying to overcome difficulties and gain recognition of the children's needs, and may have a whole range of troubling feelings associated with having a child identified as having special needs. Teachers should be sensitive to fears that parents may have, even if these fears are not well-founded - such as a fear of their children acquiring HIV by going to a swimming pool, or being converted to Hinduism by going to a mandir. Once the origins of problems are identified, see what you can do to ease or overcome the problems. It is always helpful to invite parents to visit the school before major problems arise, and once parents are in school, to have good policies and practices to make teachers and parents feel secure (as in Chapter 2). If a

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Involving Parents parent has a particularly good relationship with one member of staff, then it is worth having that person involved in any meeting with the parent. Many parents will be able to work through problems given time. Time is always precious to teachers, but if there is a way of giving parents sufficient time, this will be tremendously useful. Perhaps teachers can collectively agree to cover lessons or duties for each other, in order to see parents for longer. Some parents, no matter what you do, are still going to grumble. Ultimately, you may just have to accept that you are a professional and have to put up with grumbles. If it gets to that stage, at least promise yourself that a difficult relationship with a parent should not ever be taken out on the child. To summarize this section: •

Understand how much you need parents, and ask for parental involvement with a genuine enthusiasm rather than as a grudging obedience to an abstract theory or policy.

•

Know and explain what you teach, in a way that justifies your work to parents and their lives.

•

Assume, in all dealings with parents, that they know more than you do about their children.

•

If, at the end of your teaching career, you feel you have made a contribution to the lives of pupils that is somewhere near the contribution of parents to a child, then you can retire happy. Thinking about these last impressions is a good complement to earlier work on first impressions.

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Relationships Task 9: A retirement speech (a long time in the future) Take yourself forward to the day you retire from teaching. The school has arranged a party for you, and has invited present and former colleagues, pupils and parents of pupils. Write that part of your retirement speech that is addressed to parents of pupils, past and present. What would you like to be able to say to them? Yes, I know it is tempting to write an entertainingly rude speech, and that too may be helpful for you. Nevertheless, it would be good to be able to think about what positive things you would like to be able to say about your own work and the involvement of parents over the years.

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Bibliography

AIIExperts (2003) http://www.allexperts.com Barth, R. S. (1990) Improving Schools from Within: Teachers, Parents, and Principals Can Make the Difference, San Francisco: Jossy-Bass. Bastiani, J. (ed.) (1997) Home-School Work in Multicultural Settings, London: David Fulton. Bastiani, J. and Wolfendale, S. (eds) (1996) HomeSchool Work in Britain: Review, Reflection and Development, London: David Fulton. Benjamin, S. (2002) The Micropolitics of Inclusive Education: An Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press. Claire, H. (1996) Reclaiming Our Pasts: Equality and Diversity in the Primary History Curriculum, Stokeon-Trent: Trentham. Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003a) h ttp://www. dfes. gov.uk Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003b) 'Parental Involvement'; hnp://www.standards. dfes. go v. uk/paren talin volvemen t Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003c) Parents' Centre: Learning Support; h ttp://www. dfes. go v. uk/paren ts/support Great Britain Board of Education (1936) Homework (Educational Pamphlets, N° 110], London: HMSO. Holland, J. (2001) Understanding Children's Experi-

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Bibliography ences of Parental Bereavement, London: Jessica Kingsley. Hornby, G. (2000) Improving Parental Involvement, London: Continuum. Lacey, P. (2001) Support Partnerships: Collaboration in Action, London: David Fulton. Lovelace, A. (2001) Speaking for Ourselves: A REaSE Project Video, Norwich: RMEP. MacBeath, J. and Turner, M. (1990) Learning out of school: Report of Research Study carried out at Jordanhill College, Glasgow: Jordanhill College. Merttens, R. (1 994) Holiday Activities: Maths: Impact Writing, Leamington Spa: Scholastic. Munn, P. (ed.) (1993) Parents and Schools: Customers, Managers or Partners? London: Routledge. National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations (NCPTA) (2003); http://www.ncpta.org.uk National Parent Partnership Network (NPPN) (2003); http://www.parentpartnership. org. uk NSPCC (2003); http://www.nspcc.org.uk St John-Brooks, C. (2003) 'Letters home should be free of capital offence', TES, 25 April. Salzberger-Wittenberg, I., Henry, G. and Osborne, E. (1 983) The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stern, L. J. (1997) Homework and Study Support: A Guide for Teachers and Parents, London: David Fulton. Stern, L. J. (1 998) The OoSHA Review: Out of School Hours Activities in Lambeth: Report for Lambeth LEA, Spring 1998, Isleworth: Brunei University. Stern, L J. (1999) Developing as a Teacher of History, Cambridge: Chris Kington.

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Bibliography Stern, L. J. (2003) Progression from Family Learning, LSC-funded research report for Hull CityLearning, April. Stewart, W. (2003) Tear that heads will be workload losers', TES. 4 April. 7ES(2003)'Staffroom'; http://www. tes. co. uk/staffroom Topping, K. J. (1986) Parents as Educators: Training Parents to Teach Their Children. London: Groom Helm. Vincent, C. (2000) Including Parents?: Education, Citizenship and Parental Agency, Buckingham: Open University Press. Wolfendale, S. (ed.) (2002) Parent Partnership Services for Special Educational Needs: Celebrations and Challenges, London: David Fulton. Wolfendale, S. and Bastiani, J. (eds) (2000) The Contribution of Parents to School Effectiveness, London: David Fulton.

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