Family ties: how to get parents involved in children's learning

Teachers are always looking for ways to improve education for their pupils – and one of the fundamental ways of doing this is parental engagement. Learning shouldn’t finish when the child leaves school at the end of the day, and with parents on board it is much easier to help students reach their potential.

Of course, it won’t always be easy to engage parents: they may be very busy, or have a first language other than English. So what advice is out there for building better partnerships?

Make homework collaborative

Try setting homework that involves parents’ or a carers’ participation. Teacher Rob Faurewalker got his year 7 geography class to ask their parents to take them out into the park to see the stars.

“Working in central London, many kids haven’t seen the stars,” he says. “But seeing them and gaining an appreciation of their place in the universe is a vital starting point to a geography curriculum that teaches them about the world from a global to local scale.” At parents’ evening, mums and dads said they enjoyed the chance to get involved.

Give them good news

A note from school shouldn’t be a source of dread for parents, so make sure you regularly feedback good news as well any worries or concerns. “Positive communication is rare in schools as children get older, but as a parent it fills me with a lot of pride,” says Thomas McCarthy, who has three daughters, and works as a learning mentor in a primary school in Lewisham.

Positivity can also help win over the trust of new families, adds Robert Kazandijan, a learning mentor at Oakthorpe Primary School. “Emphasis on positivity is the key to generating interest. Celebrating something brilliant that a child of a ‘hard to reach’ parent has done can be a wonderful tool.”

Get parents through the door

Many schools now provide services such as food banks and language classes to students’ families. This doesn’t just help plug the gap in local services, but helps to build a sense of community within a school.

Nasser Mockbill, community liaison officer at Ark St Alban’s academy in Birmingham, explains. “At St Alban’s we have a food bank and we speak to our parents – confidentiality – to see if they need to access it.” The school also runs weekly literacy lessons for parents, as well as sessions to educate them on issues such as healthy eating, safeguarding, e-safety, FGM, sexual exploitation and radicalisation.

Another way to get parents through the door is to set up a reading cafe, where parents and children choose from a menu of books and read them together, says Kazandijan. “Reading cafes are a nice example of this, where parents can join the class, listen to children read, read aloud to children themselves if they feel confident to do so, and enjoy a positive collective experience.”

Use social platforms

Parents are busy and might not have time to attend workshops during the day, but social media can provide an efficient way to keep mums and dads in the loop. There are more ways than ever before for teachers to send updates home – from Classdojo, a service which keeps busy parents in the loop with their child’s education, to Facebook.

In terms of what can be sent home to parents, it could be anything from photos and videos of projects being done in class, to announcements or one-on-one messages can be sent home to parents. “It breaks down those barriers to communication so parents and teachers are able to work together, which ultimately means a better learning experience for every child,” says ClassDojo’s Lindsay McKinley.

Try a home visit

A home visit is time-consuming, but it has real benefits, says Mockbill. He sees them as a way of informing parents about their child’s education and building relationships: “It’s not a bad idea for schools to visit the year 6 students and their families before they join their school”.

Tackle language barriers

Parents who don’t have English as their first language can find it hard to interact with teachers, and may end up feeling distanced from their child’s school life. Some schools run literacy sessions to help build parents’ confidence or use other parents and colleagues as interpreters. “This helps foster the sense of community and positive collective experience,” says Faurewalker.

“It is important that schools employ from the local community so that these language skills are present, but this is not always possible – I once worked in a school with 57 home languages,” he explains. “In this case, the children should be encouraged to translate for their parents and this helps the language skills of all involved.”

If at first you don’t succeed...

Sometimes parents aren’t responsive – perhaps because they’re busy juggling work commitments or because they’ve had negative experience with schools in the past. Don’t be put off.

Jonathan Bailey, assistant head of Malvern College in Egypt, says it’s important to persevere because getting parents involved means they will have more conversations about learning at home. This then “equates to an improved attitude – and hopefully a more determined and successful individual”.