South Morningside Primary does not look like much from the outside. It is a Victorian school building with a tarmac playground and, although some greenery screens it from the busy road it sits on in Edinburgh, you can appreciate Louisa Dall’s point when she describes it as something of “a concrete jungle”.

At last week’s Tes Schools Awards 2024, the almost 600-pupil school was shortlisted as Primary School of the Year for the whole of the UK. And in this “brilliant, vibrant community”, says headteacher Grant Gillies, a shining light is its parent council, of which Dall is the co-chair.

South Morningside Primary Parent Council has a turnover of over £120,000 a year and runs more than a dozen after-school clubs - many of these are led by parents and all have a parent convener who manages sign-ups and subs.

Out of all the schools that have active and thriving parent councils, few could match this level of fundraising and parental engagement.

The impact of a strong parent council

Iain Ring-MacLeod, who has two sons at the school and one who recently left for secondary, organises football coaching. He estimates that around half of every year group from P3-7 are involved, with girls outnumbering boys. A platoon of 45 parent coaches dedicate their Saturday mornings in order to make it all happen.

Clubs also run after school every night of the week; some are free, others cost almost £200 a year. These clubs cover chess, coding, drama, creative writing, judo, gymnastics, guitar, singing and much more. If a family cannot afford a club, the parent council will step in and help out; the same goes for outdoor camps run in P5-7.

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But this is just one aspect of what the parent council does - as well as it having a sub-group responsible for the extracurricular clubs, there is also a group that looks at communication (it is trying to streamline the information that parents receive from the school) and another that focuses on transport (safe travel to school for pupils can be a challenge in Scotland’s busy capital).

How to make the most of the school playground is now also on the parent council’s to-do list. A group of parents and carers is looking at improvements. Working with Gillies, a “trim trail” - a sort of obstacle course to encourage fitness - has recently been added and there are plans afoot for a multi-use games area.

The school is a great example of the incredible impact that an active parent council can have - but its achievement could easily be dismissed.

For Scots - in particular, those with a knowledge of the different areas of the capital - Morningside has a reputation for being, to use a somewhat loaded term, “posh”.

That the children of South Morningside Primary are benefiting from a full extracurricular offer could perhaps be deemed unsurprising. But it would be wrong to settle for such an overly simplistic explanation.

Yes, Morningside is affluent and has low levels of poverty, but then so do many parts of Scotland - but precious few of them will have a parent council with a turnover of £125,000 a year, as South Morningside Primary did in 2022-23.

‘Not easy to galvanise a community’

“It’s really not easy to galvanise a community in a really positive way like this,” says Gillies. “You have to keep working at it.”

Not that he is taking the credit. Gillies joined the school a year and a half ago and much of the extracurricular offer predates his appointment. The judo club, for instance, has been running in the school for 25 years and gymnastics also goes back “years and years and years”, says Dall.

However, all the clubs had to be restarted after Covid. Dall says this was a hugely challenging period and almost like beginning again from scratch. For his part, Gillies says the school has had to work “very hard” to encourage the community back into the playground.

But Gillies sees working closely with parents as central to a successful school. He has led another city primary school - he was the head of Dalry Primary - but for the seven years before he joined South Morningside, he worked in schools around the world, including in Thailand, Qatar and Romania.

His philosophy is that education should be “a baton that passes between school, child and home”.

“We use an army of parent volunteers and live the values that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’,” he says.

Next year Gillies plans to introduce “meta-skills Mondays” when children will come out of their year group silos and pick a skill they want to work on. Among the options on offer will be cooking, orienteering or marketing.

Pupils will work on their chosen skill for six-week blocks, and parents have been asked if they have some sort of expertise they would like to pass on.

The importance of being visible

Talking about building good relationships with families, Gillies cites the importance of being visible - for instance, at the school gate at the start and the end of the day - and having the “small conversations”. Take the time to do that and “opportunities explode”, he says.

At South Morningside Primary he says it is normal for parents and carers to “come and go all day long”, supporting classes, helping out on trips or just walking the pupils to nearby green spaces where they go for PE and outdoor education.

On Friday afternoons the school is closed - many Scottish councils operate an asymmetric week with Friday afternoons off, and this has long been the case in Edinburgh. But at South Morningside Primary when the bell goes, families are encouraged to stay on and play.

“It’s just beautiful,” says Gillies. “The kids are picked up at 12.30pm and by one o’clock everybody is sitting having sandwiches and playing in the playground. All those bits are really important for connecting.”

On Thursdays, family members dropping children off - often grandparents - are encouraged to stay on for the gardening club that is hosted in the former janitor’s house on the school grounds.

Gillies says the result of all the additional experiences that the school offers is “well-rounded children” who “are happy and are finding success that they can transfer academically into school”.

“When parents are involved in school it can make a huge difference for the choices and chances of all children”

Dall also believes that having a wide range of clubs supports attainment because pupils find “their tribe or the thing they are good at”. At South Morningside “you fit in somewhere”.

But some schools struggle to tempt in any parents to run the parent council, let alone the 50 that Dall estimates are involved in South Morningside’s council and its array of sub-groups.

When it comes to getting parents involved, Dall says they try to make meetings fun and sociable. Sometimes they take place in the pub, and there is always wine at parent council meetings.

She also recommends being specific when asking people for help - don’t just ask people if they want to join the parent council or if they can help at the school fair; instead, make small requests like “Can you dry dishes at the school fair?”, “Can you do face painting?” or “Can you make teas and coffees?”.

“Getting people involved in a small aspect shows we are not this weird cult of busybodies. We are just quite normal people,” Dall says.

Families ‘a largely untapped resource’

National parents’ organisation Connect says that families and carers remain a largely untapped resource in Scottish education. Speaking to Tes Scotland in December, Patrick McGlinchey, who was the body’s executive director at the time, said “huge cultural change” was required.

Too often, he said, parents are looked upon as fundraisers - not genuine partners in education.

New Connect executive director Gavin Yates, who was appointed in April, is calling for a “parents’ charter”.

He says parents should be involved in decisions about the appointment of senior leaders, how government funding to close the attainment gap is spent and the content of school improvement plans. These rights have existed for a long time, he says, but often they are not well understood by parents and carers themselves - and schools’ awareness is also sometimes lacking.

“When parents are involved in school - working in partnership with teachers - it can make a huge difference for the choices and chances of all children,” says Yates.

“At a time when education is a huge issue for the public, with concerns about resources, attainment and provision for additional support needs, the views and ambition of parents need to be properly heeded.”

But the reason why school leaders might feel unable to achieve deeper parental engagement - for all the benefits it could ultimately bring to a school - is clear. Spiralling workload is a huge issue for those in headteacher and depute headteacher posts. They already report working well beyond their contracted hours, so how are they to find the time?

Parents holding schools to account

Gillies, meanwhile, does not shy away from the fact that, while South Morningside Primary is well-supported by parents, they also have high expectations and hold him to account.

Engaging and communicating with parents is about being proactive, he says, and spending time in order to save time. Without that dialogue - which may sometimes be uncomfortable - he questions how a school knows whether it is investing time and effort in the right things.

For example, Gillies says it has been “a bit raw” hearing parents on the sub-group that is looking at communications with families criticising the school’s approach and talking about being “overwhelmed”. Worse, though, he believes, would be not knowing and continuing to invest time and energy in an approach that just isn’t working.

“You have to keep focused on what makes good schools, and it’s people that make good schools,” says Gillies.

“Our school is an amazing place because we have got some flipping phenomenal staff - and parents.”

Emma Seith is senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

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