Three years ago, Chenaze Ullah was a struggling single mother - alone, bored and unfulfilled. Living in Poplar, east London, with her young son, she made ends meet by working in a local shop. “I felt useless. I wasn’t fulfilled and felt unable to give enough.”

Now she is giving all she can. Employed as a nursery nurse at nearby Malmesbury infants’ school, she is just one of many residents to benefit from Tower Hamlets’s innovative programmes for involving and training local people.

Ms Ullah came to England 10 years ago, aged 26, to work as a child-minder. She had worked in a nursery in Mauritius and was keen to be a teacher. But after she married and gave birth to her son, she found her husband less than keen on her ambitions. “He didn’t want me to have a career,” she says, “so after a while we didn’t get on.” When the marriage ended, she says, she “lost years just sitting indoors” until a support worker suggested she become a parent volunteer at the school where her son had just started nursery.

It was perfect timing, as Sarah Gale, from Tower Hamlets’s equalities and parent partnership development team, explains. “We’d been encouraging parents to come and help in schools for years. But, although they’re often extremely skilled, many parents in Tower Hamlets don’t feel comfortable - because of language barriers, or low levels of literacy - so we looked at ways for them to be involved that were non-threatening and that could build their confidence.”

With the council’s encouragement, some schools set up informal parents’ groups or set aside areas where parents could meet without feeling under pressure to enter the classroom. More specifically, the council began to advertise “family learning courses” at its parents’ advice centre in Mile End, so that those who wanted to could train to become more involved in school life.

Ms Ullah jumped at the chance, taking a “helping in schools” course and acquiring an NVQ level 3 qualification for learning support assistants. Soon she was a paid, part-time classroom assistant at the school and, in January this year, was given a permanent nursery post.

The “helping in schools” programme is only one of a range of courses available to parents and classroom assistants in Tower Hamlets. In particular, the council encourages assistants by releasing them for courses during paid work time, with the ultimate aim of encouraging some of them to become fully qualified teachers.

“We realised that if we were going to encourage local people to become classroom assistants or teachers, we needed to address their personal needs and professional abilities,” says Ms Gale.

The courses - ranging from a “return to learn” programme run with public service union Unison to courses on communication skills, GCSE maths and English, and an Open University specialist teacher’s assistant certificate - form a set of steps that parents can take towards becoming teachers themselves. Ms Gale estimates that 400 to 500 classroom assistants in the borough were on council-funded courses last year.

“Having children in school can act as a catalyst for parents to start learning themselves,” she says. “Some parents found school an ambivalent experience, others may have had no formal education in Britain and thus have no knowledge of it. Our strategy allows them a way in.

“There’s nothing new about encouraging parents’ involvement in schools, or providing training courses for that matter. But the idea of creating a kind of ladder that enables parents to be involved as volunteers, then be classroom assistants, and even to become teachers, is unique.”

Ann Wood and Jackie Jeffery are two parents approaching the top rung. Classroom assistants at Olga primary school, they are halfway through a two-year teacher training course at the Urban Learning Foundation, taking advantage of Tower Hamlets’s policy of paying assistants’ salaries while they train.

Ms Wood, 35, started volunteering at the school seven years ago as holiday cover for a midday supervisor. From then on she was “offered more and more involvement”, and eventually became a paid classroom assistant after taking the part-time specialist teacher assistant course.

“I knew I wanted to go on and become a teacher. But I didn’t think it would be possible because I couldn’t afford to give up my job for full-time education. Then Tower Hamlets came up with this scheme.”

She had thought of teaching when she was at school, but left at 16 to find work - and money. “Now I feel like I’ve been given a second chance,” she says.

Ms Jeffery, on the other hand, readily admits she hated school and was desperate to get out. Now 39, she is relishing the chance to become a teacher. “Being involved in the school gives you much more insight into what goes on in your kids’ lives, and how things behind the scenes work,” she says. “But as your kids grow up you realise you need something for you at the end of it.”

Ms Wood and Ms Jeffery grew up locally and are committed to working in the borough after they qualify next year. As teachers who hail from the locality, they will be relatively rare in East End schools, and both believe they have something to give back to the community.

For Joanne Clensy, Chenaze Ullah’s head at Malmesbury, the prospect of a pool of local teachers is one of the main benefits of Tower Hamlets’s raft of parent-friendly schemes. “If we can employ local people who are committed to the area, who actually want to be here, that can only be a good thing,” she says. “They also have a real understanding of some of the problems our children face. And the knock-on effect is that we’ll end up with permanent staff, which, with teacher shortages, most schools around here haven’t got.”

Parental Involvement in Children’s Learning: a practical framework for schools’ self-evaluation, written in collaboration with John Bastiani, will be published by the London borough of Tower Hamlets in the new year