The thoughts of many leaders and teachers at the start of the school year are about how to engage more fully with the parents of the children placed into their hands.
They know there is a cornucopia of research that points to the improvement in pupils’ behaviour and results when parents fully buy into what’s happening at their kids’ school.
The flip-side of this is, of course, a long way from this idyllic view: parents can cause significant stress to both teachers and leaders alike.
So why is there this divide?
Ask most parents and they will tell you how much more they want to be involved in their child’s school. But too many significant barriers get in the way. The biggest is, perhaps, the language used by schools: often it is simply not understood by parents.
This “alien” language will soon lead to their child talking about digraphs, descenders, phonemes and sound mats, and that’s before we start talking about the language of maths.
Parents often feel intimidated by the school and even by their own child. Far too quickly they can begin to feel redundant within the education system. They genuinely believe the school talks down to them, or doesn’t talk to them at all, and this often reinforces the experiences they themselves had at school.
Making parents feel welcome at school
Negativity is very quickly achieved without really trying.
To break this vicious cycle, schools need strike a balance in the home-school relationship very early in the school year. Schools need to differentiate learning in the classroom but also need to do the same with the parents. Parents are as individual as their children, and need to be treated as such.
This is easier said than done: the issue is, of course, a lack of time.
However, there is one way into this intractable problem that isn’t often enough explored. Schools must exploit the area where most parents truly are the expert: their own child. Parents must be encouraged to discuss all aspects of their child, and this should happen constantly and at every level of the school system.
Too often schools seem to think it’s essential to teach parents the systems and processes of school life instead of simplifying this and just talking about the individual: about their characters and interests.
Successful schools do just this. They see parents as a vital cog in the education process. They are welcomed continually into schools. Parents hear more of the successes of their child, in a language they can understand, and recognise that the school knows their child. A culture of trust is built.
This is tough to achieve because of the strictures laid down to schools and the external pressures placed on teachers, but when a bond between parents and schools staff is achieved there is only one winner - the children themselves.
Colin Harris led a school in a deprived area of Portsmouth for more than two decades. His last two Ofsted reports were ‘outstanding’ across all categories
To read more of Colin’s articles, visit his back catalogue
