Promoting partnership with parents to enhance the assessment and reporting proce

National Conference on Wednesday 26th November
The Moat House Hotel, Glasgow.

Report by Eleanor Coner

Report by Eleanor Coner
 

 National Conference on Wednesday 26th November
The Moat House Hotel, Glasgow.

Not exactly the catchiest title! Even so, I was looking forward to the day, as it would give other parents/teachers and me an opportunity to have a look at projects in Scottish schools that were aimed at improving the reporting process and links with parents.
 

The morning opened with an overview of Project 9 from the Scottish Executive. This project is part of the "Assessment For Learning Programme" and is piloting things like PLPs, (Personal Learning Plans) and other ways of reporting. The speaker also gave some feedback on some seminars that had gathered views of parents around Scotland on what they want from the reporting process. The conclusions were that schools need to break down barriers, parents want regular and realistic information with no “eulogies”, and they want information at the beginning of term and early meetings before potential problems get out of hand. As I was sitting there listening to this, I must admit to getting a sense of déjà vu as SPTC has been saying this for years!

I’m not going to write about the keynote speakers as the highlight of the conference for me were the workshops. The first one I attended had the title: "Meeting the challenge of supporting parents with Additional Support Needs" and was run by staff from bilingual units in a couple of Glasgow schools. They are working with asylum seeker families whose children stay in the units until it is felt that they are ready for mainstream schooling. The staff recognises that many asylum seekers do not feel part of the community and feel that they have no rights to anything. The staff also see many people with varying degrees of schooling and perceptions of education - some of the parents are highly educated and have had to adapt to a completely different lifestyle and some have had no schooling whatsoever.

Even though many asylum seekers feel separated from much of the community, the school itself is a very important part of their lives - it is something stable and a place where they can get involved. Lots of the parents believe that as they don't speak English very well, if at all, then they can't help their children at school but the staff in the bilingual unit are very keen to emphasise to the families that their first language will always be the most important. The parents are encouraged to come into the school and have helped to produce resources, taped stories and have also translated books, school notices, greetings and posters. They also sit with their children while they are working and the children are encouraged to tell them about the books they are reading.

The unit holds regular meetings with families and at first translators were used, but now the parents and children translate for each other.

The staff have also learnt a lot about communication whilst working with the asylum seeker families. One teacher described how they have tried to make their parental consultations less formal and how "frightening" this was for her on the first evening when she had no desk to hide behind! It was great to see how both staff and parents listen and are aware of each other’s needs and how the members of staff value the parents’ role which in turn has led to increased confidence and self-esteem

The afternoon started with a talk by Brian Donald, the BBC sports presenter. It was a good way to wake everyone up after lunch as he is an experienced after-dinner speaker and was a great joke-teller. He talked about his own experience as a dad. At first, he had very little contact with the school and left it up to his wife. However he had to cope on his own when his wife died, leaving him with a 14-year-old daughter. He spoke of his first parents’ evening on his own and how shocked he was to learn that his daughter was not the cleverest in the school. He admitted himself that due to his exceptional circumstances, he did expect a lot from teachers and it took him a while to realise that teachers are only human!
He now has two step-children and says that things haven't really changed - most of the information that parents get is retrospective - parents need information before not after the event. Brian also thinks that there should be consideration of the physical environment for parental consultations - it should not be like a trial for the parent and barriers like desks should be removed. But he also emphasised that parents also have responsibilities – they should accept the good and the bad, should feed back to the school and take in and act on information given to them by staff.

The high quality of workshops continued in the afternoon when I attended a presentation from a nursery school in West Dunbartonshire. They have worked closely with parents to create a series of science themed boxes, (similar to story sacks) and these contain activities which can be done together at home. The parents were involved in the project right from the beginning and the staff was very careful not to take control. The parents were involved in the initial meetings and had input all along the way into such things as leading workshops, the suitability of resources for use in the home, items that should be included in the boxes and suggestions for new boxes. The parents take photos of their child at home, which are then displayed, in the nursery. My main impression of this project was how brilliant nurseries are at the parental involvement “thing” and how much primary and secondary schools could learn from the early years sector.

During this workshop, we also heard from representatives from Moray House, School of Education who are looking at ways of increasing student teachers awareness of the importance of partnership with parents. The lecturers agreed that they would be contacting all of the workshop presenters with a view to using their work as examples. Its about time the subject of parental involvement was given a higher priority during teacher training.

26 Nov 2003