Secondary schools face distinct challenges in reaching out to less engaged parents but there are ways we can improve that situation.
The key is to know who our quietly unengaged parents are and then make efforts to reach them through a range of measures which might include more intelligent use of technology as well as good old-fashioned pastoral work.
We know the families who are unhappy because they let us know. And we are equally aware of the engaged ones, usually because their children are equally motivated and engrossed in their learning. These students invariably have strong support at home.
Then there is the silent group in the middle who fall between these two camps. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you might say they are our “known unknowns”.
For some of our less engaged families we have clear and regular engagement. For example, we have specific groups of students in intervention categories such as those classified with SEND. They will be very well known and very closely tracked and monitored, and their parents will usually be closely invested in this support.
But it is those unengaged families, often with children who are classic grade 3-4 borderline students who aren’t subject to interventions, who are for me the most important cohort that we have – and it is crucial that we bring them in closer.
These families are even more of an engagement challenge than they were in the pre-pandemic “before times”. We know that literacy is one of the biggest indicators of future student achievement and success and sadly we can evidence that some of these students have not read anything in the past two years. That makes parental engagement in their learning vital if we are to move these groups on.
The key role of the tutor
Our focus has been to make that group smaller and one of the chief ways we do this is to greatly enhance the role of our tutors. The role can sometimes be regarded as a secondary position, there to simply look after that stage in the school day before students get to their lessons.
However, Covid forced us to reappraise the role, which I now believe is the most important one in the entire school. When you are an inner-city school faced with significant challenges in the community and safeguarding issues there should be a person in school who knows a child really well.
Throughout the lockdowns we held daily live online tutor meetings for our key groups which were put in place even before live teaching. We have since kept that tutor focus by reducing tutor group sizes as much as possible.
Reducing the group sizes makes it easier to build that rapport with the students and their families. We did this by bringing in some of our support staff – including administration staff and technicians – and, after training and work-shadowing, moved them from being co-tutors into outright tutor roles.
It has worked well. There is often the view in schools that only qualified teachers can be tutors, but the fact is that some of our very best tutors are support staff, especially because they have more capacity during the day to follow up with students and families if required.
If I would share any advice, it would be to take a fresh look at all staff – not just teachers – to see who might make a good tutor. This approach could potentially reduce tutor group sizes from 30 to 15, giving parents and students more of a chance of building a meaningful relationship, and using that person as the first point of contact if there are any concerns or questions.
At first, we thought there would be resistance from the support staff but when we suggested scaling down the initiative after the last lockdown the support staff told us that they now saw it as the most rewarding part of their job.
Using technology
Technology has a massive part to play in narrowing this group of disengaged, or unengaged parents, by allowing the efficient sharing of information with home. It also allows staff to be able to regularly update parents on their child’s learning progress rather than waiting for that traditional parents’ evening.
You can make the mistake of assuming that if the information has left the school, then the parent has received it and is acting upon it. Our school engagement platform means that we can see that the information has reached a parent and when they have seen it as well.
Tech also makes it easier for us to reach families which speak English as an additional language. We can bring an interpreter into online parent meetings. I have discovered that these parents, while they are not confident with reading written communications in English, are more comfortable with video messages, so I now use YouTube for my frequently recorded principal’s messages.
Conclusion
We are starting to reach these parents through this combination of strategies. They are getting used to seeing that information coming to them and they are happy that they have a direct line to an individual with a good knowledge of their son or daughter.
Now I am seeing more parents coming to virtual or face-to-face meetings armed with information. The fact that they are downloading it through our parental engagement platform is a good sign that we are making some important strides in bringing all our parents closer to our school and their children’s learning.
Parental engagement tips
A new report from school engagement platform Firefly draws on research involving 2,000 teachers and parents to find out more about how parents engage with teaching and learning.
How well are schools helping parents to support their child’s learning? features recommendations, suggestions and questions to help schools improve their approach to parental engagement (Firefly, 2021).
The report includes a description of the barriers to effective engagement as seen by parents. These include:
- Language: Parents don’t like education jargon in school comms and find an overly formal tone a turn off. Being aware that parents may speak English as an additional language or have different levels of comprehension were also stressed by respondents.
- Action: Some parents felt schools could place more emphasis on what parents need to do with the information by highlighting “action needed”. Others felt that even though a communication method, such as email, worked for them, schools needed to avoid creating barriers by attaching documents that weren’t easily viewable on a mobile device.
- Technology: Technology could foster increased parental engagement, but parents stressed that not everyone has access to the same equipment, tools or software, and not every member of a family will have equal access to the home’s technology.
- Agency: Asking parents which communication methods they prefer will improve engagement, as will making sure that parents have the know-how and technology that allows them to access school information.
- Dan Locke-Wheaton is principal of Aston University Engineering Academy in Birmingham, which works with Firefly to support its parental engagement approaches.
Further information & resources
- Firefly: How well are schools helping parents to support their child’s learning? November 2021: https://fireflylearning.com/parent-engagement-free-report/
- SecEd: Effective parental engagement practice, Best Practice Focus, January 2022. This is a free seven-page download offering a wealth of evidence-based advice and ideas for engaging with parents and carers, including handling conflict, using technology and communicating effectively (January 2022): https://bit.ly/3fRWy81
- SecEd Podcast: This episode looks at effective parent/carer engagement work in schools and offers lots of advice & ideas. Topics include parent evenings, community outreach, school websites & other tech, positive communication plans, hard-to-reach parents & more (January 2022): https://bit.ly/3pVRbKR