Your stories
Stories of families who are developing positive attitudes to maths and schools who are helping parents support their children's maths education.
Want to feature on this page? Send your story to enquiries@nationalnumeracy.org.uk
Stories of families who are developing positive attitudes to maths and schools who are helping parents support their children's maths education.
Want to feature on this page? Send your story to enquiries@nationalnumeracy.org.uk
All parents want the best for their children – so why is increasing parental engagement in learning such a struggle?
Many factors can make it difficult for parents to engage:
At Pakeman we have worked hard to overcome the barriers above in order to increase parental engagement in learning. We worked towards the Leading Parent Partnership Award (LPPA), which provided us with an excellent framework to use in order to audit our practice and develop an action plan.
As a result, we adopted a three-pronged parental engagement approach.
1. Developing a Positive Nurturing Climate
Our first aim is to ensure that the school climate:
We conducted a school office survey to see what parents really think about how they are received in school. We asked:
o Are they welcomed?
o Are their visits valued?
o Is the service efficient?
o Do staff make them feel comfortable?
2. Providing Opportunities to Build Knowledge and Skills
Our second aim is that parents feel confident in their own skills and knowledge so that they can support children effectively at home.
We reviewed and extended the range of courses on offer for parents. These include skills sessions for parents and family learning sessions where they work alongside their children, e.g.
We run regular coffee mornings to support parents in “how to help”, e.g.
For each parent learning event we provide a crèche, so ALL parents can attend.
On parents’ evenings we organise a range of stalls for parents run by the school and other agencies to provide:
Our aim in holding these meetings is to:
At the end of the first meeting, we (parents and school) both sign a contract to commit to our actions and meet formally each term and informally throughout the term.
In the first year of this initiative, we met with 14 parents of underachieving children. 12 of the 14 children achieved a level 4+ in all subjects. 100% of the children attended boosters, completed homework and made 2 levels of progress from KS1.
3. Supporting Parents to Reduce Life Pressures
We recognise that for many parents life can be difficult and if a parent is struggling to cope it is very hard for children to flourish. We have therefore made a commitment to support parents to reduce life pressures as much as we can.
We help to reduce childcare issues by:
Our School Home Support (SHS) worker works closely with a large number of families providing additional support such as:
Our SHS worker is always there to listen and provide support, giving encouragement/pointing out the good and guiding parents on next steps. She has built excellent relationships, is persistent, and through listening and not telling or judging, has managed to break down many barriers.
As a result:
I have made a huge effort to make maths fun for my children, as they've heard so many negative things about it ("I'm bad at maths, I never use it, we don't need to do maths") from other parents. I want my kids to be really good at maths so that they can have more choices at uni/work/in life [...]. Participant, National Numeracy Parent Survey
I, almost daily, include maths in our lives through things like cooking (which we've done since he was 3), filling up the car with petrol etc. so it's a different and more positive experience for him than just sitting down having to do 'exercises'. Participant, National Numeracy Parent Survey
Just over a year ago I was introduced to Tapestry (an online learning journal) by one of our feeder pre-schools. As soon as I saw it I wanted to use it at Broadlea. Parent partnership is so vital and all previous attempts to engage all parents had had differing results, with none of them lasting long.
Tapestry allows parents to access their child’s learning journey whenever they want. They are able to comment on observations made in school and also upload their own observations, photographs and videos.
As manager users my colleague and I are able to view the last time a parent looked at their child’s learning journey even if they have not uploaded an observation or commented.
When we started this I was hopeful of getting 50% of parents to sign up. We had 100% sign up, although there are two parents who have never accessed it (despite constant emails and nagging from us. But we decided you can’t win them all :) ).
For our cohort of 60 children we have 5272 observations. 500 of these have been made by a parent/carer!
Parent comments about Tapestry include: “I love it, I feel so in touch with what my child is doing.” “We sit down as a family and look on the computer at what S has been doing today.” “My older children used to say they had ‘done nothing’ at school, with my child in Reception we can share and talk about their day.”
Tapestry also allows us to plan much more effectively. Every day we approve and quality assure the observations and we can change our planning for the next day depending on what has been observed today.
Observations for each area of learning can quickly be identified, so when we were moderated earlier this year it was very simple and quick to find the evidence to validate our judgements.
The Foundation Stage Forum have developed Tapestry and are so helpful. They are open to suggestions on how to improve it and are about to add the Key Stage 1 assessments to it so it can progress further up the school.
I could not even contemplate going back to paper learning journeys as Tapestry has completely transformed our practice.
Bev Eustace
Class Teacher/Early Years Leader, Broadlea Primary School.
In September 2014, a small primary school in a rural area took part in our parental engagement project.
Many parents embraced this wonderful maths based activity, which encourages parents/carers and their children to spend time together solving a number of challenges. They were all provided with a colourful ‘Scrapbook’ which they used to record their findings.
The style and amount of work varied from family to family, some recorded the minimal amount whereas others attached photographs; used the computer to devise data handling graphs; painted pictures to highlight the answers and even included their own family home layout to work out right angles within their house.
Unfortunately, some parents were initially quite negative. One parent left a comment in their scrapbook saying;
‘ At the beginning of this book it says that these activities will be short and fun. This task is not at all ‘short’. Tom is feeling daunted about the amount of work he has to do. How to put a child off!!!!’
However, once provided with certain resources, such as a hundred squares, and an idea of methods which are used in school, to work out certain tasks, most parents felt much more confident in helping their children.
A couple of weeks later the same parent left a comment saying,
‘Tom can’t wait to get his homework now. We sit down as a whole family, even his big brother.’