As research has shown, parental engagement is important for schools as it has been proven that the more parents engage with school life the better children perform and that's good for everyone. Here at Park Lane Primary, we like to value and show off our children's achievements. If a parent is really interested in what you are doing as a school then the pupil is going to take that as a really positive message. If parents feel part of the school, children then feel that parents and the school are working together and therefore the relationship with parents really improves.
At Park Lane Primary, we've worked very hard in the last couple of years to develop aspects of the school that will encourage parents to have more of a say in what's going on and to enable them to access simple information. The use of ICT makes this much more possible these days because all sorts of ways of communicating are open to us and available to schools and to parents that weren't available before. We have continued to develop our website and parents can now download letters that go out from the school, we also make our policies and procedures available to view and we can post information such as class pages and about school meals. We also encourage parents to email teachers direct, if a parent does have a concern we want to be able to get back to them as soon as possible. We have even developed web casts, each term every teacher makes a short recording that highlights the main topics of learning to be covered. Parents find that really useful and like the fact that they can put a face to a name and hear the teacher's voice.
Its vital for schools to have a vision for where they are going to move forward to in terms of ICT, for example curriculum ICT, MIS systems in schools, engaging parents, all of these aspects are high on the education agenda. Once you've got that vision and you've got people on board then you can start working out your strategy as a school to help you meet that vision.
The Becta framework is a really helpful tool for schools as it acts as a point of reference to determine where they are now on the reporting path and more importantly, give them guidance on how to meet their individual school's vision for engaging parents in the future.
The first section in the framework is Recording and Reporting and within that section there is quite a key area about strategy which certainly highlighted for us at Park Lane all the things we are already doing right. Strategy is very important, it determines where you are going and its then up to the individual schools to plan and implement how they are going to get there. "
For more information on the Becta framework and how it can help you exploit ICT to improve parental engagement using online reporting visit: www.becta.org.uk/schools/parentalengagement
Or contact Becta customer services customerservices@becta.org.uk
tel: 0800 877 8777
