'Bronton Catholic Primary School' (Victoria) – Engaging parents
‘Bronton Catholic Primary School ’ is an ‘alias school’ where the real school identity has been withheld to maintain confidentiality. The story is from research interviews undertaken at the school for this Guide.
Bronton is part of a cluster of schools whose focus is on developing student resilience, self-confidence and leadership skills as part of a whole of child development approach to schooling. Bronton explicitly teaches values in the classroom and across all aspects of the school. The program has a strong focus on student action teams (SATs), a form of student leadership. Over the past 18 months, the program has been broadened to extend the student focus work to values action teams (VATs), which entails stronger parental involvement in the life of the school and the way in which teachers work with students to develop their understanding of the underpinning values of the Catholic education system. The Catholic school ethos has a strong emphasis on developing student awareness of the values of the church and of translating these into practice. This includes a focus on service learning and a number of values which expand and extend the National Framework. It is part of that culture to view parents as an integral part of the school community. The coordinator relates her experience of getting parents on board.
It has taken a five-year investment to set up good partnerships with our parents. Initially I set up a resource room for parents to pop in. But that effort backfired, because the parents thought that this meant they were bad parents, so they didn’t take up the offer.
I soon realised that I needed to be more strategic. I approached the principal. Without her, I doubt that the parent involvement would have got off the ground. She gave me some resources and also gave me opportunities to speak at assemblies and in meetings to explain my role as student wellbeing coordinator. I also started writing a paragraph or two in the school newsletter to make parents aware of me without intimidating them or having them feel that they had somehow been lacking.
I slowly started getting some enquiries, often through the teacher or the child, rather than directly from the parent. I realised that I had to start from the three S's: small (through assemblies and presentations at curriculum evenings or parent teacher nights); slow (through conversation in the yard and articles in the newsletter); and strategic (through the newsletter and piggybacking from the principal’s support). Some schools may have policies in place to look after the whole child. We did not at that stage and it was important to get the parents into the school and involved so that we could learn from them and vice versa.
Starting with the personal
In a way as primary parents they were a captive audience. But there is also that yard gossip in a primary school which works against their engagement with more serious aspects of their child’s learning. I started with some evening workshops on eating disorders. I got some small numbers. That ran for four workshops each term for the first year. I also made sure I was out in the yard so that I could chat to parents and develop my own relationship with them. Values education is big picture stuff. Not something you launch into straight away if you want parents to come to you. I believed that if I started with something personal that might touch their reality, and I ran the workshops in the evenings, that would be less threatening and they might come.
After a while I started a student wellbeing newsletter and tried again to set up some parenting groups. I had more success by now as I had been working in the school for a while. In the meantime, we were starting to look at values inside the curriculum, through some staff professional development and activities. I can’t say it was easy. Staff were very resistant; but the things were up on the boards in the rooms so I suppose that, together with the general newsletter, aroused enough interest for a small group of parents I could work with. I ran alternative sessions – both during the day and in the evening, to try to capture the best times for parents. I also started getting the SATs together at around this time and they were really taking off. The children came together in teams to identify problems in their community. The SATs really gave children a voice and that’s so important. It might also be the catalyst that got the parents willing to come into partnership with the school. While my emphasis had to be on the children and on professional development for the staff, values education is a shared community enterprise and we couldn’t really consider doing it properly without the parents accepting it and becoming fully involved.
We have not expanded too much beyond that point because I realised that with the parents it’s important to gauge their pace and work with that, rather than trying to impose any time line I might have. These are their children. If we’re talking about values, it’s extremely important that we show the parents the respect they deserve.
Once I had established some workshops and in a way my credentials, I approached the principal to coordinate the school’s vision mapping with the parents’ views. The principal agreed. She also believes that values education is underpinned by a three-way partnership of school, child and parent. We weren’t quite sure of the best way to broach a values vision exercise with them so we used the wellbeing workshops and also brought students in to help us explain to the parents why we were looking at values, and which values might be important to us as a school community.
Again there were limited responses. My next attempt was to send out a parent survey asking them about values. I did it through random selection from the school roll and double-checked that I had a good socioeconomic spread. Some of our parents also worked at the school – as teachers’ aides or cleaners. I told parents that if they wanted their children with them that was OK. The main thing was getting the parental involvement.
Gaining gradual support
It still was not easy. Numbers were growing but basically the community is insular. Parents dwell in their own problems and issues and are not keen to get involved in the bigger picture stuff. If it’s something that directly touches their child, we have far greater success, but if it’s about a bigger world view, this is not the audience and it’s a hard slog. I believe that sometimes it’s good to take their eyes out to the rest of the world, but I must admit that using an external facilitator to help with that has made a difference. I just believe now in bringing in the experts. Parents have a different regard for them even if they are saying the same things I would say myself. The principal also gets good response from parents – again, if she’s presenting to them about a school barbecue or toilets or facilities or something in curriculum they understand.
I’m now in my fifth year doing this work and I can’t believe the change. Somehow getting parents to do the values survey and then over the following year embedding values into formal curriculum seemed to do the trick. Perhaps the parents had an ‘aha’ moment of their own. When we were explaining it to them they did not quite get it, but when values became part of what their children did and what they talked about at home, things moved very quickly. That was the point at which I could set up my parent resource centre and have cups of tea with groups of parents talking about some bigger issues. It’s almost as though a number of factors across the whole school coalesce and create the catalyst for parents to see what you’ve been trying to involve them in for one, two or three years.