Consultation with Parent Council Chairs/Parent Representatives – March 2021
A small group of practitioners from Education and partners have met to discuss the challenges parents/carers face which can have a negative impact on attendance in school or engagement in learning.
We highlighted the following and would like to know if you have any other challenges you feel should be added to these:
- Establishing and maintaining routines in the home
- Parent/carer health – physical and mental (sometimes undiagnosed)
- Alcohol or drug misuse
- Lack of IT Skills – hampering home learning
- Financial challenges – impacting on clothing, food, learning resources
- Transport costs if children are further away from school they attend
- Domestic violence
We feel strongly that helping families with routines at home would positively impact on some of the above challenges, including mental and physical health. So we’d like to do the following:
- A poster campaign around being ‘Routine Ready’ (taking message away from just ‘attendance’ and putting spotlight on routines).
- Linked to this would be a parent/carer leaflet giving information about importance of routine, ideas/strategies for doing this well at home, the difference in routines for weekdays/weekends, in school/home school learning; positive impact (research based) on mental and physical health of children and adults.
- Helpline numbers for getting support with any of the other challenges listed above that might be impacting on their attendance/engagement.
- A competition to design a logo for the routine ready campaign which will outline a learning task that will be shared with teachers across the authority. This will introduce the idea of routines to the children and help them to create a logo to represent the initiative.
- The posters and parents leaflets will be made available widely, including, for example, doctors’ surgeries.
- There will be a Routine Reward Chart for children to use daily and gain rewards (we will give suggestions to parents around kinds of rewards to offer).
- We will also use social media platforms to promote the initiative as widely as possible and this may include creating voice overs/videos made by parents/people in our communities.
What do you think? Could you let us know your feedback by completing this short (5 question) survey using the following link by 31 March 2021.