Parental engagement is a great way to raise attainment in schools. Technological advances can help facilitate this relationship. Hear how primary and secondary schools effectively communicate with parents, and how they help parents in supporting their children at home.
Teach Talk: Working with parents to raise attainment
1. Working with parents to raise attainment
Paget High
Richard Blaize, Head of ICT
Portway Infant School
Katy Lynas, Teacher
Rosemary Harper, Teacher
St Clement Danes School
Tom Phillips, Network Manager
Teach Talks
3. School Background
• Approx. 1000 pupils and 60 staff
• Average Daily Unique Log Ons 1300
• Christmas Day 2012 over 200 log ons
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
4. • Revision website accessible to pupils, staff and
parents
• The website has its own URL allowing for
access without going through Frog
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
5. • Examination Timetable
• Start times, Examination title, Exam board,
Duration and Room
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
6. • All subjects have their own page
• Each page is built to allow departments to
add/remove content as and when
• Overall design and navigation remains intact
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
9. • Using Twitter to
publicise the revision
website and each
individual
examination
• Tweets give the
examination
information the day
before the exam and
the day of the exam
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
10. • Parents and pupils
use Twitter to ask
messages about
examinations and
request material to
appear on the
revision website
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
12. • ‘I Am Learning’ has
been added to the
revision website
during the year
• Using ‘I Am Learning’
Year 11 have revised
for almost 700 hours
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
14. • Advertise, advertise, advertise – letters, parents
evenings, newsletter, school WWW
• Give the website its own URL
• Allow staff to manage content and advise on use
• Recommend the use of PDF documents
• When tweeting avoid using terms like ‘today’ or
‘tomorrow’ be specific with the tweets
• If you receive a tweet reply to it ASAP
• Retweet examinations from other accounts
Richard Blaize @richardblaize
16. Background info
• Portway Infant School, Derby
• 235 children on roll
• _ without internet access / computer at home.
17. Engaging parents – non technological
techniques
• Infant school relies on the engagement of
parents
• Take home Tuesday
• Coffee mornings
• Information and curriculum meetings
• Parents evenings and reports
• Ten minute ‘welcome’ time in the classroom
each morning.
18. Engaging parents – technological
techniques
• Website, more for prospective parents
• Text messaging service
• Learning platform – main platform for
communication with parents, relevant
information for parents within class sites
amongst the main school information forum.
• Message to teacher, emails.
19. Learning from the past; Sharepoint
Parents Staff
Children can’t be independent Unreliable
Too much time Too much time
I am going to miss important information Not easy to upload - multiple docs
Too many clicks An extra job, parents still need paper
Unreliable – down at weekend Corporate site
Not like sites children want to use Not infant friendly – not how we teach
Where can I get help? Used folder structure beyond belief!
20. What we were looking for;FROG
Essential Desirable
Infant friendly – pictures, videos and
more pictures. WOW factor
Reduce page clicks
Potential for independence Easy access to passwords
Easy to get around – parents and children Alternative to folders
Reliable
21. Key advice – what the staff think
• (Hopefully little video clips to go here!)
22. Implementation – how it works for us
• Staff confidence first!
• Staff meetings and
training
• Team work
• Support
• Amend policy
• Chocolate bribes!
• Children and parents
use same username
• Raise enthusiasm within
classroom
• Incite curiosity – and
introduce bribes (teddy)
• Sustain interest (school
and home)
• Offer support
23. Raising attainment – continuing
learning at home
• (Screen shots to be moved into a few slides to
show activities to continue learning at home
and for parents support – ensuring we all
support children in the same way with lit and
maths for example.)
• 4 screen shots
25. Frog at St Clement Danes
• Frog installed 2009
• Used well throughout the school
• Developing Parental Portal
• Looking to move towards Frog OS
26. Parental Portal – Benefits and
Drawbacks
• Benefits
– Parents feel more included
– Information is readily available to parents
– Cut down on admin work
– Staff encourage to promote good behaviour/achievements
• Drawbacks
– Data needs to be correct, up to date and stay up to date
– Additional work load?
27. Parental Portal – Engaging parents
• What would parents want to see?
– Childs information:
• Assessment – Achievements
• Timetable
• Attendance
• Reports
• Frog Activity
– School information:
• What’s happening/events
• Ways to contact the school – careful!
28. Parental portal – Focus
• Assessment / Attendance
– MIS database – Sims.net
– Aspects
– Subjects
– Information to display – Graphs, Tables, IF
statements for key stages
29. Parental portal - Journey
• Portal template supplied by Frog.
• Bulk of time was spent on this. Check MIS
Aspects and tidy MIS system.
• Frog Extractor setup but no data pulled over yet.
• Data pulled across, we checked how it was
displayed and configured our Frog template.
• Displayed data that was confusing was removed.
• IF statements setup to segment Key stage data.
• Staff parents were given logon details.
• Bugs and Feedback was received and
adjustments made.
Parental portal
template
Check and
Update MIS
Extract and
Interpret Data
Configure and
Simplify Data
Test with Staff
parents
30. Parental portal – Next steps
• We plan to release the portal to a single year group
for a full academic year to test how well it is received.
• Feedback from this will determine the next step.
• Our overall aim is to give all students parents the
ability to use the parental portal over the next few
academic years.
Release to
Single Year
group
Stagger full
release
31. Parental Portal – Raising
Attainment
• Parents can see information about their child quicker and in more detail.
Information is not lost in transit or mislaid.
• Parents can then address issues and identify areas where their pupils at the school
can improve.
• Parents can track progress over previous months or years quickly and spot trends
that might otherwise not be apparent.
• A lot of the work a parent would have to do in order to get a clear overview of how
a student is doing is done within the parental portal.
