Resources to help improve relationships with families to secure positive engagement and communication

As school leaders and staff in Norfolk, fostering effective communication and building strong relationships with families is essential to ensure good academic outcomes and support our children and young people to flourish. 

This can not only enhance the educational experience but also support families in navigating challenging situations. The Education Endowment Foundation has found that successful parental engagement can lead to four months academic progress for pupils.  

Engaging all families in the school community can sometimes feel challenging, but there are several resources available to help. We are also delighted to share some of the practice and learning from our own Norfolk schools that we've been collaborating with, along with some of our local authority advisers sharing their top tips for your consideration.

1.    The Key

The Key provides some evidence based parental engagement strategies and examples where you can find out how to improve parental engagement, including how to set expectations and build positive relationships from the start. Find practical strategies to engage parents and carers with their child's learning and your school community and see examples from other schools.

2. Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Guidance

This EEF guidance report reviews the best available research to offer schools and teachers four recommendations to support parental engagement in children's learning.

Parents play a crucial role in supporting their children's learning, and levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes. Evidence from our Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective parental engagement can lead to learning gains of +3 months over the course of a year. Yet it can be difficult to involve all parents in ways that support children's learning, especially if parents' own experiences of school weren't positive. This is why they've produced this guidance report, designed to support primary and secondary schools to work with parents - particularly those from disadvantaged homes. 

It offers four clear and actionable recommendations which we hope will support an evidence-informed approach.

3.    Department for Education

The Department for Education has collated ideas for partnering with parents and carers of early years children without creating more paperwork.

4.    Children's Commissioner

The Children's Commissioner produced a blog on Engaging parents which shares the findings of the Family Review including the role of Family Hubs. You can find out more about the Family Hub programme here in Norfolk, including the support available to help families flourish here.

5.    NAHT

The NAHT School Leadership Podcast: Learning with Parents explores the research that recognises by age 11, a disadvantaged child is on average nine months behind their peers in English and Maths - and that only 14% of this is related to what happens at school, while 49% is related to what happens at home. It questions what can schools do differently to engage parents? How can they find out what the barriers facing the most disengaged families really are? And how do power dynamics, time and child enjoyment have a role to play?

6.    Traveller Movement

The Traveller Movement has launched a new website supporting GRT families in the UK to navigate the education system and NAHT provides a good practice guide on how to develop positive relationships with GRT families. You can also read our Norfolk GRT Adviser top tips here. 

7.    Bell Foundation

The Bell Foundation guidance provides four recommendations for those working with the families of children and young people who use English as an Additional Language (EAL) so they can support their child's learning at home. It draws on research around parental involvement with a particular focus on children who use EAL. You can also read our Norfolk EAL Adviser guidance on how to increase family engagement for families with EAL here. 

Guidance for when school and family relationships need support

No matter how strong partnerships are, and how good strategies and policies are, things can still benefit from some additional support at times.

Education Support: Building collegiate relationships in schools

Staff in education deal with a number of different types of relationships with all types of people. The difficulty is in knowing how to manage the different needs, expectations and requirements of each of these. Download tips for leaders for building collegiate relationships across the school workforce.

Restorative approaches

Restorative approaches (sometimes referred to as restorative practice) is a mindset, providing the foundation to build, maintain and repair relationships. Relationships are at the heart of restorative approaches, built on mutual respect with individuals taking responsibility for their actions. Norfolk County Council, Children's Services believes that a restorative ethos and restorative practices should underpin any work with children, young people and families. You can find out more about our restorative approaches offer here.

Local learning

Watch this short film to listen to what are partner schools have told us they find the most challenging when working to support families, and what they have found most effective. Here you will hear from colleagues in our partner schools, families and our local authority advisers sharing what they find challenging when communicating, why this is and how to build better practice to move forwards in a positive partnership between schools and families to support children and young people to flourish.

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