Resources

Resources for Parent Teams

P&F Resources
Parent Engagement

Parent teams represent and are inclusive of the interests of the whole parent community, aiming to strengthen the partnership between family, school, parish and the wider community for the benefit of a child’s faith formation, learning and well-being.

Effective leadership: what does it look like?

Communicating expectations, goals and activities
Creating a strategic plan, setting goals
Creating an inclusive culture, making connections & sense of belonging
Knowing 'who is our community'? & how to develop knowledge
Retaining and passing on knowledge

What Guides your work?

Parent Teams in the Broken Bay Diocese are encouraged
to support and help parents to engage with their school & to engage in the education of their children.
Read: Parent Engagement Cheat Sheet
Building Learning Partnerships

Research shows ....
# that children do better at school when parents are engaged with their child's learning and well-being both at school and at home
Research indicates that ...
# that parents should be partners in their child’s learning & that education is a shared responsibility of schools, parents & communities.

We have all experienced unproductive & meetings …. so what makes a ‘good’ meeting?

What are you spending your meeting time on?
Making Time for Conversations that Matter: 10-40-50 Meeting Model

Up to 10% of the meeting time should be spent on attending to the previous meeting (minutes and business arising), financials if approp
Up to 40% of the meeting should be spent on discussing & understanding what is currently happening,
Up to 50% of the meeting should be spent on looking towards the future, planning, responding to current information Read more click graphic left

Meeting Planning Tools: Translating the annual agenda into practical meeting agendas

More Resources: www.btadvisorybodies.catholic.edu.au/resources

Know Your Community

Welcoming schools acknowledge and honour the diverse needs of families and cater to those needs.

All parents of your school community are members of the P&F. It is important that P&F teams consider the nature of their school community in all planning, by developing an understanding of "who" the families in the school are, and organising communication and events to suit the needs of all families.
* collect information about your school community Resource
     *   include discussion on agenda item of P&F meetings
     *   conduct 'getting to know you' surveys
     * find out the ideas, needs and skills of your parent community

School Improvement Goals (SIPs)

Primary & Secondary Schools in the Broken Bay Diocese have 3 year Strategic Plans.
Each year the school leadership team implement 3 School Improvement goals (SIPs) in the domains of
            *   Teaching and Learning,
            *   Student Wellbeing, and
            *   Mission.
Do you know your schools SIP goals?

Supporting SIP goals & Strategic Planning

Parent Teams goals and activities should support their schools leadership team in the implementation of the schools SIP goals.

P&F strategies should be linked to the educational and pastoral goals of the school;
P&F Executive meetings and general meetings should always reflect on and work with the SIP goals;
Resources to support these goals include people, time and knowledge and the 'alignment' of these towards agreed SIP goals requires P&F teams to 'know' their community.

Constitution goals of the P&F?

The constitution provides guidelines and ideas on how P&F
teams operate to support their school community.
It is is the starting point for understanding all parent leadership
roles and outlines what is involved for each executive position.
Download Constitution

Alcohol at Functions & in Fundraising

Alcohol must not be consumed at any functions at which students are in attendance.

Examples include welcome family BBQ, Year 6 graduation, school fetes.

Alcohol must not be consumed or brought to school premises during school hours.
The principal must authorise in advance the consumption of alcohol at any adult only school function or other adult only function held on school premises.

For example, trivia night, welcome cocktail party, annual P&F dinner.

In short, when families are engaged in learning at home and school, children do better and schools get better.

Parent Engagement

We need to think about shifting our focus from ...‘how to get more parents into the school’ to ‘how we can support them at home’ ....where (more than) half
of the achievement happens”

Parent Engagement in Broken Bay

The CSP has a strategic initiative to support parent leadership in schools to engage families in their child’s learning & wellbeing. DOWNLOAD

Defining Parent Engagement
Parent engagement, in the schooling context can be defined as:

... an intentional and collaborative strategy to support and leverage the knowledge and capacities of families, to improve the faith development, learning and well-being outcomes for all students, by making connections between the different spaces they learn in.

#ParentKnowledge
"True parent engagement is when it draws on what you know as a parent. Parent engagement is not about being a teacher at home. Its about being engaged as a family"
Dr Debbie Pushor

Activities for planning in your school community

Involvement & Engagement

Research has shown that in order to raise achievement parents need to be both involved in schools and engaged in their children’s learning. (Harris and Goodall: 2007)
Read: Involvement or Engagement: what’s the difference?

Download

Parent Engagement

The strongest predictors of effective parental engagement in a school are the programs the school has in place and teacher practices.
(Dr Joyce Epstein Johns Hopkins University)

Family-led learning
Family-School Partnerships

Embedding Parent Engagement

It doesn't necessarily mean new, just different.
What existing activities can be adapted to engage more families?
"By 'engaged' we mean all - know, understand and have experiences of what school and learning looks like today"

Download

I want to be engaged but I can’t go to my kids’ school. I don’t have the right clothes and I don’t have the right words.”

"Looking into the mom’s face and hearing the painful emotion in her words, it was heart breathtakingly apparent that the place for change did not rest with the mom, but instead with the structures and practices being lived out on the school landscape." "embracing a philosophy and pedagogy of “walking alongside” is at the heart of working with all families." READ MORE

Dr Karen Mapp - Harvard Uni

FREE Online Introduction
Family Engagement in Education

The relationship between family engagement and improved outcomes
The additional benefits family engagement brings to everyone
What the research shows about the importance of engaging families

Linking Family Engagement to Learning