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Parental involvement
in multi-ethnic schools
Home-school liaison
An effective
way of making contact with parents
Home visits were considered
by all those interviewed to be an effective way of making contact with
parents in multi-ethnic schools, particularly with parents who do not
speak English. At Northshire Comprehensive, the Headteacher personally
carried out visits, accompanied by the school-funded Community Liaison
Officer, to the homes of all the new Year 7 students. Although this personal
show of caring only occurred once, it was said to be most appreciated
by the parents who felt more comfortable and confident about visiting
the school and about taking part in school events. Thereafter, such visits
were carried out by the Community Liaison Officer.
The Advisor for Refugees in one LEA did, however, add a note of caution:
"Parents might appreciate a home visit, but I think it depends
on how you actually approach it. It's one thing writing to them that you're
coming to visit them, but if they don't know what it's all about, they'll
get frightened, you know, worried about it. So you have to make yourself
absolutely clear. I think then it would work because they would open out
to you and tell you what their concerns are about."
Home visits were, however, time-consuming unless a school had a home-school
liaison officer on the staff. Most schools did not have such a member of
staff and the bulk of the responsibility for visiting parents seemed to
be carried out by bilingual members of staff. Home-school liaison workers
and bilingual staff were key members of the school for making such visits
possible and for ensuring effective exchanges of information between parents
and schools at meetings. Many schools benefited from formalising a home-school
liaison post.
Home-school liaison staffing
While schools were making strides with increasing attendance at open evenings
and meetings, it was not always easy to get parents to contact the school
about their own concerns and those of their children. Many working class
or non-English speaking parents, and gypsy traveller parents were said to
feel intimidated by schools.
An effective method for these groups was to have a direct telephone line,
bypassing the school switchboard, to an identified person in the school
whom the parents knew and to whom they had the confidence to speak. One
way to avoid misunderstanding was to have a 'link' person in the school,
that is, someone who either spoke the language of the parents, or, as in
the case of the gypsy traveller students at Southern Metropolitan, someone
who was known to and trusted by families, to do the liaison work with parents.
This 'link' person allowed for a two-way process of communication to occur
because it provided an opening for parents to talk about their own concerns
and not always to have to wait for the school to contact them. The more
that parents felt able to approach the school, the more confidence they
developed to take part in other aspects of school life.
This strategy was found at Northshire School to be valued by parents with
little English. The 'link' person was the school's full-time Community Liaison
Officer, funded out of the school's own budget, who spoke the language of
most families. Parents were able to develop the confidence to approach the
school with issues that bothered them. Information could be passed on to
the Heads of Year and contact made with the school's supportive parents'
group. The 'link' officer was also able to pass on information about events
and meetings in the school and usually carried out additional duties of
translating and interpreting at meetings and parents' evenings.
Not all 'link' persons need to be from the community, however. Where that
was not possible, members of the school staff who have either volunteered
or been timetabled to take on such a role have done valuable work. We have
described in the chapter on provision for refugee students how at Southern
Metropolitan, one Head of Year earned the trust and respect of local travelling
families which encouraged not only the families, but also the children,
including ex-students, to participate more in school life.
The idea of a 'link' person was also useful for refugee students, and Northern
Metropolitan Secondary School included the role of home-school liaison as
well as in-class support in the role of the Section 11-funded
refugee workers based in the school.
A home-school liaison teacher or worker who knows the parents can mediate
between teacher and parent, and clear up misunderstandings. For example,
an issue that parents sometimes did not understand and about which they
wanted clear information was the system of setting and banding. Parents
sometimes thought that if their child was in a bottom set and achieving
grade As, that meant that the child was capable of being in the top set
of a subject, and could not understand why the school refused to move him
or her. The home-school liaison worker had an important mediating role in
this sort of circumstance.
The employment of a home-school liaison worker, however, can be a complex
one unless management structures and the boundaries of the role are crystal
clear. In Northshire School, the Community Liaison Officer was not invited
to Heads of Year meetings as she was not a qualified teacher. Although a
full-time worker, funded by the school and accountable directly to the Head,
her role had not been written into the pastoral structure. There were no
formal structures whereby she met with Heads of Year. This led to some unfortunate
tension. As she explained:
"When somebody from the community contacts me or they come
in, the question [that is then] asked is, 'Why have they contacted you,
[when] I am the Head of the Year?', or 'We are the pastoral staff', or
'If a family has been sent a letter about an exclusion and I haven't been
told about it, that puts me in a awful situation because the parents will
contact me and I hear one side of the story about what the parents are
saying but I am not aware of what has actually happened in the school.
Then when I take the information back to a member of staff, they say 'We
don't see why you have to be involved'. What they forget is that I am
in that community and people will approach me and they want me to be involved."
Lines of communication between the home-school worker and staff need to
be clearly defined so that the liaison worker is not caught between the
demands for help from the parents and the staff's perspective of what the
role is or should be.
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