Curriculum for Excellence - Sharing Practice Session

The second Sharing Practice Session was held at Stirling Management Centre on 1 September. The theme was Engaging Parents with Curriculum for Excellence. The idea was floated of “Curriculum for Excellence - The Musical” to share the messages with parents.

The event attracted CfE and Parental Involvement Contacts in Authorities, as well as some teaching staff and Parent Council members. Scottish Governmnent (Linda Kirkwood and Eleanor Jess) were there to bring everyone up to date on the current timelines and developments.

The new DVD for parents was shown, along with some of the other resources mentioned in the Engaging Parents with Curriculum section of this blog. You can also see the clip there of the Medieval Monk struggling to open a book - the way some parents may feel when we are trying to explain Curriculum for Excellence to them!

Consideration was given first to how Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) could be explained to parents clearly. Curriculum for Life was felt to be an appropriate explanation - trying to equip all young people with skills for life, work and learning. It was also felt to be about trying to develop all children as individuals to the best of their potential.

Some felt that schools were struggling with methodological change and were currently being asked to make many different changes. It was these changes that needed to be explained. There was much discussion around how it was much more helpful to focus on the “how” with parents as oppose to “what” CfE meant. Practical examples of how CfE was being delivered would be helpful to parents -

It was also felt important to show what it meant in terms of celebrating achievement in all areas and showcasing this to parents. Also using partnership working with libraries, arts, leisure and cultrue, community learning and others to engage pupils and parents could be worthwhile.

Clearly, all there are some key messages for all parents, but it was likely to be more meaningful when it was in relation to their own child at the level of their own school.

It was agreed that the barriers to parental involvement in CfE were the same as the barriers to parental involvement generally. Some ideas were shared as to how these barriers could be overcome:

• Enabling parents to share their “succes” experiences with other parents

• Combining fun events with Parent’s Evenings - where this has been tried, it has significantly increased attendance and improved the atmosphere

• Letting pupils choose what they want to share with parents or display

• Changing structure of Parents’ Night to a week when parents can come in anytime and parent only sees tutor - this has been tried and attendance improved from 30% to 80%

Previous Sharing Practice Sessions
The first Sharing Practice Session took place on 16 June. It was aimed at Parental Involvement Officers in Authorities and their colleagues who may were interested in exploring parental involvement in relation to Gypsy/Traveller Families. We also tried to link this with how some of the resources /lessons learnt from working with this group of families may have some bearing on working with Immigrant families eg newly arrived Polish families. It seemed to go well and there were lots of ideas and resources exchanged.

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