Parental involvement and family learning

For refugee families, early years settings can be an important pathway to integration into local communities. By actively welcoming refugees and encouraging their involvement, early years settings can improve the sense of belonging and the inclusion of refugees in the community.

By involving refugee parents, early years settings can better support children’s settling in, healthy development and progress. They can also benefit from the talents and skills that parents bring. Family learning opportunities in early years settings can provide refugee parents with skills and experiences that can support them in their aspirations towards employment and will therefore contribute towards integration and their contribution to the community.

Developing effective partnerships with parents is at the heart of good practice in many early years settings. For example, one of the targets of Sure Start local programmes is to reach and involve all families within the catchment area of each project. Local programmes are also delivered by local partnerships, with strong parental and community involvement.

As refugee children and their families may experience barriers to accessing early years provision, they may also find it more difficult to be actively involved in their child’s education. The reasons for this may include:

• Being unable to communicate in English
• Feeling isolated
• Being unfamiliar with different types of early education opportunities and how they promote children’s play and learning
• Not knowing how to support children’s learning
• Coming from a culture where there is no tradition or expectation of parental involvement .

Good practice

By encouraging parental involvement and family learning, early years educational settings can support children’s progress and assist the integration of refugee families.

Parental involvement

Ensure that the involvement of refugee parents is planned for as part of the duty to promote race equality. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 requires early years settings which are directly run or maintained by the local education authority, and day nurseries run by social services departments of local authorities, to monitor the involvement of parents from all sections of the community and ensure that no groups of parents are under-represented. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (.pdf) provides guidance to assist early years settings meet their duties under the Act.

Early years settings will need to be aware of the ethnic mix of the community in their catchment area, and will need to access reliable demographic data with an ethnic and language breakdown. This information is usually available from local authorities and Sure Start local programmes.

Sure Start for all: Guidance on involving minority ethnic children and families is a tool to ensure that all families, including those from minority ethnic groups, have access to and get a good quality service from Sure Start programmes. Other early years education settings will also find the guidance useful.

Equal Chances published by the Pre-school Learning Alliance, also provides guidance on achieving a genuinely inclusive approach for children and families in early years settings. (From the home page go to Publications. Both the member and non-member areas of the website list this publication under Inclusion)

A parental involvement and partnership policy

All early years settings can improve the involvement of refugee parents by having a clear vision of the partnership with families that they wish to promote.

Parental Involvement This DCSF website has been designed to help schools and early years settings develop parental involvement and offers some suggestions on how to achieve effective partnership with parents.

Working with parents This area of the teachernet aims to help schools and teachers understand how to work with parents effectively and explains why it is important to do so.

Parents: Partners in learning is a guidance pack and video produced by the Primary National Strategy on the important role that parents and families play in their children's learning.

Partnerships with parents This area of the QCA Pathways to learning for new arrivals website also provides more guidance and information on how early years practitioners can plan for better.

Provide accessible information

Children do better when parents understand more about the play and learning that takes place in the early years setting their child attends, and are better able to support learning in the home. Many settings work closely with local minority ethnic communities, including refugees, to ensure that parents can become familiar with the activities provided, and ways that they can become more involved. Bilingual assistants and volunteers can play an important role in this, as can local Interpreting and translation services.

The Sure Start Foundation Stage Information Pack for Parents has been developed as a resource by Sure Start for practitioners to use when introducing the Foundation Stage Curriculum to the parents/carers of children attending their setting. A leaflet for parents is available in several languages including Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese and Somali.

Develop effective home liaison

Home liaison can help to maintain contact and good communication. Refugee parents and communities may need flexible approaches that recognise their particular needs.

Parental involvement in multi-ethnic schools is an area of the DCSF Parental Involvement website provides advice on effective home liaison in multi-ethnic schools and early years settings.

Some early years settings in London work with school-home support workers from the registered charity School-Home Support to extend help to parents and families where possible. The charity works holistically and its workers are developing their roles to work with newly arrived refugee children, parents and communities.

Involve parents in school

Parents can be invited to help in early years setting and may have valuable skills. Parents could help make labels and signs in different languages. They might also read stories or teach songs in children’s home languages.

Refugee parents can provide insight into faiths, cultures, history and places, for example, when cooking in the home corner or when visiting locations such as a market. Their involvement also ensures that all children learn from the breadth of parents’ experiences.

Parents can also be involved in activities such as trips, assemblies, celebrations, and social events. Early years settings can also ask parents to help and volunteer in school in activities such as interpreting and mentoring.

Provide opportunities for voluntary work

Volunteering can increase the confidence of refugee parents and provide them with experience that can help them into employment. For information on volunteering see:

Volunteering England

Tandem

Guide to Volunteering for Refugees and Asylum Seekers produced by the Volunteer Centre Sheffield-Refugee and Asylum Seeker Project is a guide for asylum seekers and refugees. It gives some basic information about how to chose an opportunity and guidance on some rights, responsibilities and expectations for both the volunteer and the organisation. It is available in English, Amharic, Arabic, Farsi, French, Kurdish (Sorani), Somali, Tigrinya and Urdu.

Some refugee community organisations run volunteering and befriending programmes and may be able to support parental involvement initiatives. For example:

Shpresa Programme for the Albanian-speaking community in the UK has developed a project to ensure that mothers know about early education and develop their confidence to become more involved.

Encourage parents to support learning

Early years settings can support parents and carers in their role as children’s first and most important educators. Many early years settings link with the Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) - an early learning programme for parents and carers and their children from birth to five years. PEEP offers ideas and activities, such as stories, songs and craft activities, to support children's learning in everyday situations, both in the home and in groups.

It is helpful to discuss with parents the importance of speaking and reading to children in their home language. Parents can also support their child’s learning in other areas of the curriculum. Some early years settings hold meetings or develop short courses to explain how parents can support their child’s learning.

Some of these events have been targeted at specific communities, with interpreters being employed.

Multilingual resources that can support early years settings in discussing the value of using home languages include:

Reading Together and Helping your child to learn at home and at school, published by Learning Design,

Let’s Read, published by MantraLingua

Portsmouth EMAS produces a downloadable leaflet: Young Children Learning English as an Additional Language - Support and guidance for parents and Early Years Practitioners. Why it is important for young children to maintain and develop their Home Language.

Provide family learning opportunities

Some early years settings have developed opportunities for parents to access English classes and also improve parents’ literacy, numeracy and ICT skills. Consulting with and listening to refugee parents can help identify their needs and ensure that what is planned will be something that parents wish to participate in. Ofsted’s Family Learning: a survey of current practice (2000) found that broad and flexible family learning opportunities are more successful in attracting parents from disadvantaged and under-represented groups.

The Family learning area of the QCA Pathways to learning for new arrivals website provides guidance on planning with parents.

Case studies

The Learning Through Media project (.PDF)

The Learning Through Media project was developed with a group of Somali and Arabic-speaking women whose children attended Sharrow Nursery and Infant School in Sheffield. The case study describes how, through a series of workshops, the parents explored how children learn in the nursery and at home, and developed new skills in filming and editing moving images. As a result, they increased their understanding of the foundation stage curriculum and early learning goals, and ways they could support learning at home.

Valuing and supporting home languages (.PDF)

Hanley Crouch Playgroup in the London Borough of Islington recognises that the diversity of languages spoken by children and families is a cultural asset. Valuing home languages is seen as a key part of supporting children’s developing cultural identity and their self-esteem. The case study demonstrates how the playgroup works closely with an advisory teacher to develop ways of valuing children’s home languages and encourages parents and carers to use their home language in play and learning activities with children.