The Ultimate Guide to Parental Engagement
Strong parental engagement is central in promoting children’s healthy development and wellness, including: social-emotional and behavioural development and preparing children for school. Yet as an early years practitioner, perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of managing a setting is getting parents to actively engage in their child’s education.
Much of this may well be due to the changing demographic of modern parenting where we see working and single parents with little time to attend activities and workshops during ‘school’ hours. In an ideal world, every parent and practitioner would have time to have a chat about their children each day at pick-up time, but as you may already know, this is not always possible.
As a software provider for the market leading parent communication tool ParentZone, we’ve tapped into the knowledge of our 3700 strong customer base and have compiled all of the different ways that you can stretch beyond pick up and drop off times to encourage and improve your parental engagement with those hard-to-reach parents.
This guide covers:
- 15 interventions for you to consider that will support and improve parental engagement
- The importance of a parent communication tool
- Top tips from nursery settings
We’d like to give a special thanks to Heidi Wright and the team at Brook Farm Children’s Nursery who let our team visit their idyllic nursery in Lancashire, and helped us to gain insight into how they keep their parents engaged all year round.