Wallace High School in Stirling has been striving to engage with and hear the views of parents and carers from all of the communities in their catchment area.
Head Teacher Scott Pennock says that consultation needs to be as wide as possible:
“You’ve got to be very wary of running your school only to please the parents who will respond to a survey. You wouldn’t be running it for the whole school, you would be running it for a much narrower demographic of parent. They’re great and these are really supportive parents, you want them to be part of the school, but you want others to come in as well.”
Wallace High School staff have started to deal with this by gathering information from various sources:
“I think what you need to do is use all your intel, use your family link workers’ conversations, use your conversations at the school gate, use the conversations at the readmission from exclusion meeting, where somebody’s telling you what the barriers are. Get as big a suite of information and then use that to inform your policy.”
This broad approach means that staff are able to hear the views of families they may not have heard from before. Scott feels that it’s well worth thinking about the quality of information you are able to gather.
“Sometimes it’s about the quality of information that you get from fewer parents in one community, rather than the volume you would get from another one. This might help to more fully inform your practice.”
Wallace High has a parental engagement group which aims to work with the parents and carers whose voices are often less represented. The group began when a PE teacher contacted some parents about their children and went on to “ask them if he could come out to their home and went out and asked them a few things, and had a really good chat about barriers.” Now the school has in place an ongoing programme which aims to speak to parents in their own communities. Scott describes how the network has made a difference to the school:
“The network gives us greater capacity to do things like outreach work, to touch base with parents that can’t make it in and can’t come to general events, but you are still getting their voice and their feedback. That’s the key, I think.”
Staff at Bannockburn Primary School in Stirling are aware that what they offer to children and families to promote equity needs to develop as circumstances change.
Karen Sneddon, the school Health and Wellbeing Officer:
“we just evolve, we just see something and respond. It’s being aware of families.”
Head Teacher Audrey Ross says that the school engages with parents to hear their views and says that:
“Parents aren’t scared to push back, they will tell us if they think we are not getting it right. Practice has evolved and will continue to evolve.”
For example, the school’s Pit Stop facility was initially set up to help keep a small group of children in mainstream school but is now open to a much wider group. Other examples include the breakfast club, which currently costs 50p per day per child, but which the school now plan to offer free to a targeted group of children and fund using Pupil Equity Funding. BUB, the school uniform bank, had been run by the parent council through Facebook, but since Covid has been moved to the school foyer to be more accessible."
You'll find template surveys in this section of the Cost of the School Day Toolkit for speaking to parents and carers.
