"The school has benefited from both the support given by the parents and also by the growing understanding they have of how they can help their children to succeed at school" - Head teacher John Lynch, High Street Primary School, Plymouth
"Our children have grown up with Big Wide Talk and it has become part of our identity. We think we can use this as a base for taking collective responsibility for the delivery of local services and for approaching hard to reach/isolated families. It is a fantastic way of providing the support we all need when we are struggling to bring up our children. We want to show people we are not just a bunch of mums sitting around drinking coffee." - Parent Researchers, York
What do Local Groups involve?
● Establishing place-specific relationships with practitioners through which parents can do exciting things with children, for example, workshops and local expeditions.
● Developing locally specific reflective practice to develop a problem solving approach to the task of bringing up children.
● Enabling people taking part in these groups to come together with other groups at seminars and national meetings to share their learning.
● Enabling parents and practitioners to present their thinking and learning at conferences and local decision making forums.
Parents, parents, parents!
Every major report about education since the early 1950s has emphasised the need for parental involvement. This has resulted in the enactment of a series of measures to reach out to parents, not least the national Sure Start programme. However, recent research about the Sure Start programme has been clear that the local programmes did not reach the most excluded households. In Scotland the 2006 Parental Involvement Act has just come into force with the setting up of Parent Councils for every school instead of a School Board. School Boards have been unsuccessful in gaining support from poor and BME parents. Read more about the importance of parental involvement.
Why the local level?
Word-of-mouth networks are socially bonding systems where information and debate are most powerful. Whether choosing schools, registering with doctors, deciding on vaccinations or discussing ways of bringing up their children more generally, parents pick up information in these networks that they are inclined to believe. They understand that the pople in their own families and those living nearby are making sense of life within the same contexts as themselves. Children and young people also take direction within these networks, assessing what is 'cool', and what best addresses their immediate needs.
If we accept that there is a public realm where public purpose is understood, negotiated and enacted, the local level is where these processes are rooted. This is the place to begin developing a sustained conversation about the kind of future people really want to see. Our evidence is that parents, without exception, even in the poorest places, want to build a better future for their children and they are prepared to move out of their comfort zones to make this happen. Read more.
Involvement in Local Groups since July 2000
