Dr Kay Mathieson looks at why the process is a key opportunity to
improve relationships with parents and carers.
A major part of helping our children learn, develop and make progress during their time with us is establishing positive working relationships with the adults who care for them at home.
Families come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so inevitably one form of communication will not work for everyone. Part of our task as we review and improve our communication systems is to ensure that they are sufficiently flexible to work for all the parents and carers currently involved with our setting. This is an evolving process that recognises the pros and cons of different forms of communication for different purposes. The introduction of the integrated review gives us a useful opportunity to consider further developments in our communication systems.
PURPOSE OF THE REVIEW
The statutory Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Progress Check at Age Two has become a regular part of our practice since 2012. Now local authorities are working towards developing this into a fully integrated review, involving early years practitioners, health practitioners and parents.
This integrated review of development and learning progress at about two has three purposes (National Children's Bureau, NCB, 2015):
1. To identify the child's progress, strengths and needs at this age in order to promote positive outcomes in health and well-being, learning and behaviour.
2. To facilitate appropriate interventions and support for children and their families, especially those for whom progress is less than expected.
3. To generate information which can be used to plan services and contribute to the reduction of inequalities in children's outcomes.
ONGOING COMMUNICATION
For the integrated review to have maximum benefit, practitioners will want to ensure that it is a natural part of the ongoing communication with parents and carers. The principles detailed in the NCB document, in fact, provide a useful tool for reflection on all our communication with parents and carers. So, how close is your practice to these descriptions?
'The integrated review should engage parents, particularly those who are disadvantaged. The integrated review values active participation from parents both intellectually and emotionally in their child's assessment and in making decisions.'
Consider first meetings with parents. What evidence do you have that they feel engaged, able to contribute, knowing their opinions will be valued? In what way could you increase your own confidence in engaging parents during early discussions about their children? How might you support colleagues to feel more confident?
Think about whether your day-to-day conversations with parents:
- contain useful information about the child's developmental progress
- encourage parents to share observations, worries and celebrations
- support parents to consider what changes they may notice next as a consequence of development progress.
'The integrated review should engage the child, where they are participating. The child should be at the centre of the review, should enjoy the experience, interact and participate, helping to show what they can do, alongside the information given by parents and the ongoing observations of their early years practitioner.'
The phrase 'where they are participating' highlights our understanding of how different a child's response can be depending on where they are observed, whether at home, in the setting, a clinic or in a local park.
Think about whether your day- to-day conversations with parents support them to recognise the impact of their children:
- being with a larger group of peers
- not 'owning' any of the toys
- having to share resources
- not having any of their 'special' people present
- making new relationships with other children
- making new relationships with adults
- having to share adult attention.
'The integrated review should be a process of shared decision-making. Practitioners and parents should respect each other's perspectives and contribute together to decisions on realistic and achievable actions to support the child's well-being. This can include agreeing changes in how both parents and the early years setting can best support the child's health, learning and development.'
Think about whether your day-to-day conversations with parents:
- build their confidence
- give positive feedback about their parenting
- value their observations
- consider interpretation of observations positively
- ensure they have the necessary information to contribute to shared decision-making.
Building parents' confidence in sharing decision-making about their child's progress and identifying the most helpful ways forward takes time and professional skill. Finding ways of sharing observations so that parents' views are encouraged is crucial. Changing the tone from 'telling' to 'sharing' by using phrases such as 'I was wondering', 'I have noticed' or 'I'm thinking' invites conversational responses from a different perspective. It also requires follow-up and coherence between daily, weekly, monthly, termly and annual conversations.
PARTNERSHIPS
Establishing equal partnerships with parents has to be led by the professional. It is our role to find innovative ways to ensure parents see that their contributions are valued.
For all adults, our life and work experiences influence how confident we feel talking with the professionals we come across. Parents will have a range of experiences that inform their view of our professional role. Even if a parent is also an early years practitioner and has specialist child development knowledge, it feels different applying this to your own child when your parental emotions are involved.
Some parents will have learned through their life experience that professionals are difficult to understand and talk to, and seem intent on criticising or blaming them as an individual or as a parent. Most parents are somewhere in the middle, having good days when they feel reasonably confident and other days when it feels as if nothing is going right. As professionals, it is only by being consistent in our encouragement and striving to engage parents in shared decision-making that we can really have active partnership working.
In our thinking about communication with parents, it is important to remember that it is not just more formal or frequent interactions that contribute to the tone of our relationships. From first contact, we give messages about the role we would like parents to play in the life of our setting.
Typically, the pattern of communication between parents and practitioners will include:
- setting website
- local advertising
- first contact phone call
- information leaflets
- first meeting - policy documents, 'all about me' information
- settling-in period - flexibility, individual needs, conversation content
- arrival/departure conversations
- phone calls, emails and texts
- sharing surprises, delights and concerns arising from observations
- regular reviewing of progress, decision making about most effective ways to support key elements of development and learning
- progress check/integrated review
- transition review of progress between rooms/settings.
One coherent conversation
All of these contribute to parents' understanding of what goes on in the setting and ways they can become involved. By looking at these elements as one coherent conversation, we can begin to reflect on what works well.
In addition, we can recognise staff confidence in each form of engagement. Where individual members of the team are less confident, targeted professional development can really build confidence. This is likely to include a range of learning opportunities such as work shadowing, shared research or attending a training course.
Parental contribution to improving quality
Actively seeking parents' views about their experience of your communication is a very effective tool, helping you to understand how your intended messages are received.
By focusing the discussion on identifying ways to improve or respond differently, we make it much more effective than just hearing that everything is fine.
Evidencing the process of listening to and acting on parents' views, through simple displays (for example, 'you asked about', 'we responded') or newsletter/website feedback, builds an important picture of how working together improves the provision for everyone. Making this an ongoing, rather than annual, conversation also contributes to parents' willingness to make suggestions, as well as showing a pattern of partnership working for Ofsted.
Quality provision is characterised by meaningful engagement with and maintaining communication with parents. This does not mean everyone will agree all the time, but creates a positive context for problem solving and recognising how situations may look from different perspectives.
As this becomes embedded practice, relationships between parents and practitioners are more about being alongside each other in a journey of shared learning.
As with all areas of our early years practice, it is not just about putting an effective system in place, although this is of course important, but also how the tone and feel of each individual interaction involving parents builds into a positive community ethos.
MORE INFORMATION
Inclusion in the EYFS by K Mathieson (2015), Open University Press
Integrated Review, National Children's Bureau (2015)
Statutory Framework for the Early Years, DfE
Supporting Parenting Early Childhood in Focus 5, M Woodhead and J Oates (eds) (2010), Open University Press, www.bernardvanleer.org
Working with Parents by C Digman and S Soan (2008), Sage.
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