Nursery World - Positive Relationships: Working with Families

Photographs taken by parents gave practitioners new insight into how children experience ways to communicate at home, says Elizabeth Jarman.

In recent years, the use of photographs to shed light on children's interests and motivations has developed apace. While it is often the children themselves who are encouraged to take the photographs, it was the parents and carers who were handed the cameras in one project in the London Borough of Haringey. Their task was to photograph the places in which their children enjoyed communicating - and the results have been illuminating.

The project was devised in response to the poor SATs results and general underachievement of Turkish-speaking boys in the borough. Settings with a high proportion of children from this community chosen to take part included children's centres, playgroups, and primary schools, predominantly in Tottenham. Through the photographs, the authority hoped to build up a picture of the children's preferred contexts for learning.

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