Learning Outcome A - Evidence 1

Reading: Home-school partnerships.  What are they really?

Keren Brooking

This reading is about the importance of home and school partnerships in a child’s learning journey. 

A home-school partnership refers to proposals and concepts that schools can introduce that involve whānau in a child’s learning.  There is emphasis placed on schools making an effort to strengthen communication and interaction with family and caregivers because there is clear evidence that this can have positive effects for children’s education – refer to research done by Epstein (1992, 2006), Desforges and Abouchaar (2003) and Biddulph, Biddulph and Biddulph – “Best Evidence Synthesis” (2003). 

The article encourages teachers to have a switch in their thinking so that they don’t make partnerships a one-way street where they are telling the parents what the child needs to learn and what the parents should be doing at home.  Instead, look at working with the parents/whānau to gain a greater knowledge of learning in the home and connecting the two together so that there are opportunities for children to achieve at a higher success rate, have higher engagement and improve attendance.  Alongside this, in regards to the children’s learning, their interests, enthusiasm and attitudes are a focus and research suggests that there can be improvement if there is a successful home-school partnership. 

Some important factors to consider are that home life is extremely complex and is constantly changing and the need for regular meetings will help in this area.  Also, that time is major factor and needs to be considered by the school and the home with encouragement of commitment from both parties.  School hours usually clash with work hours for parents and vice versa.  What is important for an affective partnership is that both home and school place significant value in what they are doing and recognise the issue is worth solving – in this case, a child’s education.  Home-school partnerships also need to time to become initially established and strengthened. 

What I learnt from this article is that teachers need to make an effort to form these home-school partnerships.   There seems to be a need for a shift in teacher thinking where they try not to dictate what they want the child to learn to the parents but instead, ask the parents about learning in their home and form a plan that suits individual’s educational needs.  It also made me reflect on why some parents may be a little hesitant to form this type of partnership – could some parents feel like they aren’t educated enough to teach their children because of their own schooling and just rely on the schools to provide this for their children?  Or there maybe families who don’t place value in education and therefore do not care?  I will be aware of this when looking at home-school partnerships in the future.