News, commentary and practical articles on engaging with families, written for teachers, leaders and anyone working to strengthen the partnership between home and school.
This page gathers articles on family engagement as they are published. Each piece looks at a specific part of the work, from the conditions that support learning at home to the methods schools use to understand the needs of parents and carers. The articles are written to be read alongside the guidance elsewhere on this site.
Articles will appear below this introduction in date order. Until then, the pages listed in the sections that follow offer the background and frameworks that the writing draws on.
Writing here focuses on practice. Pieces explore how schools plan communication with families, how they respond to barriers such as work pressures or language differences, and how they measure whether their approach is making a difference.
Articles also look at evidence, asking what research says about family involvement and where the claims made in the field need careful reading.
Each article is intended as a starting point for discussion within a team. Readers are encouraged to compare the ideas with their own setting, to test small changes, and to record what happens. The related pages below give the wider context.
The blog is written for class teachers, pastoral staff, family liaison workers and senior leaders. It also speaks to governors and community partners who want to understand how schools reach families and what happens once contact has been made.
Tone is practical and direct. Articles avoid jargon where a plain term will do, and they name the trade-offs involved in any approach.
Planned themes include reading at home with limited resources, communicating with families who speak English as an additional language, and using community spaces to extend learning beyond the school day. Suggestions from readers are welcome and will be considered for future publication.
Some articles will refer to published data and research. Where figures are quoted, the aim is to explain their source and limits, so that readers can judge how far they apply to their own community.
For an overview of what engaging with families involves, and how the wider work is organised, begin with the home page. The blog complements that overview with specific, dated writing on practice and research.
New articles are added as they are written. Returning to this page is the simplest way to see what has been published on family engagement, and to follow the themes that matter most to your setting.
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