Involving Parents in their Children?s Learning

A Knowledge-Sharing Approach

Margy Whalley

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 3
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526414113
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Involving Parents in their Children?s Learning is the story of the pioneering work of the Pen Green Centre for children and families. Showing how early years practitioners can collaborate effectively with parents, the book includes case studies of parents and children who have attended the centre, and charts developments in learning for both children and parents.

The authors show how to:

·support parents as their child?s first educator

·provide practical and psychological support to parents

·involve fathers and male carers

·share important child development concepts

·support and extend children?s learning

· connect with services that parents may find 'hard to reach'

This New Edition is updated throughout, revisiting some of the families and practitioners who feature in the previous editions and also includes 2 brand new chapters on 'Parents as Researchers' and 'Family Drop-in sessions'.

Cath Arnold will be discussing key ideas from Involving Parents in their Children's Learning in the SAGE Early Years Masterclass, a free professional development experience hosted by Kathy Brodie.

1 New Forms of Provision, New Ways of Working The Pen Green Centre

Margy Whalley

The Pen Green Centre opened in 1983 as one of a small number of pioneering integrated centres offering children and their families both nursery education and a wide range of support services. It was established after a comprehensive research project undertaken in the late 1970s on under fives services in Northamptonshire, with a clear intention to bridge the traditional divide between day-care and child protection services provided through social services-run day nurseries and early education as it had traditionally been provided in nursery classes and nursery schools.

The centre had a joint advisory group with strong political representation from both education, social care and health and the project was jointly managed by the Education and Social Services Departments and the local Health Authority. From the start the centre was staffed by a multidisciplinary team; in 1983 there were six staff working with 50 children and providing a range of services for 300+ younger children and their families. The staff included a social worker, early educators, a teacher and an unqualified community worker from the local area, with health visitors ‘on loan’ from the local health visiting team.

Pen Green was one of the first six Early Excellence Centres in 1996, became a trailblazer Sure Start programme in 1999 and was one of the first children’s centres in England in 2006. By this time we were employing more than 120 staff including teachers, early educators, social workers, play workers, midwives, health workers and support staff, working on an annual basis with over 1400 families. Today, there are now three nursery areas (for children from 2 to 5 years) and two baby nest areas (for children from 9 months to 3 years) working daily with 340+ children. We also have indoor and outdoor environments for children and families that are used 48 weeks a year, five days a week and into the evening, and on Saturdays and Sundays between 9am and 1pm. We still engage with over 1500 families from across the whole town.

Corby, where the centre is based, became a steel town in the 1930s with a teeming population of steelworkers who had come down from Scotland to find work. A high proportion of the town’s population were first generation Scots and the Scottish culture is still very strong with kilts, bagpipes, highland gatherings, ceilidhs and large followings for Celtic and Rangers football clubs. This migration has been summed up in the local adage ‘80% of the population are Scots and the rest are jealous’. The town also has a large Irish community with their own clubs and social centres and cultural traditions and in the immediate pre- and post-war years many families also migrated to Corby from Eastern Europe. The town’s school registers represented this shift, so along with the Camerons, McKenzies, Wallaces, O’Malleys and Dochertys we began to see the Dejaralovics, Konsbergs and Merniaks.

In the 1980s, when the Pen Green Centre opened, the steelworks had closed, the local council housing estates were boarded up and shops were barricaded with wire grills; 43 per cent of the male population were unemployed and 50 per cent of children attending the centre when it first opened were from single parent families. Poor nutrition, inadequate housing and high infant mortality rates were all major factors influencing the lives of young families. There were minimal public services for parents and young children and very few of the traditional voluntary organisations for families facing social economic challenges or to support children at risk of social exclusion.

In Corby in the early 1980s there was no choice of services for parents wanting nursery education, childcare or ‘time out’ to study. There was no partnership between the public, private and voluntary sectors because there was little provision for family support or early education. There was only one private day nursery, a small number of registered childminders and a few volunteer-led playgroups. The part-time nursery education that was available in nursery units attached to local primary schools was hugely oversubscribed, and these short nursery sessions did not help parents who wanted to attend college or go back to work. There was also a social services children’s centre in Corby, which was perceived by local parents as a resource exclusively for ‘problem families’.

The Pen Green Centre was set up in what was formerly a comprehensive school built in the 1930s by the Stewarts and Lloyds steelmaking company to provide an education for the children of the steelworkers. The houses that surround the centre were built specifically to be homes for the ‘steelworkers’. Sixty feet away stood the last of the blast furnaces that had transformed a small Northamptonshire village into a thriving steel town (Whalley, 1994). In the first year that the centre opened we witnessed the detonation of the last ‘Corby candle’.

Problems and contradictions

Corby in the 1980s exemplified many of the problems and contradictions inherent in education and day-care/childcare services in the UK at this time. The issues that staff at Pen Green had to face then remain problematic some thirty-three years later in 2016.

1. Simplistic demarcation lines: crude divisions remained in the 1980s between those who saw themselves as providing for the educational needs of the children i.e. the local education authority, and those supporting the child in terms of welfare and childcare i.e. social services, and in a very limited way, the private sector.
   In 2016 these divisions still remain. The main provider for 3-and 4-year-olds is the local authority through provision in nursery classes in primary schools across Corby. Most of these offer limited access to breakfast clubs or after-school provision and they do not open during the school holidays. Childcare support for the 3-and 4-year-olds of working parents is therefore very limited. The evidence from the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) study of the standard of early learning and development in nursery classes also shows that they do not currently demonstrate the same good outcomes for children as nursery schools (EPPE Study; Sylva et al., 2004).
   Corby now has a plethora of private childcare services, some of which are still run on the old playgroup model of school hours and school year. There has been a very significant take-up of 2-year-old provision in Corby in the private sector, however, only two primary schools in the town make that kind of provision. There are particular difficulties for families with young children with disabilities and special education needs in accessing high-quality services. The ‘crude divisions’ in 2016 in Corby would be between the various academy providers, as most of the primary schools and all of the secondary schools are now academised. We have six different academy chains involved in the delivery of education across the town. Currently 59 per cent of the schools are in Special Measures.
2. Separatism: in the 1980s there was no tradition of working in a fully integrated way with other services such as health visiting, midwifery, child and family guidance (CAMS) or Adult Education, all of which had a critical role in working with children and their families.
   Paradoxically we can look back on the 1980s as halcycon days for multidisciplinary working in Corby. Because of the closure of the steelworks, public service engagement and collaboration between health visiting and social care were outstanding. Whilst there have been an enormous number of policy directives on multi-agency partnership working the level of co-operation that we had with health visiting, midwifery and other services was at its very best in the years up to and including the Sure Start intervention years. Since then joint working has become increasingly eroded with constant reorganisations in health and social work in Northamptonshire; the long anticipated shift of health visiting from Public Health England into the local authority has become a very protracted journey. Whilst there have been some powerful interventions such as Family Nurse Partnership for the most vulnerable young mothers in Corby, there is no seamless integration of services between midwifery and health visiting or full data sharing between social care and education. Indeed the pressures on all these services are such that we are struggling to maintain the level of joint working that we had in past years, with up to 60 per cent of social workers employed by agencies.
   The direct work of health visitors and midwives at Pen Green has been outstanding and hard fought for and has demonstrated a deep commitment from individual workers. Even when departments were reorganising, health visitors and midwives held onto their commitment to community-based services within an integrated centre for children and families. Health visitors and midwives work directly with our across-town family support team, and Home Start which is based at Pen Green, to co-ordinate new birth visits and referrals. Data sharing can still be problematic across agencies, but in the area of SEN and disability we have made some major breakthroughs with very early notification and identification and highly effective joint working.
3. Over-professionalisation of services and under-representation of the voluntary sector: this was a key issue in the 1980s and continued to be so into the 1990s whilst early childhood services were perceived by government as the panacea for all social ills. The contribution of the voluntary sector was and is still underestimated and Pen Green’s commitment to voluntary groups such as Home Start has prevented their closure on several occasions.
   The concept of the Pen Green Centre was about co-constructing local services with local people. It has to be said this was largely the result of an action group against the centre, which was established in 1982 when the local authority first developed the idea of a new early years service for Corby. Local people took matters into their own hands and made it clear that they did not want another ‘problem family’ centre in Corby. What they really wanted was an institution that would be flexible and responsive and driven by local need.
4. Inability to learn from history or the rest of Europe: when setting up the early childhood services in Corby in the 1980s there was very little reference to early interventions at the beginning of the century; for example Margaret McMillan’s work in Deptford and Bradford, the family centre movement in social care or radical community interventions in health in this country. Nor was there any effort made to learn from other European countries, such as Scandinavia or Italy, where fully integrated services for young children have a long history.
   In subsequent years we have worked collaboratively with projects across the UK, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
5. The narrow view of evidence-based models: the only ‘models’ generally recognised as successful in the 1980s were those transplanted from the USA. The insistence on using medical models to provide the evidence base was particularly unhelpful for small-scale local projects. There was very little recognition in the 1980s of the importance of a local ‘diagnosis’ of need and this remains true today.
6. Compensatory models: in 1980 the prevalent professional perspective on working with parents assumed a ‘deficit’ model of parenting. This could be seen in almost all policy and much practice. There was an assumption that parents could become more effective by being taught a set of ‘parenting skills’ and this remains true to this day.
   In 2016 former Prime Minister David Cameron spoke about life chances and once again presented us with the notion of parents who require ‘treatment’ to improve their performance. There was and remains very little acknowledgement or celebration of ‘difference’ in terms of parenting approaches. The assumption is still that there is only one way to be an effective parent, and that is to have produced a compliant ‘school ready’ child.
7. Political will: it was clear in the 1980s that the early years workforce was relatively inexperienced in engaging in political debate and unaware of the inherently political nature of early years work. What has been most significant in subsequent years is the huge shift in delivery of early years education and care services from the public sector into the private sector where most provision for 0–3s now takes place (Gallagher and Arnold, forthcoming). Even in areas of very significant socio-economic deprivation like Corby, the private sector has become the preferred provider for the local authority and public sector provision, particularly in nursery schools, has been marginalised (Gaunt, 2016). The delivery of services such as preventative family support, which used to be found in both the public and voluntary sectors, is now predominantly delivered exclusively through large national voluntary organisations which are highly dependent on government funding. In Corby, the nursery schools and primary schools still do continue to deliver the children’s centre offer. Pen Green’s experience is that, without local borough council and county council support, settings such as ours would have been cut back on successive occasions. It has been the political will of the local community that has been most significant in retaining Pen Green as a local service that is much loved and well supported by families and the wider community.
8. Lack of public accountability: in the 1980s this was manifested as a general lack of awareness of the changing needs of young families, and the need for services to be increasingly flexible and responsive to the realities of family life. Families in Corby had fought hard to get their critical concerns recognised throughout the 1980s and 1990s as active stakeholders in public services. Corby is a town that is prepared to march and Corby families marched in the 1970s to save the steelworks and many times over the last few years to save their centre for children and families. With the marked exception of pre-election rhetoric, successive governments have failed to recognise the concerns that children, parents, families and the wider community have for services that really support family life in the twenty-first century; services that recognise parents’ need to work and study and children’s right to a rich early childhood experience with the added provision of accessible and effective family support within their locality.
9. Poor conditions of service and training: in the 1980s our studies had shown that although early childhood educators were capable of powerful advocacy on behalf of children and families, they were relatively passive in relation to their own pay and conditions of service. Staff were accustomed to working long hours, with inadequate training, little supervision and no non-contact time to plan and reflect on children’s learning and development.
   There has been relatively little improvement in pay and conditions in the private sector. In 2016 the government still appears to see Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) as a Cinderella service, assuming staff will work for less than the living wage. In the public sector significant improvements have been made. Well-qualified staff at Pen Green have pay that is commensurate with their incredible commitment and hard work. All staff have continuous professional development opportunities and we work with a 76–84 per cent graduate workforce across the three nursery spaces and two baby nests. Most senior staff have Master’s degrees and all staff have some non-contact time to home visit and to dialogue and document children’s learning and development.

Working with the community

Pen Green, as a centre for children and families, developed from a perspective ‘which regards early childhood services as a need and right for all communities and families, and as an expression of social solidarity with children and parents’ (Moss, 1992: 43; Moss and Penn, 1996). However, this social solidarity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Author and Contributor Bios
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Companion Website
• 1 New Forms of Provision, New Ways of Working The Pen Green Centre
• 2 Developing Evidence-Based Practice
• 3 The Many Different Ways We Involve Families
• 4 Sharing Ideas with Parents About Key Child Development Concepts
• 5 Parents and Staff as Co-Educators ‘Parents’ Means Fathers Too
• 6 Working with Parents Who Traditionally Find Our Services ‘Hard to Reach’
• 7 Parents as Researchers
• 8 Dialogue and Documentation Sharing Information, Developing a Rich Curriculum and a Responsive Pedagogy
• 9 Sharing Knowledge with Families in a ‘Drop-in’ Provision within an Integrated Centre for Children and Families
• 10 The Impact on Parents’ Lives
• 11 Working in Groups with Parents of Young Children Growing Together at the Pen Green Centre
• 12 Developing PICL in Primary Schools, Children’s Centres and in Childminder Settings
• Postscript: Developing a Sustainable Approach
• References
• Index