Raising Whole School Parental Engagement through Effective Student Reporting

[overnetdata_reeza]

Hi all, we recently published a blog article on raising whole school parental engagement through effective student reporting and I thought I would share it within this forum.

 

http://bit.ly/1yja5pQ

 

Do you have any winning strategies for parental engagement? What are the biggest challenges that you face with your current IT infrastructure to facilitate sharing information with parents?

 

Best wishes

Reeza

[wiseoldowl]

Interesting article Reeza, thanks for sharing. I'm not sure I would agree that effective student reporting will raise whole school parental engagement, it usually requires a little more.

[overnetdata_reeza]

Thank you Jeremy for the feedback. You do make a valid point. Effective student reporting is part of an armoury of tools to help raise whole school parental engagement.

 

Best wishes

[dhicks]

What are the biggest challenges that you face with your current IT infrastructure to facilitate sharing information with parents?

 

Collecting detailed data on each student and creating a reporting system capable of delivering fine-grained data pretty much in real time to teachers and parents are technical problems, solveable with various solutions. However, after having gotten such systems in place, the biggest challenge I can imagine is getting people not to over-use or become over-reliant on such a system and conclusions they may draw from its data. The whole idea of school is that it's a learning experience - children can make mistakes in a controlled environment. I wouldn't want parents able to see, and worry about, and question every test result a child has, or see every bit of bad behaviour. Pupils need a bit of flexibility and breathing space where they can feel they're not being obserbed and judged every moment. The people who should be the gatekeepers between the raw data and the parents is of course the teachers - if a trend becomes apparent that they need to bring up with a parent then they should have the data available to back it up, but it should be up to the teacher's judgement (helped along with a set of handy, easy-to-use statistical tools provided by their IT systems, of course) as to how to teach their pupils.

[matt40k]

Not a fan of the "real-time" point, getting the data - yer, totally, but does it need to be truly real-time? I know I've heard horror stories where parents have been screaming down the phone at their child because they have a missing lesson mark - only for it to transpire that it was due to a problem with the teacher taking the register for whatever reason, technical or not. I agree with @dhicks point about the data having a "gatekeeper" to ensure the data quality, but also he has a good point about it being a safe sandbox in independence before hitting the "real" world.

[wiseoldowl]

Couldn't agree more with Matt40k and dhicks. Collecting data and how it is used will also vary from school to school but one of the key issues is to ensure the data collected for the purposes of engaging parents in their child's learning has to be subject to more than a 'here is the data' approach. In my view it needs to part of a wider context that will include policies, school culture, data cleansing and supporting parents so they understand the data being presented and how they can use it to support their children.