St Margaret Clitherow Catholic Primary School

FSPA (Family School Partnership Award)

Family-School Partnership Award (FSPA)

We are currently taking part of a scheme being run in Ealing, Harrow & Brent (FSPA) which is helping us to think about how we work with families and support us to build stronger links between home and school. 

Who are the FSPA team and what do they do?

-A school partnerships and enrichment team

-A team within Ealing Learning Partnership (ELP)

-Tracking barriers to learning outside the classroom

-Allowing all pupils to fulfil their potential

-Engaging parents in their child’s learning and school life

-Enrichment activities for pupils and families

Background

Increasingly schools are providing a huge range of services and support to parents and carers in order to engage them in their children’s learning and develop their own skills.  The Family School Partnership Award (FSPA) seeks to build on and enhance this work by providing:

a) Model to review family engagement at a strategic level

b) Resources & support to build capacity in schools and

c) Award for schools to work towards

SCHOOLS ARE SUPPORTED TO ENSURE POSITIVE CHANGE IN THEIR APPROACH TO PARENTAL ENGAGEMENT

Advice and helpful documents for parents

 The Family Partnership Model

The framework developed aligns the different aspects of schools work with parents and families under 5 key themes, with an overarching theme of monitoring and evaluation cutting across all areas.

 Five Key Themes:

A huge body of evidence tells us that children of parents who are actively engaged in their learning make greater progress than other children and that the gains made in achievement as a result of this engagement tend to be permanent.

Parental involvement has been shown to be more powerful than social class, family size and level of parental education in impacting achievement.  In a child’s primary school years, the influence of family has a more powerful effect on children’s attainment and progress than school factors.

 What is parental engagement?

The distinction between involvement and engagement is important:

• Parental engagement could be defined as enabling parents to support their child’s learning at home
• Parental involvement is when parent participate in school as PTA members, governors or volunteers.

Both roles are important for different reasons but research shows us that parental engagement had the biggest impact on a child’s achievement.

The diagram below shows the ‘ladder’ or parental participation from the Parental Engagement guidance produced by Oxford School Improvement.

When developing a whole school approach to Family-School Partnership it is important that we, as a school, consider the full range of work with parents and carers.

FSPA Documents

SMC Parental Engagement Policy January 2021

Family School Partnership Award Action Plan

Advice and helpful documents for parents