David Hetherington  00:06

Hello, and welcome to Hands Up a podcast by the Public Education Foundation that lifts the lid on everything going on in our public schools. I’m David Hetherington, the CEO of the foundation. You know all those burning questions you’ve had about what actually happens at your child’s school? Well, hands up if you’ve ever gone to a P&C meeting, or even know what P and C stands for, that’s Parents and Citizens. Have you helped out at a sausage sizzle? Or the school fete or been an ethics teacher? Maybe your support comes in the way of buying raffle tickets or a couple of boxes of lamingtons? Or maybe you’ve wondered how to get more involved in your school community, but just don’t know how. Research shows that when families are actively involved in the school community, there are significant benefits to the students’ school and learning experience. In this episode, we’re going to visit one school that runs an innovative school as community center program. We’ll also talk to Barbara Barker from the Australian Research Alliance for children and youth and Di Giblin from the Australian Council of State School organisations about what happens when families collaborate with the school community to support student learning. But first, let’s head to Punchbowl Public School in southwestern Sydney.

Punchbowl SaCC playgroup  01:19

Hello, how are you? Well, thanks. 

Donna McGeary  01:23

So my name’s Donna McGeary, and I’m the principal here at Punchbowl Public School.

Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos  01:29

And my name is Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos, and I’m one of the deputy principals and my role is looking after student and community engagement. 

Donna McGeary  01:37

This is the space where parents are participating in learning. And then just through that door, we actually have another space where childcare is often provided. Kitchens been re-done. We offer morning tea, healthy morning tea for playgroups. 

Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos  01:56

So our community center was renovated a couple of years ago. It basically is a learning hub for parents with young children from birth to eight years of age. So that’s the brief. So the programs involve supported playgroups as well as parenting workshops, we have partnerships with TAFE, where parents are offered short courses. 

Donna McGeary  02:21

You know, like it might be a short retail course where they can go and then gain employment in retail or, you know, floristry, or it might be English, to learn English, or it could be, you know, any number of things that we feel that you know, to support them perhaps to get into the workforce. 

Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos  02:39

It’s targeted support for some of our equity groups, including Aboriginal families, refugee families. They also offer informal supports by way of a drop in service. The SaCC facilitator who is Asenati Mareko, is available before school, after school just after the school bell, in-between programs for parents to drop in, you know, to have a cup of coffee, to have a chat, you know, to ask questions and you know, to be guided in an informal way and often it’s easier for parents to talk to someone who’s not the class teacher or who’s not the principal or you know, someone in a official kind of leadership role in the school. But they’re, they feel really supported.

Punchbowl SaCC playgroup  03:27

Come around the mat, come on, come join us on this mat…

Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos  03:34

One of the focuses for the playgroup is our transition to our preschool because we have a preschool on site. And the beauty of having our community centre means that we get to know many of our kids who come into preschool through the playgroups and then they become students in our preschool. And then following that they’re enrolled in our mainstream primary school program. So we get to know families well before they actually officially enroll here at Punchbowl Public School. 

Donna McGeary  04:06

So there’s lots of partnerships between staff so with the transition program to preschool, and they will plan those playgroups to how to best meet the needs of those little toddlers, preparing them for preschool. So the relationships start very early and the parents feel very much a part of their child’s education. And that and that is very important to our community, that they feel that they know what’s happening with their, with their child all the way through from you know, preschool to to year six.

Punchbowl SaCC playgroup  04:42

Fun for mum as well. 

Donna McGeary  04:44

It’s a community hub. It’s a lot of things the SaCC and it provides that you know space to have community.

Punchbowl SaCC playgroup  04:52

Alright families…

David Hetherington  04:56

Punchbowl is an excellent example of how parents and families become part of the school community even before the children go to school there. It’s these deep relationships between parents and families and the school that our next guest is particularly interested in. Relationships that have developed through recognising the diversity of the school community and through strong two way communication. Di Giblin is the CEO of the Australian Council of State School Organisations ACSSO.

Di Giblin  05:23

Hi, I’m Di Giblin,  I’m the Chief Executive Officer of Australian Council of State School Organisations. I’ve held this role for just over 12 years. Prior to that I had a dual position as a volunteer as the president of the New South Wales Federation of Parents and Citizens Association, to which I’d been involved in for 23 years prior to that.

David Hetherington  05:42

Thank you Di and welcome to the podcast. You have really extensive experience in the kind of interlink between schools and parents and communities. I want to begin by asking you, what exactly does family engagement mean for the new parent perhaps arriving at primary school or or navigating their way through the entrance to high school? What does family engagement mean and look like?

Di Giblin  06:02

It’s interesting, because there’s a thousand definitions out there. And we define it as that relationship between the home and the school. And that can mean many things. But most importantly, it means that the significant professional in the child’s life, the classroom teacher, or the school itself, and the parent worked together to support that young person through their education.

David Hetherington  06:24

And I’m aware, there’s a lot of research out there that suggests that better quality family engagement leads to more positive student outcomes, higher outcomes for the students, what are the kind of mechanics of that? How does that work in terms of what a parent/carer and a student picks up in the course of deeper family engagement?

Di Giblin  06:42

Deeper family engagement is that ‘R’ word that’s called relationships, and everything’s built on purposeful built relationships, to support that family and that school, but also to support the teacher. We know that children are very diverse in what they bring to school, the baggage they bring the school some with the neurodiversity that they bring to school. And so that relationship is extremely important to understand what makes the young child tick, what engages that young child, and what support the family can bring to that teacher to ensure that their day is a little bit more productive as well with that young person. So like with your family doctor, you have a very strong relationship, you talk about what you know as the parent as the expert of the child at home, and the expert of that how the way the child ticks, I suppose for want of a better word, and then what the professional the teacher knows about pedagogy, instruction, and ways to adapt the curriculum and the classroom experiences to support that child.

David Hetherington  07:42

I know ACSSO has put together a toolkit, if you like, for schools as to how to best structure family engagement. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the channels that schools use to deepen the relationship? You know, what are the different formats schools use to engage with families.

Di Giblin  07:57

So the key is communication. And it’s effective communication. And communication works differently for different families, fortunately, or unfortunately. So the suite of tools starts with good communication practices. And by that we don’t necessarily mean those long, jargon-ised or long messages from people, but make it short, simple and to the point. Continuous communication where no one wants a surprise. You know, I can give you example, halfway through my son’s year 10, we got a zero on his school certificate. And I went, is there a reason why I don’t know that before June? So that constant non surprises, but more importantly, there needs to be a positive one to start with. So we encourage in our suite of tools, first and foremost, positive communication at home as early as possible. And then the tough conversations become a lot easier if there needs to be any. There also needs to be opportunities for families to be involved in many different ways. But the better the relationship is between the classroom teacher and the parent, the better everything else follows through.

David Hetherington  09:05

So typically in the public school system, who decides how each school communicates? Is that something that happens at the classroom teacher level? Or is it something that principal will kind of structure on behalf of the whole school?

Di Giblin  09:18

We find that leadership’s the key. Good, strong leadership and commitment to family engagement will flow through to the classroom teacher, it’s sometimes a more difficult position for a classroom teacher to want to be engaged when she hasn’t got the support of the school executive and the school principal. So for us, we talk a lot with principals to ensure that principals lead in that strong family engagement and support their staff. We’ve been told through our research, that it’s the second most scariest thing for a teacher when they come out into the profession is to have to talk to parents and it’s really because yes, okay, their our, their our posessions.

David Hetherington  09:53

Of course, of course. I’d imagine there are perhaps, broadly two groups of families. There, there might be those who are right are very keen to engage with the school but aren’t sure how best to do it. But on the other hand, there’s probably a group who perhaps are more disadvantaged, whose first instinct might might not be to engage, but whose children could benefit equally from that engagement. And how should schools think about, on the one hand quickly, building, building linkages with those those families who are who are ready to go. But on the other reaching out to communities and households, that might be harder to tap into?

Di Giblin  10:27

Look, there are families who definitely have their own baggage, because of their experiences at school. Schools need to see families as all positive and all or wanting the best for the kids, the way that some families might express that might be quite different. And that’s, again, another set of tools that we need to give the school for that of how to react to that. And particularly in that pre-service time. Communication is the key.  And you know, our key message always is a positive lot of communication to start off with. Ensuring that what families want most is to know that their child is going to be looked after and nurtured and liked. And so those sorts of messages need to go out first, if possible, that positive phone call home to say, “hi, you know, I’m going to be working with your young, young one this year, give us some tricks, what do we need to know?”. You know, and so make that very positive that you’re actually going to be learning from the parent because they do know the child the best.  

David Hetherington  11:20

So that raises a question for me, of how important is that, that the engagement or the communication is two-way because I think perhaps one of the critiques is that it’s often one directional coming from the school in perhaps an undifferentiated format, and that from the perspective of a parent or carer, it’s hard to find a way to play back into that communication?

Di Giblin  11:41

It’s paramount that it’s two-way. And it’s it’s also paramount that the school validates the concerns of families or what the families have to say. As parents, we do know our kids the best, but we also know what they’re carrying with them when they come in. And you know, if we want to throw back to an experience in 1969, when I was in primary school, my cat died, it was devastating for me. Our school principal, Marjorie Bruce, was the writer of ‘Let’s be good spellers’. ‘Let’s make better English’, all those sorts of things. So we, you know, like she was in the ivory tower, as far as who’s concerned, she’d found out my cat died, I spent the whole day with her in her office, she bought me lunch. It’s one of the things I remember, it connected me. And it validated what was an absolute disaster for me. But when you look back at it, your cat died ok. It was, it was very important. And then she made contact with my parents, and said, “Look Diane didn’t come into class today. And it’s because I wanted her to recover or to, to see that we felt that her grief was important”. So that was a really good two way communication. I thought for the 60s in particular, when I look back at it.

David Hetherington  12:45

I think one of the lessons there is that in 1969, a principal had time to spend with a student on that basis. And you alluded to earlier, the pressures on the teaching workforce now and one of the one of the themes of the podcast, but but also one of the really tricky points in the public debate now is how are we equipping our teachers, you know, and resourcing them properly, such that they have the time to do what was once you know, more accessible for them,

Di Giblin  13:13

We’re asking for too much. If I can say bureaucracy overload, in paperwork, and, and also in the administration of schools. You know, once the principal was the educational leader, and I would have seen what Miss Bruce did as a very perfect mentoring leadership demonstration to the rest of the staff in school. And as far as ACSSO is concerned, our principals are employed to be educational leaders, and mentors and role models. And similarly with the leadership team. And what we’ve got at the moment is, you know, they’re also being site managers and doing lots of other things that possibly, industrially, I couldn’t say whether it needs to be handed to someone else or not. But is not really the role of what we would expect our principals to have.

David Hetherington  13:57

So let’s turn now Di to the impact of the pandemic. I know, at the Public Education Foundation, with the students we support through scholarships, we’ve seen hundreds of instances of students dislocated in various ways, you know, that can be as simple as not having had the laptop or the broadband to, to plug in. But we’ve also seen kind of more profound cases where students have been at home, ill with COVID, and the whole family has come down with COVID and even access to food and medicine, the essentials has been challenging. So we’re keenly aware of that impact. I know ACSSO, did a big survey earlier this year, about the impact of COVID on families. And I’m keen to ask you, firstly, the kind of the immediate lessons from from that survey the immediate outcomes of the survey. But secondly, how might this pandemic change family engagement? Are there different ways of engaging that schools have had to innovate because of this very unusual set of circumstances we’ve faced over the last couple years?

Di Giblin  14:58

Yes, sure. We’ve done a series of surveys, but profoundly what’s coming out of it is a time of crisis is not time to start your family engagement strategy. We found that schools that already had a good family engagement strategy, things were a lot smoother. In places where family engagement wasn’t one of the key strategies that schools were using, things went belly up very quickly, and are having difficulty in recovering. What we’ve also found in the recent surveys that schools are having some difficulty in cutting down the guard. Now that could be first and foremost, because of health concerns that we don’t want families rushing into schools or becoming part of schools. Because of that, in the primary school, it’s really key that the gates opened, you know, and we’ve noticed in a number of many schools that all of a sudden, we’ve got buzzers, we know why they’re there. Because we want to ensure the safety of children. And we want to ensure the safety of staff if someone is infected with COVID, or got a cold or just more to the point making people feel safe. What we need is some really nice signage or something out there that says, you know, you’re more than welcome, but please understand, we’ve got this buzzer for a reason, you know, that sort of thing. The other things that we’ve found is that the technology makes it a little bit easier to contact families, but it can be and I know, teachers have said this to us a bit of a burden that, you know, you’ve got this constant messaging backwards and forwards. And I know, during that two year period, my son’s a single dad, so his kids were with me while he was working.

David Hetherington  16:26

That raises an interesting question about technology, because I’m a parent of two children in public high schools. And I find oftentimes, you’re being asked to embrace a new app or a new platform. And, of course, the the children are great at it, the kids, the kids are second nature to them. And to what extent does it pose a problem for families to be asked, particularly parents and carers to be asked to take on new technologies. And you know, in some cases, it’s grandparents.

Di Giblin  16:56

And sometimes you’re taking on new technology with your workplace as well. So we added it up in our little office at home, there was myself, my husband, my two grandchildren and my son, there was 11 different platforms we were using. And that became an interesting task. So for families, yes, it became difficult. There were also families that were also dealing with dads on night shift, mums on night shift, little babies, younger children, we even had a number of families where the 12 student couldn’t be found. And that was because they were working to support so they were using this time, because they had their part-time Woolies job or their part-time Maccas job and that was supporting home. So they weren’t, they weren’t linking in at the right time.

David Hetherington  17:41

I think that’s that’s been a huge challenge for, for families to kind of grasp through the whole pandemic is you get report cards back, that would suggest, you know, your child’s been absent for some really significant part of the term. And you know, they’ve been sitting there, at the very least, notionally plugged into what’s going on? How intellectually plugged in is another question. So we’ve talked quite a lot about how schools structure themselves and position themselves for for great family engagement. What about what families tell your parents and carers tell you what did they like best? What are what are their best experiences look and sound like? What’s the positive feedback from from them?

Di Giblin  18:24

Look, I think the most positive feedback is to validate what they’re saying about their child and take that on board. Sometimes parents will sit awake all night about a concern that the teacher or the or the school staff may think that’s not really important, but it is. So just to listen and validate for parents. To make that we’ve got to make families feel like they can contact, that they are welcomed. That their decisions to contact the school are valid, and for families to understand that schools are busy places. But more importantly, if there’s something that is a really big issue that they think is going to be a great issue to, to make that known in whatever the most productive way for the school is possible. You know, I mean, we’ve used things like sending in a doctor’s report, as opposed to ringing up and unpacking it. And then the teacher can look at it at their time or, or sending an email.

David Hetherington  19:14

So it’s ease of engagement, you know, from the from the family into the school, but also some understanding coming back from the school as to what might be going on at home.

Di Giblin  19:21

And I can assure you from the many years I’ve worked as a community liaison officer, the more the families knew the difficulties that schools were under, the better the relationship became. Because unless the door is open, and there is the engagement, they don’t know. When, when we realise that there’s two sets of people moulding and working with this child or young person to help them to be the best they can be. If that philosophy is set up from the very beginning, that that’s what we’re here for. You’re here that for that and we’re here for that to make sure that that child’s experience and access and opportunity to make sure that that child can be the best they can be.

David Hetherington  19:58

Although I think that’s an excellent note to end on, that sense of collaboration right from the outset between schools and families. So thank you so much for joining us today and for, for sharing some insights. And you know the lessons of of long experience in parent school engagement, we really appreciate it. Hello Adam, ‘A’ ‘N’ ‘A’…how are you? 

Donna McGeary  20:21

We had a numeracy workshop here, where the parents came up to learn about what their children are learning in numeracy in stage two and stage three, and we had an enormous turnout. So that for them is so important to know, I want to support my child with their learning. I don’t necessarily know this system, I may not have had the opportunity to go to a primary school, to go into high school. So, for them, it’s a reassurance that I know I can come and find out what I need to know about my child’s education, and I’m involved in what they’re learning.

Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos  21:00

Well, 98% of our families come from language backgrounds other than English. So, we’ve got Arabic speaking families, Urdu, Indonesian families, yep. 

Donna McGeary  21:15

So very much a multicultural community. They’re very aspirational for their children to, to go on to university as our surveys show, our parent surveys. They want to be very involved in what’s what’s happening at school. 

Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos  21:34

And I would say that our diversity here at Punchbowl is is our strength. And it’s not, not like many other communities, but it certainly is is our strength here at Punchbowl. They’re a generous, loving community and very trusting of what we’re doing here at the school.

David Hetherington  21:57

The principal of Punchbowl Public School, Donna McGeary and deputy principal Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos say there’s a misconception that disadvantaged families, or parents and carers from diverse backgrounds may have less capacity to be involved in their children’s learning at school. The experience of the playgroups in Punchbowl’s Schools as  Community Centre (SaCC) has been that families are eager to get involved in their kids’ learning. This is borne out by the research to Barbara Barker is from the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth or ARACY. She’s found that it’s what parents do with their children, not what level of education families have or their socio-economic status, that really counts. 

Barbara Barker  22:37

Hi, my name is Barbara Barker. I’m a senior researcher here at ARACY. I’ve been working with ARACY for about eight years now. And predominantly I’ve been focused on researching parents and family engagement, which we’ll shorten to family engagement for this conversation if that if that’s helpful.

David Hetherington  22:55

Well, thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Barbara, I know that ARACY has been deeply involved in parent and family engagement for for well over a decade. I know you’ve been managing a very in depth four year project funded by the federal government looking at communities and practice around family engagement. Can you tell us why family engagement has such a powerful impact on student outcomes?

Barbara Barker  23:19

Put simply, it’s because families matter. But unfortunately, families don’t always realise just how much they matter. And some families don’t see their role in learning as one of partnership or collaboration with the school or teacher. And that might be because they have an uneasy relationship with education from their own experience. So they might have a bit of baggage which makes it difficult for them to feel comfortable in the school environment perhaps. Or because in their culture, teachers are the experts, so you aren’t seen as needing to be on the same platform, in collaboration or in partnership with your child’s teacher. But by family engagement in learning, we’re really talking about the learning that happens in homes, in cars, in communities, anywhere that families spend time together through everyday activities anywhere, anytime learning.

David Hetherington  24:14

So this is much more than just information flows between, between schools and families. As a parent, I know, the kind of first step to my involvement with the school is, is just managing the information flow but you’re talking about something much deeper. You’re talking about the way in the home, parents and carers can subtly support the learning outcomes of their of their children.

Barbara Barker  24:37

The challenge I think for school communities is making family engagement relevant to their school and their community. And put simply there isn’t a set way for schools to adopt a culture of parent engagement. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ as we know the context in the setting of each school community is different and that’s what makes a, a school community the beautiful microcosm that it is. But ultimately, there needs to be a commitment from the school leadership, the school leadership team and a vision for how they want their, their school, their staff, their educators to work with families. Can I just say here, David, that the work or this, this effort by schools is never finished, I don’t know if you see that as an unfortunate thing or a fortunate thing, but each new school year brings a new cohort of families, students, and even educators will be coming into a school community for the first time at the beginning of the year. And additionally, students learning needs change as they age. So family engagement for learning needs to adapt, adapt to those changes. So essentially, schools need to embed appropriate structures and provide the resources and supports that are required by their staff. And I’m not just talking about educators, I do mean, people who might be front facing to families. So there might be the front desk, umm, the staff at the front desk, when we need them to have the resources and supports in place to sustain engagement practices.

David Hetherington  26:06

So let’s talk about this in the context of real life case studies, real life schools, I know you’ve worked um, you’ve profiled engagement at a rural K to 12 school in Victoria called the Timboon School. I know you’ve also done it at Liverpool Boys High, which is a large metropolitan high school? How might it look different in such different environments?

Barbara Barker  26:27

Well, in all environments, it’s about collaborating with the families out there and finding out what is it that speaks to those families about their child’s learning. So in the case of Timboon, it’s very agricultural area, and the school goes to year 12. But they were losing students to that school who couldn’t see the benefit in staying at a school that was very focused on agricultural studies. Until they started to go out to their families and find out some of the expertise that was in that community that could be brought into the school and infused into the curriculum. And then suddenly, students realised, Oh, hang on, I don’t have to just become a dairy farmer, like Mum or Dad or Grandpa, I could learn about artificial insemination practices, like so and so’s Dad or Mum down the road. So they built a lavender farm. And some of the students thought that was terrific, because they could design some products that come from lavender, and learn about business initiatives that way. So that’s a really terrific example of really harnessing what’s happening out there in the community and bringing it in and infusing it into the curriculum. Why not? At Liverpool, they were having some struggles with some of the students being engaged in their learning. So they talk to the students about passion projects. And the students had to think about what was something that would really cheer them up to come to school and learn about what is something they wanted to do their learning in. And that was brought in that situation they brought families into, to take a look at what the boys were learning at school to really harness those families who might be from migrant backgrounds. And and like I mentioned before, might not feel so comfortable coming into the school. But the principal talked to me about how it was motivating for those students to realise that their families were going to be coming in to see their work. It would be on display their projects in their passion area would be on display. So that was exciting for them to know that they’d need to step up. And it really engaged in their learning so that Mum or Dad or Grandpa might be coming in to have a look at the results.

David Hetherington  28:34

So I can imagine there might be parents out there listening to this thinking, “well, what can I do? I don’t understand necessarily how to how to begin this process, how to kick off an engagement with with the school like this”. What would you say to parents to kind of inform them of the opportunities to do this and to kind of instill or build up their confidence in in being able to support engagement at school.

Barbara Barker  29:00

The first thing I would be saying to parents is you matter, you matter a whole lot and you know your child better than anybody else. The Teacher is an expert in learning and teaching practices, and they’ve done a degree in that. They don’t have a degree in your child and so what you have is something really critical, which is called parent knowledge, um, and nobody else has that. So when those two really, when those two expert forces come together, the teacher and the parent or the carer, when I say parent, I mean a very inclusive term that implies that we’re talking about the main caregiver for that child, when those two forces come together, that can be a very powerful thing. Let’s remember that a lot of this stuff is already happening. And parents need to be affirmed and reassured that they’re probably already doing a lot of this stuff anyway. What, what it boils down to is affirming the potential having high aspirations, high expectations for your child, having those parent child conversations and being open to conversations about what’s learned what’s happening at school, who’s learning what, what are some of the big ideas happening in the world. Obviously, you know, sitting at the dinner table once or twice a week, if not more, if you can just talk about the incidental discussions that come up. For the younger children reading is really important. So we talk about having a positive reading environment, a literacy rich environment. Now that doesn’t need to look like a wall full of, full of books at home, it can just be one or two books, but it’s about that shared reading, understanding the awareness of different types of reading that can happen. And it is about parent teacher communication. So making yourself available to have conversations with your child’s teacher or teachers as it may be in secondary school. Having a two-way positive communication about learning. They’re the main things.

David Hetherington  31:00

I really liked that idea of the two powerful forces coming together the parent knowledge on the one hand and the teaching expertise on the other. Now, there’s a little bit of rhetoric around the idea that disadvantaged families or families experiencing different barriers might be less able to support their children’s learning and the ability to do this is, is just a function of education of off the kind of parent or carer group. I think in the ARACY research that I’ve, that I’ve looked at, you’ve noted that it’s, it’s not what level of education or socio-economic standing a family or household has. It’s more about what parents do with their children. Is that a fair observation?

Barbara Barker  31:41

Yes, it’s true that family engagement mitigates disadvantage and family challenges. So the research that you’re speaking about is from actually a little while ago, almost 20 years ago was, it was a quote that we’ve got, which says, for all children, the quality of the home learning environment is more important for intellectual and social development than parental occupation, education or income, what parents do is more important than who parents are. So as I mentioned earlier, that means that families matter, and that what matters most is what they do not not what level of education they have, or how much money they have. But having said that, it is a tricky thing, because we know that social disadvantage does feed into student achievement. For all students to be supported and to do well, we need to consider that parenting is about knowledge and beliefs. So do I have the self-belief that I have an impact on my child’s learning. For children growing up with disadvantage, or in challenging circumstances, we see that the development of those subjective learning resources that I talked about before they can be compromised, we might not be able to eliminate toxic stress from everyone’s life. But we can help parents to manage some of those those stresses more effectively, so they can provide healthy environments for their children. So family engagement can mitigate disadvantage, but parents might need support, and this is where schools are really important, they might need support to highlight their strengths, they might need support to build their capacity to support their child’s learning. So schools have a role, a really important role to help build the capacity of their educators, but also their families to engage and to support both of those parties to work more effectively with each other.

David Hetherington  33:35

A lot of the students and schools we support at the Public Education Foundation are in very diverse communities. It prompts me to wonder whether schools need to tailor their engagement to some of the different populations that the school community serve, and maybe bring these diverse communities together to make the engagement more effective?

Barbara Barker  34:00

Family Engagement builds on families strengths and culture and it can create equity. And that means we need to ensure that any opportunity for meaningful engagement both sensitively and respectfully values all aspects of diversity. So I’m talking about cultural background, like you mentioned, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background, disability status, socio-economic background, those sorts of things. We need schools to remember that it’s really unhelpful to think about families, as some people just won’t engage. You know, we hear this from some schools, some teachers, it’s just not in their culture. Some believe that disadvantaged families don’t engage because they don’t, ah, they don’t value education as much as others. And I think that perception of poverty really prevents us from connecting engagement, family engagement with equity, with students success. So, the most transformational way that I’ve, I think we can talk about family engagement is to emphasize the importance of inclusiveness and equity by talking about this as an opportunity for all. So yep, schools definitely need to consider how they might inadvertently cause barriers to engagement at school, and they need to think about some of the common barriers and how they could be addressed for their school community. Now, that’s not an easy thing to do. But it really it means bringing the right mix of people together, who reflect the diversity of the school community, and who can celebrate what that means. It doesn’t mean bringing together the loudest voices, or the people who always say, “Yep, I can be there”. So we need to think about has the school really thought about how representative say your parent leaders are, of your diverse families? Have you considered all forms of diversity? Have you considered your socio-economic, your ethnic, your cultural, your linguistic, your gender identities, your disability, your family definitions, so your foster families, your same-sex parent families? Have you considered all of those families in your mix of, you know, bringing together the voices of the community? I think that’s a big question for schools to ask themselves.

David Hetherington  36:17

Well, that’s a terrific note to end on. Barb, thank you so much for sharing that experience and those lessons with us. We wish you all the best in your work as you continue to explore and promote an important topic.

Barbara Barker  36:29

Thanks very much. And thank you so much for the opportunity today, David, I really appreciate that.

David Hetherington  36:38

That was Barbara Barker, senior researcher at ARACY, the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. Before her, you heard from Di Giblin, the CEO of the Australian Council of State School Organisations. And we met Donna McGeary and Eleni Mavridis-Kontakos, the principal and deputy principal of Punchbowl Public School. My name is David Hetherington, and you’ve been listening to Hands Up, a podcast from the Public Education Foundation that answers all your burning questions about our public schools. We’ll include a link in our show notes to the Parent Engagement Implementation Guide, published by Barbara Barker and the team at ARAY. It also has links to her research on why family engagement matters. Our website is public education foundation.org.au where you can learn more about our work supporting young people with scholarships and in advocating for a high quality well resourced public school system. Hands Up was produced by Jennifer Macey and Olivia Rosen, with editing by Holly Forrest and Emily Perkins. Sound Engineering by Jason Nicholas and research by Melanie Morrison. We’d like to acknowledge our former colleague Janine Miguez-Shaw, who was a source of inspiration for this podcast. Thank you to the New South Wales Teachers Federation for their support and for providing this excellent podcasting studio. A big shout out to the students and staff in the instrumental music program at Fort Street High School in Sydney for composing, performing and arranging our wonderful theme music. This podcast was produced on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the first and original teachers and knowledge holders of this land. Thanks so much for listening