Partnership with parents

Mt Wellington’s Sylvia Park Primary School is being funded to set up a project co-ordinator position to act as a key link between home and school.

The school is setting up a learning partnership with the community to help families understand how well their children are doing at school, as well as challenge the school to consider its effectiveness in delivering programmes for Māori and Pasifika students.

One of its central aims is to drive up demand for quality education by empowering parents to ask the hard questions.

“We want our parents to be more demanding of us,” says principal Barbara Alo’alatoa.
The school is helping parents understand the assessment system and has promoted teacher Ariana Williams into the project manager role.

Ariana’s role is full-time and she is spending time out in the community, meeting families and understanding their needs.

She says its important to explain to parents what teachers are doing to support their child and she is trialing ways to explain the school assessment to parents.

Research will be a key component of the project, including monitoring of student achievement, looking for changes in teacher practice, changes in schools systems to better support community involvement and adoption of innovative learning programmes.

The research and assessment will also look for changes at home, with families more involved in student learning, and community engagement demonstrated by increasing parental confidence levels when interacting with staff.

Sylvia Park Primary School wants parents more involved in discussing how their children are learning – including parental challenges to teaching methods.

Then the school hopes it will be on the receiving end of questions from demanding parents  who understand student achievement data in the same way teachers do.

Barbara Alo’alatoa describes the project as a learning partnership between the decile two school and its community, half of whom are Pasifika. Another 30 percent are Māori, with Asian and Middle Eastern cultures also represented.