Creating Tomorrow
Newsletter September 2016
I am in Australia for four weeks; it's great to be back down under. I was pleased to be invited to help facilitate discussions at the International Confederation of Principals conference last week in Perth and am looking forward to working in Melbourne and Brisbane in the coming weeks.
This month's newsletter looks at stakeholder engagement and consultation. Included is a simple way of finding out how different groups perceive participation in your school and is a good way to initiate a discussion about it. It also includes research into the thorny question of hard to reach parents.
If you have been forwarded this by a colleague click the 'Follow Pat Collarbone ' button to your right. As always we welcome your feedback.
Pat Collarbone
Parent and community 'voice' in schools
The ladder of participation
The Ladder of Participation is a model for thinking about youth participation developed by Roger Hart. The bottom three rungs describe youth involvement that is not true participation whereas the top five rungs describe true participation.
One way to utilise this model is to draw the ladder on a large brown paper and ask individuals and/or groups to place a note on the ladder which best describes how they regard the planned/current participation and/or how they would like to see it in the future. The exercise is most effective when individuals have marker pens and large Post-it notes on which they can make comments.Typical duration 30-45 minutes. The facilitator of the exercise can then manage a discussion of issues that arise from different group perspectives, hopes and views, e.g. How do you feel about x view of this? How can you work together to achieve a greater level of participation?
Consult2 has other useful tools for engaging and consulting with stakeholders.
How to involve hard to reach parents
- What do school leaders mean by hard-to-reach parents?
- Barriers to parental engagement
- Strategies to encourage parental engagement and overcome barriers - below are the suggestions it makes.