Why it’s Important to Know an Octopus Can Walk on Land

This is a guest blog post from Dr Janet Goodall, an academic at Bath University whose research focuses on parental engagement. Janet delivered SPTC's 2017 annual lecture back in March.







We have an achievement gap in the UK, which is based not on ability but on background: children from wealthier backgrounds do better in our system.  It’s a simple thing to say – and a very difficult thing to solve.

We do know some things about solving the problem, and one of them is that the solution doesn’t lie in the classroom.  Schools and staff have done a very good job in narrowing the gap – but the gains that can be made in school have, for the most part, been made.  We need to stop looking in the wrong place for the solution, and look where we can make a difference.

That means we need to be working with parents, and we need to be thinking about the home learning environment.  I don’t mean getting parents into school (remember, the answer isn’t there) and I don’t really mean getting parents to help with homework.  Both of those are good things but we’re already doing that, and we’re supporting a lot of parents – but not, perhaps, the parents who most need support.

If we want to help narrow the achievement gap, we need to help all parents know how to support learning outside of school – in the home, in the car, wherever they are with their children.

With younger children, that can mean letting parents know how important it is to read stories over, and over and over again, to support early literacy; how important stirring a cake and sprinkling decorations can be for developing the muscles that will help the child write, how important noticing print and numbers in daily life, and talking about them, are for being school ready.  Even with teenagers, we know that fifteen minutes of conversation a week with parents, about social media, TV shows or movies, is correlated to how engaged those young people are with reading. 

It’s about letting parents know how important they are to their children’s learning, and working with them to support that learning.

Of course, that means a sea change: schools, and their staff, have to realise how important learning outside the home is, and work to support it.  That’s a new idea for a lot of people in schools, and we need to think carefully about how we do it.

And that brings me to the octopus in the title.

 In David Attenborough’s series, The Hunt, he showed us that an octopus could drag itself out of the water and across land to the next rock pool.  How many thousands – perhaps millions – of parents were answering questions about how far an octopus could go on land, the next morning on the way to school?  That’s a prime example of the home learning environment, and it’s the sort of thing we can all support – and that we need to support, if we want to give all of our young people the best chance at life.

SQA Fieldwork - what's it all about?

No, we’re not talking about tattie hoakin’ or anything similar – it’s an interesting piece of work by SQA about what parents, pupils and teachers in schools think about the SQA qualifications our youngsters take in schools, and especially the changes that have been (and are being) made.

Although not written for parents, it is worthwhile taking a look, particularly if you have a youngster coming up to or in Senior Phase at secondary school, or if you are on a parent council at a secondary school.

From our perspective, the key issues for parents (and parent councils) in the report are:

-       The move from Broad General Education (at the end of S3) into Senior Phase (S4 onwards) is still an issue. Many schools are looking for subject choices before the end of S3 – in some cases in S1. This may be for a number of reasons, but many parents fear this, and varying numbers of subject options, are narrowing choice for their young people.

-       Slow pace of learning and ‘treading water’ in S1-3 was also raised often

-       Many young people and teachers feel the pace of learning and the complexity of the subjects goes up too steeply as they start working for qualifications – the aim of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was that the pace would be even from S1 – 6

-       Parents and young people say they are not clear about the CfE levels, and what they mean for youngsters’ learning

-       Parents overall do not have a clear idea of their youngster’s progress

-       Over-assessment continues to be an issue, with young people feeling under a lot of pressure

-       N4 is discussed a lot: while teachers generally would like to see an exam at the end, pupils are more in favour of different levels of pass (at the moment it is just pass or fail.)

-       There is also a lot about whether N4 is a worthwhile qualification, whether it is valued by young people, parents and employers.

-       ‘Over presenting’ at N5 is also highlighted: teachers say they are under pressure to put pupils forward for an N5 even when they don’t believe it is the right thing. They say the pressure comes from parents as well as head teachers and the local council.

It is interesting that ¼ of schools said that good communication with parents and carers where decisions were being made about N4 or N5 led to little or no parental pressure to put a pupil forward for a qualification the teacher felt was unsuitable.

The report throws up a lot for schools, parents and young people to think about.

From our perspective, the big things are about how schools are communicating with individual parents, and how parent councils can help. There is also a big question mark about how parent councils are making sure the school management are listening to the views of parents (and pupils) about qualifications. If schools that communicate well with parents report that good parental communication removes or reduces parent pressure to put pupils forward at the wrong level, what does that tell us about the other ¾?