FLWs, Family Link Workers, Lunchtime club

Bridging the home-school divide

The role of family link workers is to encourage parents' participation and interest in school life. Fiona Taylor shares her school's experience in the benefits of developing this role

The five outcomes of the Every Child Matters agenda are now a mantra for everyone working with young people. For schools the challenge is how to support those not currently achieving these aims. As the heart of many communities, we are well placed to put in place support, but ‘how’ and ‘what’ are questions that many schools have yet to answer.

A group of schools in Wiltshire have made a step towards this by employing family link workers (FLWs). The school where I am SENCO, based in an area of social deprivation, has employed FLWs for a total of 15 hours a week.

The two people employed in this capacity are already established members of staff. With an immediate advantage in approaching disengaged families, they have wasted no time in starting to build bridges and provide opportunities for inviting parents into school.

The two workers see their role as providing a link between school and home, one that is unthreatening and available, that is less ‘official’ than approaching the teaching staff or visiting the office, but nonetheless supportive and accountable. For many of the parents, school is a scary place. They did not have good educational experiences, and their expectations of their children’s time at school are viewed through these eyes, leaving them feeling that school is not a place they belong in or have any belief in.

By being ‘around’ at the beginning and end of school, out and about, chatting to parents and carers, our FLWs are able to pick up on issues and problems at the very beginning. Telling a distraught mum that the new school jumper she bought is probably in lost property, and that they will check it out and get back to them the next day may seem small and inconsequential, but it has many positive repercussions. The parent does not have to come in and speak to a busy teacher or the receptionist, or worse, not come in at all but feel aggrieved and mistrustful of the whole establishment.

There are several other aspects of the work that is undertaken to encourage parents to come into school and begin to build relationships that will benefit their child’s learning.

Lunchtime club is a way for some children to experience a more controlled social environment during their lunch break, and parents are routinely invited into school to share in this time with their children. An after-school workshop also provides a chance for parents to spend constructive time with their children, taking part in an arts-based activity. Coffee surgeries are also routinely provided; just a chance for parents to come into school and sit and have a coffee with one of our FLWs. This is a pressure-free, secure environment in which a parent can broach something that they are finding difficult or is troubling them. For parents who do not come to school at all, home visits are also arranged.

The FLWs can occasionally unearth some potentially difficult issues, and see some families that are in real need. A file of outside agencies (the ‘Find It’ folder) is readily available to point people towards external services, as are channels of advice from both myself and the headteacher. Notes on various issues are regularly fed back to the headteacher (and also the child protection coordinator) to ensure necessary information is being recorded.

On chatting to one of the FLWs, I was able to find out more about what she saw as the biggest successes of her role. She cited one parent, whose bad experiences during her education and after had left her mistrustful of authorities, but who now attends all of the projects and events to which parents are invited, and has enrolled on several courses to further her own education with great success. Both of this parent’s children have high attendance, are supported at home and are making progress.

Another parent has begun paid employment within the school. The FLW was particularly pleased to have heard the ‘language of choice’ being used around the school by this parent in order to manage behaviour, and hoped that this has also transferred to her home setting.

From the headteacher’s point of view FLWs have lessened the parents’ need to see him about more minor issues, leaving him free to deal with the bigger ones, while still being available to parents as an accessible member of the school community.

What else might come of this work? With families being referred and signposted earlier to different support mechanisms, and the school being aware of different issues that families are dealing with before they reach crisis point, might a knock-on effect be a reduction in emergency interventions by social services? We can certainly hope so. And if school is then seen as the place to obtain help, rather than the place that might refer a family to social services, the positive relationships are strengthened once again.

As part of the ECM agenda, the ‘core’ of services that everyone should be able to access through schools by 2010 includes parenting and family support. While there are still issues to be dealt with, and we are by no means perfect, we feel we are making steps in that direction, and, as Ofsted's July 2006 evaluation suggests, helping to enhance self-confidence, improve relationships, raise aspirations and produce better attitudes to learning.

Fiona Taylor is SENCO at a Wiltshire primary

This article first appeared in Primary Headship - Feb 2008

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