What prevents parents from getting involved in their children’s education?  Most of us would list a range of reasons including poor literacy and numeracy skills, negative personal experiences of school as a child and parents who simply don’t value education at all.

Following our workshop at the ConcertEd Partnership Ofsted Conference, several of the delegates asked if we could put upload our tips about involving young people in school improvement.

For those people who did not come to the conference, some of the value of these is lost without the self reflection activity that supported the session, but I hope this will give you a flavour.

Here are the tips:

Today, Ofsted has put the controversial Parent View website live. The outcomes from the survey will be used as part of Ofsted’s information gathering process and in some cases could trigger early re-inspections of schools.

Schools need consultants.  We would say that!  What you might be surprised to hear is that we don’t necessarily mean us.  It may be that your consultants are closer to home than you think.

The recent riots in London and our major cities have brought a lot of debate about society and young people.  Some people are arguing that the cause is mindless violence. Others assert that the cause has more to do with deep-rooted problems within society such as poverty, poor parenting and the lack of opportunities for young people today. 

We have been a bit quiet on the blog recently as we have been busy working with schools, meeting with partners and working with young people to develop new programmes and ideas.  This time has been very valuable for us.  It has helped to deepen our understanding of the newly emerging needs of schools as well as our appreciation of those who work in them and work to support them.

As education consultants, we find ourselves in frequent conversations about the type of work that we do and our areas of specialism.  We gain so much information from these conversations.  Not only do we learn what is important to people and what their anxieties are, we also find out a lot about the general perceptions of people working within the education sector.

In our current financial climate schools are finding it increasingly difficult to balance their budgets.  Alongside this, numerous education initiatives have had their funding reduced or cut completely. Added together this means that many experiences that were open to our young people are simply not available any more. Our children are now suffering from a decline in opportunity.

We have just returned from two weeks that have been split between rest and intensive training in new skills.  I find that both of these things help to focus the mind and therefore we are now back, full of energy and new ideas.