Practitioner section

• Improving outcomes
• Who are you trying to reach?
• Engaging parents
  • Barriers to parental involvement
  • Reaching and including vulnerable families
  • What parents need from early years services
  • Working inclusively
• What services should delivered?
• Training the workforce - who does the work?
• Monitoring and Evaluation

Engaging parents

Reaching and including parents of children at risk of learning delay is a core task in developing and delivering effective services to improve outcomes for children. It can be a time-consuming and challenging task, requiring persistent and creative outreach work. This section will look at what stops parental involvement and help you think about how your service could overcome these barriers.

In their study of what works in parenting support, Moran et al.  looked at what helped services in:

• 'getting' parents (enabling them to use the service in the first place)
• 'keeping' parents (enabling them to attend sessions regularly or complete a course) and
• 'engaging' parents (making it possible for them to engage actively in what the service has to offer).

They highlighted the importance of five factors in successfully managing these tasks: relational; practical; cultural and contextual; strategic and structural.

This downloadable checklist can be used to do an 'audit' to establish whether there are steps that could be taken to make existing services more effective in reaching and engaging parents – or as a planning tool for new services.

Also in this section

• Improving outcomes
• Barriers to parental involvement
• Reaching and including vulnerable families
• What parents need from early years services
• Working inclusively