David Cameron and Ken Edwards set out the creative approach that they have been taking to professional learning in Skills Development Scotland. They describe why it is so important to engage with and supporting parents in their role as career influencers.

If you are engaging with this website and reading this, then you probably share our concerns. With very laudable exceptions, we don’t always make the difference that we want to make for those most challenged by the circumstances in which they live. We certainly don’t manage to do it often enough.

Colleagues in Skills Development Scotland (SDS) took that view. They recognised they weren’t engaging as effectively as wished with parents and families who most needed their support. They also recognised what research tells us, that parents and peers have far more influence when it comes to learning and career choices than we do as professionals. When they were asked about priorities for their own training, they specified parental and family engagement and that was where things got interesting.

Creative conversations

We decided to take what was, for us, a fresh approach to training. We based the three professional learning sessions on the Creative Conversations that Linda Lees from the Arts and Creativity team at City of Edinburgh Council had been organising for the last 10 years. The format was to have short contributions of various kinds, but these would be designed to stimulate thinking and discussion.

The idea was to challenge preconceptions, encourage reflection and help attendees to find answers. We did not want to tell people what to do. Our view was that they had had too much of that. We also felt that they had very different starting points and that there was a great deal of good practice to build on. Finally, we felt that our colleagues were far more likely to change their practice if they believed in the change, indeed, if they had decided on that change, rather than if we demanded that change from them.

Reaching the ‘hard-to-reach’

We called the series “Reaching the “hard-to-reach” – building links with families” and the inverted commas around the term hard-to-reach were very deliberate. Such was the interest in these opportunities that all 300 places for each session were filled in less than 24 hours from the link going live. Recordings of the sessions can be accessed via Skills Development Scotland’s MyWoW partner resource area or directly via the SDS Education Youtube channel.

• Session 1: Why these conversations matter
• Session 2: Looking at the big picture
• Session 3: What can we learn from?

Session 1: Why these conversations matter

The first session involves Chris Kilkenny, a young single parent, living on benefits, or at least he would be if his payments had not been stopped in error. He tells his story of growing up in poverty and shares his expectations and ambitions for himself and his young son. The impact, even in an online conversation, was remarkable.

We also heard from Maureen Trumper, from Home-start, who has worked directly with families in need, and Pauline Scott who runs Tigers Ltd, a company offering apprenticeships to young people, often from deprived backgrounds.

Session 2: Looking at the big picture

In session 2, we pulled in the big guns – Tristram Hooley, whom you might just have heard of, Phil Beadle, former Teacher of the Year, author and iconoclast and Suzanne Zeedyk, a developmental psychologist and leading campaigner about the impact and effect of Adverse Childhood experiences.

Session 3: What can we learn from?

Session 3 was our ‘voices from the field’ conversation. We heard from Joanna Murphy who was a leading voice in the National Parent Forum Scotland. She and NPFS have demonstrated an impressive ability to explain even the most complex issues straightforwardly.

We also featured Linda Lees, who had done much to inspire our approach, talking about the Discover! Project which had set out to tackle issues associated with poverty. The Project’s success in engaging even the most alienated of families, including refugees and asylum seekers had been striking.

Finally, we heard from Eileen Prior from Connect who has been closely involved with SDS in the Partnerships in Schools initiative. The aims of that project are to make parental engagement with schools effective rather than tokenistic and, through that, get the widest possible representation from families.

Interactive online conversations

All the contributions were of high quality – a fact confirmed by the feedback from participants. That is what we aimed for when we planned the sessions, but the outcomes and responses surprised us. We used Microsoft Teams and the Chat function was a revelation. We had huge numbers of comments, questions and challenges. The tone was constructive and positive and really made sure that we got the very best from the presenters, but it also became three dimensional very quickly.

Participants interacted with each other as well as with the contributors and, suddenly, we had the exchange of practice that we had probably hoped would follow on from the conversations. That engagement has continued with Team Leaders telling us that they are going to use the recordings to further develop discussions. For anyone involved in staff development, this is the Holy Grail – training that does not stop when a session ends and which becomes organic and part of both formal and informal conversations.

Outcomes

The formal sessions also generated immediate outcomes.

We invited any SDS colleagues to attending to bring a partner, most of whom were school staff, and there was no doubt that this paid off in terms of improved relationships, enhanced mutual understanding and a renewed commitment to joint working. There were lots of “next steps” identified. Commonly, colleagues wanted to build on strategies and approaches that had been developed during lockdown that they wished to continue They were creating new maps for contacts with clients and thinking differently about partnerships.

SDS was challenged, again, positively and constructively, about how we assessed success and used data. For the organisation, the learning will continue too.

We were left in no doubt that we had been successful and we need to reflect further on how we managed that, but here are a few of what we think are some of the key ingredients:-

• The focus of the training was identified by staff
• It was deliberately designed to be interactive and we constantly invited contributions throughout the sessions
• We offered questions, challenges and examples, rather than answers
• We saw curiosity as key
• We planned the core of the sessions carefully, but left space for development
• The mixed audience really enriched the discussions