Establishing Effective Communication with Families Around Behaviour

As leaders, teachers, parents, and carers, we all have children’s best interests at heart. While we may not always agree on exactly what that looks like in practice, especially in relation to behaviour, there’s no doubt that children and young people thrive when the adults around them all pull in the same direction, and there is effective communication between home and school.

The best family engagement strategies recognise this, and prioritise regular, positive communication with home, not only when there are bumps in the road, but also when things are going well.

They reflect the belief that most children and young people love to have their successes at school – both academic and personal – shared with their families: it boosts feelings of self-worth and self-esteem, and helps pupils feel seen, understood, and valued.

Barriers to effective communication with families

However, effective communication can be tricky to establish. For a great many reasons, there is sometimes a disconnect between home and school, and some families can be harder to reach than others, through no fault of their own.

They may be juggling multiple responsibilities, and communication with school is simply not a top priority; perhaps they had only negative experiences themselves with the education system, leaving them wary of perceived authority figures; or maybe there are deeply embedded feelings of separation and ‘otherness’ that inhibit their ability to engage with school leaders and teachers, such as cultural or language barriers.

A paradigm of negativity

Barriers aside, for some families, the only communication they might have with their child’s school is in response to so-called ‘bad news’. These are the parents and carers who, when they open an email or take a call from school, may automatically assume that there’s a problem, such as a behaviour incident, detention, or exclusion that involves their child.

This can then set the tone for all future interactions, and lead to a widening of the communication gap, pushing families even further away.

Strategies for fostering effective communication with families

To bridge this gap, we need to think outside the box, and make effective communication around behaviour the cornerstone of our family engagement strategies. That way, we can more readily lean on strong, positive relationships with parents and carers, if and when we do need to address problems, or have difficult conversations.

1: Use analytics to determine engagement

Using concrete metrics around current communication channels and engagement strategies can be a useful starting point. Taking a quantitative approach, and analysing relevant data, enables us to pose questions, such as: what proportion of families open our emails? How many attend morning drop-in sessions as opposed to evenings? What types of response do we get to social media posts compared to emails? What is attendance at parents’ evenings like?

We can then identify and further develop the strategies that are working, and begin to filter out or adapt those that are less impactful. It’s vital to streamline the number of initiatives we use, however; if not, we risk becoming overwhelmed, which could lead to a disjointed, incoherent approach.