Everyone agrees: children do better when their parents show an interest in their school activities, help their learning, and praise their achievements. Attendance increases, children’s motivation is higher, and classroom behaviour, happiness and outcomes all improve. It’s no wonder that parent engagement is a key school priority, and a select intervention to help close the gap for disadvantaged children. So how are some schools getting it so wrong?

Fact: The more families talk positively about school, the better children do. Attendance increases, children’s motivation is higher, and classroom behaviour, happiness and outcomes improve.

The Innovate My School community is warmly invited to the ITTE and MirandaNet 32nd International Annual Conference at Winchester University, to be held from the 7th-8th June. This exciting event’s proceedings will be based around the theme of ‘Raising Aspirations for Digital Education’. Find out why you need to attend below...

The library should be the beating heart of your school, and the most valuable resource in it is - of course - the librarian! Sadly, however, sometimes children need more encouragement to come into the library. They may be reluctant or struggling readers, or reading may not be seen as ‘cool’ by their friends. Here are five steps to change this.

The teacher workload crisis is hitting headlines on an increasingly frequent basis. Educators are expected to keep huge amount of plates spinning at all times, so it’s vital that they have everything they need. However, even with all of the most cutting-edge resources around, schools are all-too-often short on arguably the most rarefied asset: time. This is the issue that the team at TrainingToolz is looking to overhaul for good.

Springpad began simply because I loved the learning benefits my students experienced when creating their work digitally. However, I hated the long-winded process of trying to keep this work organised or give effective feedback to it. I wanted to resolve the grinding workload that most teachers face with traditional paper workbooks, such as the difficulty of storing any multimedia and the lack of access for parents. It seems archaic that teachers globally still print reams of paper, cut and stick it inside each of their student’s workbooks. The app improves learning through a seamless, paperless teacher-student-parent workflow.

If you know edtech, chances are you know The Edtech Podcast; the one-stop audio-shop for technology innovation in education. In September, fans of the podcast are in for a treat, as the first Edtech Podcast Festival will be held within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Hackney, London.

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a community to work together to provide support and guidance, resources, and practical help. This is especially important when someone - a child, a family - faces challenges and are feeling lost and alone. Schools are, by their very nature, a community. Built of myriad parts, it has human relationships at its heart: teacher-pupil, SLT-teacher, head-governors, and so on. This community, as a system, when functioning well, has the children, at its core.

Many schools struggle to get parent / community engagement right. The nature of teaching sees us thrown into a classroom with 20 or so students; when a bell goes, we move on to another class, and then to another. Our teaching is dictated by the bell. Unless collaborative time is factored into our busy days, we tend to work in isolation; sharing a few ideas as we pass by each other, or when we get a chance to meet at breaks over casual conversations. So if we find it difficult to find collaborative time with each other, how on earth can we find the time to get parents and the community engaged?

If a child becomes demotivated with their learning, it can become difficult for both teachers and parents to identify the cause. Children often behave differently at home than they do at school, and unfortunately this is not always understood by parents if there isn’t an easy way to see the progression trends themselves. Engaging parents with their child’s education is therefore crucial, so that they can work with teachers together to support child development. Although most will agree with this, there are a number of challenges and disagreements on how the process should be managed.