Parental Engagement

Parental Engagement Statement

The Education Endowment foundation defines Parent engagement as

“the involvement of parents in supporting their children’s academic learning.”

At Uplands we both support and encourage this so that parents feel involved and informed about their child’s education and pupils are able to celebrate and share their achievements.

We aim to provide a warm and welcoming environment for our families so that parents feel able to approach school with any issues, concerns or comments and feel both welcome and comfortable on site.

Parents comment that communication between Uplands school and home is excellent and they feel well informed about what is happening in school. We communicate in the following ways:

Text messaging service
Monthly Newsletters (paper and digital)
School Facebook page
Letters
School website
Marvellous Me app communication

We provide 3 opportunities per academic year for parents to receive information about their child’s academic progress. There are Parent’s evenings in both the Autumn and Spring term with individual appointments. In the Summer term we offer a Celebration day following on from the Annual Report whereby parents can come in at any point and sit together with their child to share their work from over the academic year. As part of this day parents can meet the next teacher if they wish. In addition we offer an “open door” policy whereby parents can come in or telephone and ask to meet with the child’s teacher if there is a particular issue to be discussed.

We send out an annual questionnaire for Parents every Summer term and we actively encourage parents to respond and give us their honest views so that we can continue to improve and develop.

Our style of homework provides lots of opportunities for parental engagement. We set a number of open-ended cross curricular tasks over the year which allow for individual creativity to shine through.

Over the year there are a range of opportunities for parents to come into school to share and enjoy their child’s “learning”. These include:

Class assemblies for each Year 3 and Year 5 class
Year 4 Christmas carol concert
Year 6 Summer production
Sports days for both upper and lower school
Musical showcases for small group tuition groups
Whole Class instrument teaching showcase Year 4
Summer concert for musicians
Polyphone workshop showcase Year 5
Each year group selects 2 parent engagement activities per year whereby parents can come into school and share/join in with a learning experience
Roving book fair event and read to your child
Sports matches
New to Year 3 meeting
Year 6 SATS (this is now a virtual presentation)