A creative approach to parental engagement
'Bring them into the world of the Story', written by Dr Brittany Wright
Teachers and creative practitioners are working together across several Nottingham primary schools to explore how children’s innate creativity and curiosity can be inspired within the classroom. Within some schools, this collaboration has gone further still, with parents being invited into their children’s creative worlds too. At Greenfields Community School, Usha Mahenthiralingam has been working with the school’s Foundation Lead, Clare Thomas, to bring children in reception into the world of fairytales. Through dressing up, role play, movement, fabric painting, collage, sculpting and mask-making, the school’s reception class have brought ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, and ‘The Three Little Pigs’ to life.
Usha explained that:
"As well as exploring the three narratives, we have connected them to a wider world of enquiry. In ‘The Three Little Pigs’, we considered the qualities of straw, sticks, and bricks. In ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, we explored scale, proportion, and how asking for permission can be an act of care. In ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’, we considered the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of bridge construction and engineering.”
The project itself has been fantastic, inspiring real engagement and enthusiasm from every child in the class. It’s also had real benefits for the staff who’ve been able to work with Usha too.
Clare explained that:
“There’s no right or wrong - the children look, talk, move and make… everything is celebrated, so that every child has a real feeling of ‘I can do it’ - that really stood out for me today.” For the final week of Usha’s residency, the team decided that it would be fantastic to celebrate everything that had been achieved by inviting parents and carers into school.
Nottingham's Creativity Collaboratives programme 2021-2024
Strong partnerships with parents and carers are a key aim for any school. However, recent research has suggested “a fundamental breakdown in the relationship between the school system and parents across the socioeconomic spectrum” (Burtonshaw and Dorrell, 2023, p. 20) since the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst national and local funding cuts, the relationship between state schools and the arts has become increasingly vulnerable too (Crace, 2023).
This blogpost acknowledges the significance of these two separate challenges, but also signposts and celebrates some of the exciting practical strategies emerging from Nottingham’s Creativity Collaboratives project. We are learning that arts collaboration can be harnessed to build positive relationships between home and school.
The exhibition space
The school hall had been used as a large studio classroom for the entire project. For the parental engagement event, Usha and Clare transformed the hall into an exhibition space, showcasing the children’s art on walls, tables, and through a projector slideshow. Parents were invited to come along to admire the exhibition after dropping their children off at school. Chairs were also set up for them to sit and talk to one another. The atmosphere was shy but friendly, with all the adults impressed by the work on display but not necessarily feeling confident enough to navigate around the space as guests. This soon changed when the children arrived!
Filing into the hall with quiet excitement, the reception class assembled - with crossed legs and folded arms - on the ‘magic carpet’, a tapestry of bright purple rugs and blankets. Next, they were invited to find their adults and to take them on a tour of the exhibition. The children relished the opportunity to talk about their artwork but also wanted to explain how it linked to the stories that they had read. “It’s yellow because it’s straw,” a little girl told me as she pointed to the vibrant fabric painting on the wall that showed the fate of the first little pig’s house!
Story Time
Next, the children returned to the magic carpet for their teacher to read a story. They voted on which of the three fairytales they’d like to hear and the adults, seated around the carpet in a circle, were invited to join in too. Educational research has signposted that “promoting shared book reading should be a central component of any parental engagement approach” (EEF, 2021, p. 6) but the key to this teacher’s modelling – and the creative practitioner’s approach too – was that this was an invitation, not a demand. The children and their grown-ups were mesmerised.
Shared Play
Once the story was over, the parents received another invitation: to join in with their children in some of the activities they’d enjoyed over the course of the creative practitioner’s residency. This was where the magic really happened. The children, having become experts in their own innate creativity and curiosity over the previous weeks and months, guided their adults to get involved. Some parents lay on the floor whilst their children created a 3D collage around them. Others marked out a space on the floor while their child hunted for the right materials to fill it. Bridges were built, trolls were sculpted, and masks were made to represent characters in the much-loved stories. The children and adults talked about the creative choices they were making, each absorbed in the creative world of fairytales.
The EEF signposts that “in the early years and primary school, there should be a greater focus on activities that parents and children can do together” (EEF, 2021, p. 19). The team at Greenfields showcased a practical and creative toolkit for parents and children to take home with them: all of the resources used were typical in a family home, from milk bottle tops to paper plates. The potential for books to open up new worlds – accessed through children’s innate creativity and curiosity – was celebrated and shared.
Some of the children had already been exercising their creativity to link home and school. Many of the parents, on seeing the artwork displayed, realised where children’s new interests or hobbies had come from:
“She’s been drawing cartoons like this for weeks,” one father told me, “Now I know where she’s got the idea from.”
Another parent explained that their child had been experimenting with ‘tinker’s collage’ at home. Not knowing what they were referring to, they let their child take the lead and rescued lots of household packaging before it made its way to the recycling bin, assembling all sorts of .
Final thoughts
This creative celebration of the children’s learning built clear bridges between home and school, with the headteacher commenting that this was one of the best attended parent sessions for some years. Parents’ comments also showed how much they appreciated this chance to get involved:
“[My child] loves coming to play with Usha. He always talks fondly of their sessions together. This morning, I had the pleasure of joining in and as usual Usha didn’t disappoint.”
“Having their work displayed around the room was good as they were proud of what they had done and excited to show parents.”
“They were so confident! The tinker’s collage was great fun and I can see how much the children got out of all of this!”
As part of the Nottingham Creativity Collaboratives Research Team, it was very exciting for me to see how creative practices could be harnessed by children and their parents. We know that creative practitioners have an incredible impact in schools, but this showed how they can also have an incredible impact beyond schools too.
The session clearly fulfilled many of the recommendations for good practice in parental engagement (EEF, 2021). Yet it was also respectful of parent’s boundaries – they were only ever invited to get involved, never told what to do. This is key to Usha’s approach as a creative practitioner: “I never tell anyone to do anything, that activates the fight-or-flight response: it’s just an invitation, they can get involved if they want to, it’s about having the choice.” The session invited parents to read with their children and to get stuck into creative activities with them. More than this, it showed that their children know how to take the lead on this, even if adults can be less comfortable at first. After such a fantastic morning, it’s clear that this journey into the world of fairytales is an invitation that few would refuse!
References
Burtonshaw, S. and Dorrell, E. (2023) Listening to, and learning from, parents in the attendance crisis. Public First. Available at: https://www.publicfirst.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ATTENDANCE-REPORT-V02.pdf.
Crace, J. (2023) ‘The Guardian view on arts education: a creativity crisis’, The Guardian, 7 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/07/the-guardian-view-on-arts-education-a-creativity-crisis (Accessed: 9 February 2024).
EEF (2021) ‘Working With Parents to Support Children’s Learning Guidance Report’. Available at: https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/eef-guidance-reports/supporting-parents/EEF_Parental_Engagement_Guidance_Report.pdf?v=1707460520.