Home school knowledge exchange

This study by the General Teaching Council looked at the benefits for students if parents knew more about what was happening in school and teachers knew more about what was happening at home - Home School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE).

Key points:
- There are four types of knowledge which could be exchanged:
* knowledge of the curriculum and different teaching methods
* knowledge of culture and expectations at a new school
* parents’ knowledge of their child’s personality, needs, strengths and vulnerabilities, and
* children’s knowledge of their learning preferences, passions and interests.

- There are many examples of practice and theory around ensuring knowledge is passed from school to home, but few examples of knowledge going the other way.

- Parents said they were interested in knowing more about the curriculum and the way different subjects, such as reading and mathematics, were taught.

- Helping children to learn about literacy and numeracy involved recognising that much learning in these areas takes place out of school, in every day contexts.

- The children’s parents enjoyed being able to see teaching and learning in practice, for example through video, observation or direct experience and learned a great deal about how to help their children.

- Although the activities brought a wide range of benefits, they also carried a degree of risk. Some children (and parents) might have felt exposed if they were asked to provide information about their ‘lives out of school’, and the researchers needed to be sensitive to this. Similarly, some teachers were concerned about identifying struggling children to other parents when showing video sequences etc.

Leaders may like to consider the following:
- One of the key challenges identified by the study was that HSKE activities can be time consuming and resource intensive, both in planning and delivery. But the results can be extremely positive. For example, the findings suggest that interventions concerned with personal, social and emotional areas of transfer to secondary school can have a direct impact on attainment and academic progress.
- The study identified that ‘hard to reach’ parents are certainly not a homogeneous group and that the term itself may be an artefact of the way schools are organised. Certainly, different strategies are needed to engage different parents.
- Schools were often unaware of specific details about the home lives of some individual pupils which explained for example prolonged absences or struggles in certain subject areas.
- Although the home–school activities made teachers more aware of their pupils’ home experiences of learning, the study highlighted how some teachers were more skillful than others in making use of such knowledge in their work.

It also gives examples of how knowledge can be exchanged and the implications such an exchange can have on the school and parent relationship.