Welcome to the second issue of the quarterly PEAL
e-bulletin. The PEAL team would like to wish you a very happy
festive season and a prosperous and healthy New Year.
The PEAL e-bulletin will be emailed on the last Tuesday of every
three months.
Contents:
- PEAL News
- PEAL gets ‘accredited’
- New Promotional Material
- New Practice Examples
- New DVD
- Future Training Dates
- SCORGS News
- Pen Green
- NDNA
- Family Links
1. PEAL News
1.1 PEAL gets
‘accredited’
Working closely with the PEAL
team, Parenting UK, Lifelong Learning UK and City & Guilds, the
accreditation project team has developed an optional unit at level
3 for a new City & Guilds Award in Work with Parents – Unit 16
– Work with parents to engage them in their children’s early
learning. This unit has now been accredited by City
and Guilds at Level 3 - and can be combined with other units to
achieve the ‘Working with Parents Award’. This means that anyone
undertaking the PEAL training can now choose to extend their
learning and have it assessed, gaining three credits at level 3
towards this new award.
Work is also underway to develop two other
optional units for the level 3 award – Working with fathers/Working
with young parents to engage them in their children’s early
learning – to address specific needs which have been
identified by frontline practitioners.
Gaining ‘accreditation’ for the PEAL training
is an important achievement because it not only supports government
initiatives towards a more skilled workforce through a flexible
qualifications system (the Qualifications and Credit Framework,
QCF) but it also provides practitioners with the opportunity to
gain recognition for their continuous professional development, in
the increasingly important area of parenting education and
support.
The accreditation team is now working with
other ELP partner organizations to map their training to the new
award, to extend the benefits of national accreditation to as many
programmes as possible.
For more information about the PEAL
accreditation, visit the accreditation
page of the website
1.2 New
Promotional Material
The communications team
has been working hard producing new promotional material to raise
the profile of the project. PEAL now has roller banners that can be
displayed at events and conferences and also a website postcard,
promoting the new website. These have both been very well
received.
View the
website postcard [PDF 400KB]
For copies of the PEAL website postcard, please contact Paulina
Filippou on 020 7843 1169 / 020 7833 6810 or pfilippou@ncb.org.uk
1.3 New practice
examples
The PEAL team have developed and
published several new practice examples. For those of you who
already have your packs, the new practice examples are available to
download from the website. They include two examples that focus
particularly upon childminders. Find out more and download the new
examples from the practice examples page.
1.4 New
DVD
The PEAL DVD, Developing effective early
learning partnerships with parents, has been re-issued and was
launched at the Local Authorities Early Years Network meeting on 21
November 2007. The DVD highlights three projects taking place in
settings in Camden: 'Stop, Look and Listen,' 'Sharing Observations
with Treasureboxes' and 'Music and Movement.' It encourages
regular, shared observations between parents and practitioners
recorded through video, cameras, note taking and verbal feedback.
In this way, an individual child's needs and interests are well
known and future learning and development can be planned for – both
at home and in the setting. The DVD is shown as part of the PEAL
training – and will be included in participants’ packs from January
2008.
1.3 Future Training
Dates
Details of training events are available
on our training page
2. SCORGS News
2.1 Pen Green
Pen Green Conference 2 February 2008
A national
conference held by Pen Green, ‘Children’s Centres, Outcomes and
Meeting the Complex Needs of Priority and Excluded Families’
Date: 2 February 2008
Time: 10am – 4pm
Venue: Pen Green Research Base, Rockingham Road, Corby, Northants
NN17 1AG Cost: £180 + VAT
This conference is designed for all those
working in partnership with children and families in children
centres, other early childhood provision, extended schools and
family support services in the statutory, private and voluntary
sectors.
For further information contact Donna McDaid
on mailto:dmcdaid@northamptonshire.gov.uk%20oror
01536 443435.
Summary of the Pen Green Conference 17
November 2007 - Involving Parents in their Children’s Learning:
Sustaining and Deepening Engagement
Dr Margy Whalley
talked about how the PICL (Parents Involved in their Children’s
Learning) Approach has developed at Pen Green, and the principles
and philosophy underpinning this way of working with children and
families. PICL is a knowledge sharing approach where parents’
knowledge of their child is honoured and parents are encouraged to
become advocates for their child’s learning.
Children’s learning is extended through
parents and workers sharing child development concepts and
discussing and reflecting on video observations in an equal
dialogue. It is a community development model; parents become
involved in shaping the development of services and many parents go
on to train in early childhood education and care and have joined
the staff team through this way of working.
Linda Mitchell and Yvette Simonsen gave an
international perspective with their work in relation to engaging
parents in New Zealand. Linda talked about giving parents space;
both physical space where they feel welcome and comfortable in
settings and psychological space so that they can share in a
dialogue about their children. She also talked about the ‘funds of
knowledge’ that families hold.
In the afternoon Kate Hayward outlined the
development of the PICL training programme. This is initially a two
day training programme with participants supporting each other in
pairs from each setting; carrying out work with their whole staff
team; undertaking a child study with one family and then returning
for a further third day to review their work and develop an action
plan for their centre.
Three practice based case studies demonstrated
excellent examples of how a childminder and children centre drop in
groups have adopted the PICL approach in very different
communities.
Parents Involved in their Children’s
Learning Quality Improvement Scheme
A way to show
that you are making a difference
Pen Green has developed the nationally
recognised PICL (Parents Involved in their Children’s Learning)
Quality Assurance Scheme into a scheme for Quality Improvement,
giving settings a framework for enhanced practice in terms of
engaging parents. This scheme is underpinned by the Principles of
Quality Improvement, and maps onto the National Occupational
Standards for Working with Parents.
As an important new development in the scheme,
we have incorporated the Results Based Accountability approach
(Friedman 2005) to enable settings to engage with all the
stake-holders in their work. The process involves parents and
workers determining agreed outcomes so that they can show how they
have made a difference through parental involvement. It builds on
the PICL way of working which is a community development approach,
engaging parents in dialogue and encouraging them to be advocates
for their child’s learning.
Through PICL, parents and workers reflect on
video observations and share child development concepts; extending
children’s learning through supporting children’s interests. Mark
Friedman states ‘ trying hard is not good enough’. The PICL QI
scheme will enable you to show you are ‘turning the curve’ on
parental engagement.
PICL (Parents Involved in their Children’s Learning)
Accreditation at level 4
We have worked with the
University of Northampton to offer accreditation on working with
parents at level 4 to participants who are working through the PICL
programme. They are required to produce evidence of learning
outcomes in a portfolio following the work they do with their staff
team and a child study with a family. The assessment will enable
them to obtain a 10 credit module at level 4 within the CHESL
programme or could be submitted towards the Foundation Degree. We
have had lots of interest in this opportunity, which enables many
participants to take a first step towards degree level work.
PICL is also accredited at levels 2 and 3
through NOCN and level 7 as a 20 credit module at Masters level
through the University of Leicester.
For more information on Pen Green, please visit http://www.pengreen.org/
2.2. National Day Nurseries
Association (NDNA)
Working in Partnership with
Parents Training
NDNA is delivering 'Working in Partnership with Parents', a one day
training course for full day care practitioners. The courses,
funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, have
been very popular in each of the nine English regions, with all
courses being heavily oversubscribed. In order to ensure the
practitioners training needs are met, NDNA has been working in
partnership with Local Authorities and Private Providers to deliver
extra courses.
The course focuses on the development of
partnership between parents, carers and practitioners by exploring
the importance of partnership, barriers to parental involvement,
best practice in sharing information, ways to develop parental
involvement and the importance of different communication styles.
The day of learning is prepared for by completing a pre-course
audit of parental involvement in the setting and followed by a
post-course action plan and reflective statement which links to
NDNA's Quality Counts scheme.
NDNA has been overwhelmed with the level of
interest, there is a clear demand for this type of training not
only for newly qualified practitioners but also for more
experienced staff who acknowledge that working in partnership with
parents is an ongoing development which requires fresh new ways of
thinking and time to trial and develop news ways to engage with
parents.
For further information on Working in
Partnership with Parents please contact Angela Gibbons, NDNA
Programme Manager on 01484 40 70 70 Ext 230 or email angela.gibbons@ndna.org.uk
For more information on NDNA, please visit
http://www.ndna.org.uk/
2.3 Family Links
Parent Support Skills Training
As part of the Early
Learning Partnership Programme, Family Links is delivering training
in Parent Support Skills. Since September they have
successfully run five trainings, reaching 94 people. The trainings
have been received very positively with one participant commenting:
"From the first hour I realised that this training would be very
different. For a start it didn’t feel like training, it felt like I
was being let in on a fabulous secret ", she goes on to say, "The
training I was given and the parenting puzzle I now have are
invaluable, they will help me personally and professionally".
Another trainee told us, "The course has been very good and well
run, everyone was included and enabled to join. Well presented and
above all practical and useful". Seven more trainings will be
run in the New Year.
For more information on Family Links, please
visit http://www.familylinks.org.uk/
We want your feedback and
ideas!
Please direct any comments or queries
to:
Paulina Filippou, Communications Officer, PEAL Project
– pfilippou@ncb.org.uk
Beki Hawes, E-publishing Assistant, PEAL Project –
bhawes@ncb.org.uk
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