Parent Partnership at the Family School
Welcome to The Pears Family School!
It is a unique and unusual position to be a parent or carer attending school with your child. At The Pears Family School parent partnership is fundamental to everything that we do. You may wonder, ‘shouldn’t school staff be the ‘experts’ trained to work with and educate your child?’. Whilst there is, of course expertise in all of our staff, our model works to use all of the resources available for each child and the most important of these is a child’s parent or carer; their family and wider system. As the person or people with the strongest attachment and connection to your child you can tell us more about your child than anyone else. Through your presence in the school they begin to develop their trust in other adults and people around them, as they see that you too are doing so (we call this epistemic trust).
Where possible, we would like to involve you as much as possible. It is our understanding that at school you get one half of the child’s experience, at home you get the other, and if we put the two together we are more likely to understand how best to support your child’s academic and social development. Our aim is that together we can develop and identify more successful strategies to help improve academic and social outcomes for your child.
When a child becomes dysregulated or distressed, being able to access their most trusted person helps to regulate them and feel safe. It also allows a flow of constant communication between child, family and school staff, in which you can be helping us to understand your child, and in response we can be listening, learning and together co-creating new possible strategies to support them.
When children and families arrive at the family school, they have often had a very difficult experience of the education system. Many will have suffered isolation and consequently, social thinning (less people around them to connect to and belong with); they may have felt shamed and blamed and had to fight hard for their children to be understood. Working as a whole system around your child, we can collaboratively help them to start their journey of Recovery, building trust in those around them, themselves, and in the education system, before Rebuilding their narrative of themselves as a successful learner and developing their executive functioning skills and then being ready to Reintegrate to the right eductaion setting for them.
Through developing a shared sense of your child, we can work together to strengthen the system around them, helping them to feel held in mind and understood. We will develop shared language to describe and understand your child and your experience, which further supports their sense of people ‘getting them’.
BUT, what do parents / carers actually do whilst in school?
This is a common question and one that most parents come to know the answer to through time being in the school, however some starting points may be helpful…
Usually you will position yourself on the same floor as your child’s classroom. Outside of their classroom is a communal kitchen, a ‘family hub’, with sofas and a large table and chairs. You will often find a few parents sitting here. This is where a significant amount of the therapy occurs, in the connections between families on similar journeys and the sharing of experience and expertise, as well as the sense of community and connection that comes with being a parent at the school.
Reducing feelings of isolation families have often felt through their experience of their child being at risk of exclusion is an important part of parents’ time at The Family School. At times through the school day you will join your child in their classroom to support them through a task, learn together or come to celebrate their brilliant work. Staff may ask you to join them or you may choose to be alongside them. Sometimes you might be asked to support another child whilst another parent support’s your child; to notice the moments your child or another has managed a task or a moment well, and to energise it with positive praise. Staff from the therapeutic team in school will talk with you together with your lead teacher to understand more about your child and family and the resources and support you have in your system, and your hopes and goals for your child’s time at The Family School. As a parent you will join the children when they go to the park opposite the school for break times and will be invited to take part in reflection time at the end of the day. This is another important part of helping to ‘rewire their brains’, through noticing what has gone well in the day; what you are proud of and the moments they have chosen to ignore undesirable behaviours or used strategies to regulate themselves. Through increasing the dosage of positive feedback for your child we are together helping to build new more helpful neural pathways for them.
Parent learning
Wednesdays are a particularly important day for parents at The Family School, when parents are strongly encouraged to attend.
They begin with you joining your child or another child for ‘Drop everything and read’ (DEAR), a time to hear them read or read with or to them.
From 10.30am - 12 pm Parent Learning takes place, which is a well-attended session in which a warm and lively group is co-created between parents and the therapeutic team in the parent learning room at school. Neil, Brenda (Consultant family Psychotherapists and Co-founders of the school) and Laura (Family Psychotherapist), deliver learning relevant to your experiences and your child and facilitate therapeutic group discussions and an opportunity for parents and carers to share their experiences and expertise with each other.
Sometimes visitors, such as the Child’s Commissioner, Members of Parliament, people from the DfE and other schools around the UK and Europe, will attend parent learning to seek your expertise and experiences to inform Government policy. Your role is significant to generating change about how young people, for whom mainstream school is not working at that time, are understood.
There is also an opportunity through the parent learning sessions and at other times during the week, to complete a level 2 qualification in parent and carer engagement in child mental health.