Introduction
Naace approved when schools minister Jim Knight, speaking at BETT in January 2008, announced that schools in England would have to provide up to date information to parents “in real time” about their children’s progress and attainment, special needs, behaviour and attendance. His target dates of 2010 for secondary schools and 2012 for primaries were seen as tough but achievable.
Prepared, as ever, to risk using live technology, the minister went online to visit the pupil record system of a real school to collect information about his (fictional) children, in order to give the audience a taste of what was already happening in some UK schools.
Since January, the conversation has moved on and now the language is more about “parental engagement”, with online or real-time reporting seen as only one of a number of important components in the relationship between learners, their schools and their homes.
On 20th November 2008, Naace held a one-day think tank to explore and clarify issues surrounding the role of ICT in real-time reporting and parental engagement. Becta provided an overview of the context from the perspectives of parents, learners and schools, and speakers from schools offered short inputs representing a range of experience to stimulate discussion. DCSF thinking about a new Parent-Held Record, building on the model of the Personal Child Heath Record, added a new dimension to the discussion. It is from the ensuing debate that this paper is derived.
Some Background
Two important and not necessarily consistent drivers have influenced the role of parents in their children’s schooling. On the one hand, the increasing focus on customer service across the public sector has changed people’s expectations and encouraged demands on schools and other institutions which might have been less pronounced in earlier generations. On the other hand, the emphasis on parents as partners in their children’s education suggests a relationship which is not just that of customer and supplier, and a recognition that learning is not confined to the school premises and the school day. In some ways the move towards real-time reporting could be seen as bringing these two drivers closer together. It also helps to explain some of the tensions with which this initiative will have to deal.
Over a similar time period, information and communication technologies have become ubiquitous in many areas of our lives. For the majority of parents, mobile phones are now a standard item. While there are still significant pockets of under-provision, computers with broadband connectivity have become the norm in the home, particularly where children are present, and in the workplace. Increasingly, people use on-line systems to gain access to personal and commercial services, and typically these systems are customisable by the user and available at any convenient time. In schools, ICT has become business-critical; without it, both teaching and management would be severely impaired. Children and young people themselves have not lived in a world without technology and for many of them it is an integral part of the culture.
In parallel with this growth in technology, schools now routinely collect enormous quantities of information about their pupils, most of which is stored in digital format in management information systems and elsewhere. More and more, MIS is moving out of the school office, with teaching staff using pupils’ performance data to support assessment for learning and inform their planning. There are growing demands to find secure ways of sharing this pupil information with other institutions and agencies, matched by anxieties about the reliability of the systems involved as stories about security failures hit the headlines.
Against these powerful background forces, and in spite of any reservations about security, schools not moving in the direction of real-time online reporting would be swimming against the tide. Naace believes that the opportunities to exploit technology in support of parental engagement are clear. The challenge will be to implement systems which meet everybody’s needs.
What do parents want?
Schools which have made significant progress with online reporting have taken this question seriously. Typically they have asked parents and carers through surveys sent home and questions at parents’ meetings. Pupils have been consulted too. The conversation with parents about their preferences can itself contribute to the engagement process.
Parental responses will vary, but the areas specified by the Minister on which schools will be required to report are likely to meet only some of their information needs. Typically parents are interested in more of the big picture information: which topics will my child be studying this term; are any school trips planned? Shorter term information – reminders about kit needed, homework tasks – is also valued by many. These things will not necessarily reside in the MIS.
In the required areas too, it will not be sufficient to give parents access to a standardised sub-set of the MIS data. For example, some parents will reassured if they can know that their child has arrived safely in school; others will only wish to know if there is a problem over punctuality or attendance. The language and presentation of information in the MIS may not necessarily be parent-friendly. Educational jargon and acronyms may be easily understood by school staff but incomprehensible to many parents.
Parents may also express preferences over their information channel of choice. While a website or e-mail system will suit some, others regard a mobile phone as the key device. We need to consider how well our systems allow us to cater for these different approaches.
It is also clear that while technology has the capacity to engage some parents who have been considered hard to reach, it should not replace other methods which are working well. Some parents will fear that the use of online reporting will remove valued opportunities to talk to teachers in person or on the telephone. Some schools have schemes for sharing and celebrating success that should not simply be superseded by the award of an electronic merit. In some cases, face to face meetings involving the pupil, the parent and the tutor are made more effective because all three are already familiar with the learner’s performance data and the teachers’ comments.
Making the technology work for parents
We have emphasised the importance of consultation with parents and carers to clarify their wishes and expectations. This process itself is likely to be one of the factors which determine the success or otherwise of any initiative. Similarly, parents should be asked to provide feedback about the system once it is up and running as part of a regular impact evaluation study. Schools in turn should feed back to parents any evidence they have of the impact of the system.
As in so many technical projects, it is easy to underestimate the importance of training and support. Successful implementation will require that parents are as confident in their use of the technology as the school staff are. Some schools organise training events for parents at which their user passwords are handed over. Others put serious effort into producing guidance booklets and other support material to make the user experience as comfortable as possible.
In some cases, schools have changed the way they record or report information in order to make it more accessible to parents. Reports on behaviour, for example, have used more factual and less emotive language. Absolute ranking data has been replaced by information about progress and a qualitative commentary.
Ideally, an online reporting system should be customisable by the user. Parents should have access to a single online access point and should be able to choose between information that is pushed or pulled. They should be able to plug in different information streams according to their particular choices and parents with several children should still be able to visit a single access point to view the relevant information, even if the children attend different schools.
These features may be difficult for school systems to provide in the short term, especially in time for the secondary school target of 2010. Nevertheless, developments in e-portfolios and MLEs, the requirements to share information about 14-19 students between different establishments, and the growth of cloud computing with more and more data stored remotely, can all contribute to a joined up system which genuinely meets the needs of a range of different users.
Making the technology work for schools
There has been a culture change in significant numbers of our schools so that sharing of information and resources, usually via central computerised storage systems, has become the norm. In one sense, involving parents in this collaborative culture is simply an extension of what is already happening. Even so, like parents, school staff need to be consulted when the system is being planned and then properly trained and supported when it is implemented.
If the system is to be properly interactive, with opportunities for parents to feed back their own comments to the school and to ask further questions, there will be understandable anxieties among school staff about overload, about dealing with difficult and even inappropriate comments, and about exposing their practice to a potentially critical audience. These will need to be addressed through clear protocols. It may be that parents’ comments do not go directly to an individual teacher without screening. It may be that parents sign up to a code of practice when they receive their password. A strong lead from the school management will be important and it will be helpful to disseminate experience from schools and identify what works well in different contexts.
Time will be another important factor. We are all familiar with supposedly time-saving technologies which actually eat into our personal time. In one secondary school, subject teachers no longer attend parents’ evenings; instead their time is allocated to the online reporting process and parents meet a tutor when they come into school. Generally, successful introduction of an online-reporting system has been part of an overall review of communication with parents and not something bolted on and adding to the pressures on teachers’ time.
Just as parents will wish to customise the reporting system, schools too will need to have some control over its design and configuration, with sufficient flexibility to allow for creative approaches to the presentation of information and to home-school communication. This flexibility should be high on the agenda for ICT development within the Primary Capital Programme and for local education partnerships commissioning a managed ICT service through their Building Schools for the Future programmes.
Schools should be aware of the Becta Parental Engagement Toolkit, and some of the schools represented at the think tank were involved in its development . The Framework for Online Reporting contained within the toolkit is available for all schools to use, enabling them to review their current practice and consider their next steps along the journey towards online reporting.
What’s in it for the learner?
At its worst, online reporting could mean a restricted set of information about a child being published regularly to parents, with little dialogue between the school and the home and limited recognition of the individuality of the learner. This might bring some benefits to the child’s learning experience but will not fully repay the investment being made. Badly handled, it could even discourage the parent or the child from participating, and confirm the fears of those who feel that children are scrutinised too much and not allowed sufficient independence.
In a different situation, the sharing of information would be just one stage in a multi-layered conversation, involving teachers, parents and pupils. It would make meetings and discussions more productive because all the parties involved had already digested or reflected upon both the information provided by the school and any initial response provided by the parent or the pupil. It would encourage children to talk about their experience in school by alerting parents to successes and excitement arising during the day. It would make children feel valued and better understood and more confident about discussing their learning at home and at school. Posting digital photographs taken during the day would allow children, including those with the severest physical handicaps, to share aspects of their school experience with their parents. Beginning the evening with good news stories from school would make a positive difference to children’s relationships with their parents.
Challenges ahead
There are already requirements on schools to provide individual online spaces including e-portfolios for their pupils, and to connect their learning platform to their management information system. There are already challenges for schools and suppliers in getting these technologies widely deployed and then making them interoperable between institutions. Potentially these are the systems which will provide the foundations for developments in online parental reporting. A joined-up approach is essential; the alternative is pain and duplication of effort.
Having acknowledged this, the greatest challenges schools will face in making a success of online reporting will not be technical. Ultimately the issues are about people and not technology. In an e-mature system, the focus will be on how the technology is used, and not on the technology itself. Where home-school engagement is high on the agenda, where protocols and behaviours are clearly understood by everyone involved, and where ICT is used routinely by practitioners, online reporting systems will become embedded in the work of the school far more quickly and effectively. The schools leading the way emphasise that this has taken them time and that quick fixes are not the answer. They describe their experience as a journey. And no one is talking about turning back.
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