Welcome to the start of our series, ‘Empowering Our School Community Through Our Strong Parent Council’. Each week throughout September, we’ll be explaining and exploring the often mysterious world of Parent Councils, and showing you just how special ours could be. This week, we want to take you beyond bake sales, start to give some understanding how parents can shape school governance, and explain why your voice matters.
Beyond Bake Sales
You’ve already heard about community lunches and bake sales and other fun events – which we love! Thoughout the year, we hold amazing parties and film nights for the kids, as well as wider events. It’s these that bind our community together, (building bonds!) through fun and shared experiences – and they often provide ways of raising much-needed funds, too. And yet, there’s so much more available to us as a parent body.
Many of us have joined Abbeyhill from places with a radically different understanding of the voice of the parent in school. Here in Scotland, Parent Councils have significantly more rights in a school than in many other countries (including England!), and those rights are now enshrined in law.
The Parental Involvement Act empowers parents and carers to get involved in the life of the school and in our children’s learning. You are the primary educator of your child(ren), and as such, your involvement is vital. By working together, we can influence significant decisions and changes that can transform our school into an extraordinary experience for everyone in the Abbeyhill family.
Parent Councils can work with senior staff to develop policies, like anti-bullying, or uniform policies. They can be involved in the appointment of those senior staff in the first place. (In fact, our Parent Council was recently involved in the appointment of both Mrs Robertson and Mrs Graham.) Having this level of input into the leadership of our school is unheard of in many places, and ensures the school’s management team takes parents’ views and experiences on board in all aspects of school life.
As you’ll have seen hinted at already this year, school regularly need to consult with the parent body on a range of issues. A big topic last year was the dangers posed on the walk into school each morning, and what we wanted to ask the council to do to fix it. This year, we’re already starting to look at a new playground, and the road safety issue remains ongoing. Being able to come to the Parent Council to collect opinions dramatically reduces the time it takes to run consultations, freeing staff up to concentrate on other areas.
Parent Councils hold regular meetings as well as informal events, providing opportunities for families to discuss anything of interest to parents and helping to ensure all parents from different backgrounds are listened to and supported. They can invite anyone, for example, local businesses, or local politicians, building relationships with our wider community which can go a long way towards representing the school at local, or even national level.
Your Voice Matters
Of course, if the Parent Council is to have these powers, we need to make sure it represents every voice. Every parent and carer of a child at Abbeyhill school (including nursery), has a right to voice their opinion on the way things are working in our school.
By working together, we can identify troubling patterns or new priorities and raise them with school as needed. A Parent Council can organise and amplify parent voices, making it easier to bring about the changes we want to see, but it has to be properly representative. So if you’re not sure about whether or not you want to speak, we urge you to do so. As experts in our own children, and with all our combined experience and knowledge, if we work together we can help make our school an amazing place for all of us!
This is the first of four posts in the Parent Voices series. Read the next one: Strengthening Education Together: The Power of Collaboration