Introduce
Evaluations help practitioners and services understand what works and what doesn’t. This ultimately improve outcomes for families. Assessing and improving family engagement is an important process that needs to be ongoing. It is difficult to measure and capture how effective engagement is. How can you measure authentic engagement?
- a productive, collaborative relationship between practitioners and families
- family behaviour (parent & child)
- family’s perception of engagement and process
- child outcomes (development, safety, stability, wellbeing)
It is important to take time to listen and reflect on family engagement so that settings can identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance the outcomes for the child and families. This can come through informal day to day interactions where practitioners check-in and ask ‘how are we doing?’ as well as more formal methods such as:
- feedback surveys
- workshops
- ongoing communication
- evaluation tools
Capturing the views and experiences of families allows for service providers and commissioners to consider how best to support families. In this sense, the voice of the family shapes interventions and approaches. This is relevant to any context. For example, a nursery might collect data on parents’ perceptions of the communication methods used. Gathering feedback could result in the nursery tailoring their communication methods to better meet the needs of parents.
Develop
Use the audit on page 7 – 12 to spend some time evaluating your current practice.
Reflect
Stop and Reflect: Were you surprised by the outcome of your audit? Reflect further with the following questions:
– Does your organisation have an active parent forum or parent group?
– How might you take into account the views of parents who do not attend the parent forum or group?
– Do parents jointly make decisions with workers about how services are shaped and developed?
– How are parents involved in evaluating your services (for example, through a parent-led needs assessment)?
– Do parents have a voice in what is evaluated and how evaluations are conducted?
– Some families might not give feedback and so their voices may not be heard. How might you reach out and listen to these families?