Real involvement for parents

The Sheffield Raising Early Achievement in Literacy Project began in 1995 to promote family literacy through work with parents of preschool children. It had six main aims:

1. To develop methods of working with parents to promote the literacy development of preschool children (particularly those likely to have difficulties in the early years of school)
2. To meet some of the literacy and educational needs of the parents so involved
3. To ensure the feasibility of methods developed
4. To assess the effectiveness of the methods in improving children's literacy at school entry and afterwards
5. To disseminate effective methods to practitioners and to equip them with new skills
6. To inform policy makers about the effectiveness and implications of new practice.

The ORIM framework

The project is using the ORIM framework (see diagram). This arose out of earlier work in Sheffield (Hannon, 1995) to develop and evaluate literacy work with parents, and facilitate changes in the thinking and practice of teachers and other early childhood educators. A grid is used to identify ways in which parents can provide Opportunities, Recognition, Interaction and a Model of literacy for each of the four identified strands of early literacy - environmental print, books, early writing and oral language. This provides a basis for planning practical work with parents; work focused in different cells of the grid will ensure that all aspects of early literacy receive attention and action at different times.

The ORIM framework

How REAL worked

The REAL project is a family literacy initiative where adults have opportunities to develop their literacy and learning as well as that of their children. However, parent participation in adult literacy tuition was not a precondition for families being involved. This distinguishes the initiative from other family literacy initiatives being promoted in the US and UK.

The project had two phases. Phase one, on the development of methods, took place from 1995 to 1996. In this phase, preschool teachers and others working in schools and centres across the city collaborated with the project team to develop a range of methods for working with parents. Starting from methods already being used, they went on to create a 'bank' of new methods and resources designed to address the literacy needs of parents and preschool children. Working groups focused on different strands of preschool literacy and different evaluation methods were devised for different target populations.

Phase two, implementation and evaluation of the programme, took place from 1997 to 2002.

The most promising methods developed in phase one were combined into an 18-month early literacy programme for families. Ten teachers from 10 schools participated in a specially devised professional development programme to develop and implement a 'long duration, low intensity' programme of work with parents. Eighty families from those 10 schools participated in the programme. Unusually for educational research, the evaluation incorporated a randomised controlled trial with large samples.

Based on the ORIM framework, the programme had five main components: home visits by programme teachers; provision of literacy resources (particularly books); centre-based group activities; special events (e.g. group library visits); and postal communication between teacher and child.

Teachers were funded for release one half-day per week to work with eight families. Five days' professional development was provided for them, followed by monthly twilight meetings during term time. The core of the programme was similar at all schools but was shaped by local community circumstances and teachers' styles.

Adult learning opportunities were also developed and offered to parents. The programme had to be voluntary in the sense that, whether or not they participated for themselves, parents could be involved in the child-focused part of the programme. Two opportunities were offered to all parents in the programme: (1) information, advice and support to access local adult education from various providers, and (2) a specially developed course based on the REAL programme and accredited by the Open College Network.

Key findings

The programme had maximum take-up - all 80 families invited to participate accepted the invitation. Families continued to participate satisfactorily throughout its duration and few left the project. Only a minority (nine parents out of 80 families) took up the adult education component of the programme but those who did, valued it.

Parents valued the parental involvement programme highly and believed children had benefited.

When asked how they felt about the project coming to an end, two-thirds expressed disappointment (most of them spontaneously using the word "sad" to describe their feelings).

The remainder valued the programme but some felt their children were ready to move on to something else. When asked how they had found working with their programme teachers, responses were overwhelmingly positive. The interviews were designed to make it easy for parents to voice criticisms but very few could be September 2003 elicited. They were asked if being in the programme had ever felt a pressure. Virtually all of them said "no" or "never".

Parents were also asked if the things they were involved in ever felt too much like school. Again, virtually all answered "no", often quite emphatically.

Children proved to be interesting informants, and those in the programme were more likely than any control systems to report the kinds of activity promoted by the programme. We attempted to discover the children's perspective on all this through some simple interview questions after they had entered reception class in school. We learned from them that literacy was very much a family affair. Mothers were highly involved but over a third of children also mentioned fathers as the people who read with them at home. Grandparents and siblings were active in reading, writing, sharing nursery rhymes and using environmental print. Even though, at the time of interview, children were experiencing shared text reading in the literacy hour, when asked, they overwhelmingly named their parents first as reading partners. Reading for these children was closely associated with home.

Project teachers reported that they had been enthused by the opportunity to work with families. Key themes were:

• the opportunity to work with parents was highly valued
• relationships, home visiting and flexibility were key to the work
• teacher attitudes, knowledge and skills were crucial
• other responsibilities in school made the work difficult at times
• benefits were seen for children and families.

Teachers greatly valued the opportunity to work with parents and they found it changed their thinking. A typical comment was, "It really made me refocus on what family agendas are, which were in some ways quite separate to school agendas."

Teachers also saw benefits for children and parents such as improved attitudes toward school, increased shared reading experiences in the home, and greater confidence, concentration and enjoyment of listening to stories being read.

Children had clearly gained in terms of literacy measures by the end of the programme, though these gains did not appear to lead to improved literacy in terms of later school measures (possibly because the programme promoted home, rather than school, literacy practices). The activities dominant in the literacy hour at the time were not those which reflected home literacy, but rather those which promoted the acquisition of discrete literacy skills. One of the biggest challenges facing us in the early stages of the project was how to measure literacy development between ages three and five. Existing methods of assessment were not adequate (Nutbrown and Hannon, 1993) and so the Sheffield Early Literacy Development Profile (SELDP) was developed (Nutbrown, 1997) and we used this as our principal pre-programme and post-programme outcome measure. It is an individual, 60-point scale, assessment of children's knowledge of environmental print, books and early writing.

This has been a most exciting project for the researchers, practitioners and families involved and the overall findings are extremely encouraging for the development of practice and policy in family literacy. We need to think about the implications all these findings have in the current, rapidly changing context of early childhood care and education.

References

P. Hannon (1995) Literacy, Home and School: Research and Practice in Teaching Literacy with Parents, London: Falmer.
P. Hannon, J. Weinberger and C. Nutbrown (1991) A study of work with parents to promote early literacy development. Research Papers in Education, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 77-97.
C. Nutbrown and P. Hannon (1993) Assessing early literacy -new methods needed. International Journal of Early Childhood, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 27-30.
C. Nutbrown, P. Hannon and S. Collier (1996) Early Literacy Education with Parents: A Framework for Practice (video), Sheffield: The REAL Project, University of Sheffield/Sheffield University Television.
C. Nutbrown (1997) Recognising Early Literacy Development: Assessing Children's Achievements, London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
C. Nutbrown and P. Hannon (eds.) (1997) Preparing for Early Literacy Education with Parents: A Professional Development Manual, Nottingham: The REAL Project/Nottingham Group Ltd.
J. Weinberger, P. Hannon and C. Nutbrown (1990) Ways of Working with Parents to Promote Early Literacy Development, Sheffield: The University of Sheffield/USDE Publications.

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