What are your strengths?
What is working well? (and why?)
Examples:
- You feel you have a good relationship with most of the parents/carers of the pupils you teach.
- Parents come to you regularly for online safety advice.
- The parent community are very interested in online safety, and actively seek information and support from the school.
- Children receive a consistent message from school and their parents about online safety.
- You provide online safety information in every school newsletter, so that parents are ‘drip fed’ advice regularly.
What is not working so well?
Why is that?
Examples:
- There are some parents who are completely disengaged. They have never responded to any communications about online safety.
- You ran an online safety evening and no-one turned up.
- Parents approach the school only once something has gone wrong and they want the school to fix it.
- We don’t have good quality resources we can use.
- We don’t have up to date information.
What opportunities are there to improve parental engagement on online safety?
Examples:
- You’re planning to provide a device to every child, for free. You could make it a requirement that parents attend online safety training in order to receive the device.
- You have set up a pupil digital leaders group and could expand its remit to digital citizenship and online safety. The group is tasked with coming up with a way to engage parents. Maybe they could run a ‘teach the parents’ event.
- You are aware that some parents have low digital skills. You invite in a local charity to run a training event on digital skills, which you can then build on to talk about online safety.
- You have a little bit of budget you can use to provide refreshments or run a raffle to encourage parents into school.
- You decide to integrate online safety into every school event. There will be a family online safety quiz at the summer sausage sizzle event; you’ll run an online safety presentation for parents at the same time as the spring bop school disco; you’ll put online safety on the agenda of every parent council meeting and every parent/teacher meeting.
What could go wrong with parental engagement? Anything you need to avoid?
Examples:
- We don’t have enough time to plan and deliver events and communications for parents. It just won’t happen.
- Parents don’t have enough time or have other problems to worry about.
- Some families do not use video conferencing. They will not attend an online event.
- We don’t know what parents want to know about (tip: run a survey).
- We might give the wrong advice. We are not confident in our knowledge.
- What we want to tell them is not what they want to hear. For example, we want to talk about being a good role model but they just want to know how to set parental controls.
- If we get the approach wrong, parents might completely switch off – e.g. if we overload them with advice, or if they think we’re telling them they are bad parents.
- Parents are highly engaged with school when children are very young, but they ignore online safety advice until their children are older.
