If a child is to flourish and reach their full academic and social potential at primary school, a good relationship between school and home is vital.

There’s an enormous body of research and studies on the positive impact of parent partnerships and student success, not just in school but throughout life. We cannot educate our children without reaching out to their parents. When schools and families work together, children have a far better chance of not only being successful in school but being successful in life as well.

At Hindley J&I, we have worked hard to develop good working relationships with our families, and we pride ourselves on our open, supportive and honest approach.
Examples of parents/carers engaging with the school

• All parents are invited to attend parental working bodies alongside teachers to inform school procedures and policies. An example of this was when parents had a major input into changing our attendance policy and procedures in school: introducing new attendance rewards systems which positively impacted upon whole school attendance. 
• We have an open door policy at the end of each day where teachers are available to speak to parents/carers.
• Parents and teachers communicated via the personal messenger service on Class Dojo.
• The headteacher is on the playground daily, at drop off and collection times, to talk to families.
• Parents are invited into weekly celebration assemblies; they are very well attended.
• We have a nucleus of parents who volunteer in school regularly: listening to children read one-to-one, helping supervise on school trips, heling supervise the children to swimming, helping to organise and run school fund raising events and supporting school sports teams.
• Parents’ evenings are well attended.
• All classes hold informal meet the teacher events at the beginning of every new school year.
• Parents are invited in to school to read stories to groups of children and/or talk to children about their different jobs – to hopefully inspire the next generation.
• ‘Family’ school trips have been organised such as trips to watch Manchester United at Old Trafford and trips to watch live rugby Super League games at Wigan Warriors
• Parent and child afterschool sports clubs
• We publically celebrate parental achievements as well children’s achievements.

Excellent use of Class Dojo
All parents have a Class Dojo account. Class Dojo is a school communication platform that teachers, students, and families use every day to build close-knit communities by sharing what’s being learned in the classroom with home through photos, videos, and messages. Homework is set via Class Dojo, school achievements are celebrated and teachers and parents have immediate direct communication within each other via the messenger function.

Class Dojo is also used as our school platform for remote learning: all work is posted on individual class pages and each child has their own ‘portfolio’ to upload work directly to teachers; the teachers then provide individual feedback directly to individual children.
All class teachers have access to each individual class pages as well as the whole school page, as do all school governors. Class Dojo is used effectively as the main source of communication between school and home.
https://www.classdojo.com/
We are always looking for volunteers.
If any parents/carers would like to volunteer some of their time to get involved in school life, then please contact your child’s class teacher via Class Dojo. We are particularly looking for parents/carers to do the following:

• Listen to children read one-to-one in the afternoons (as little as 30 minutes per day will make a huge difference).
• Helping to maintain the school vegetable patches and flower beds around school.
• Reading stories to classes or small groups of children. Children love having a story or a part of story read to them by a different adult. And it’s not as daunting as you think. Please volunteer to give it a go: either in person or remotely on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
• Talking to children about their jobs (either in person or remotely on Zoom or Microsoft Teams).

Parental feedback
In order to keep improving what we do at school, it is so important that we regularly get feedback from a variety of different people including children, staff, governors, other professionals and parents. We actively and regularly seek parental feedback, and we try to act upon parental feedback when we can.

Historically, parents asked for more effective and meaningful attendance rewards, so we invited parents into school, to work alongside staff and children to form a working body to develop new ideas. Consequently, we altered our attendance policy and rewards procedures across school. This resulted in improved attendance.

Parents asked for more opportunities for the children to participate in extracurricular clubs, so we introduced a much wider variety of extra-curricular clubs for the children. 
Parents said that it was tricky doing remote learning via ‘live lessons’ due to siblings sharing devices and other work commitments at home meaning that it was difficult to commit to specific times, so we based the majority of our home teaching/learning on pre-recorded, personalised lessons (that could be accessed anytime of the day) instead of live lessons.

Parents are actively encouraged to complete the Ofsted Parent view survey. If you are a parent/carer of a child at Hindley J&I, please take 10 minutes to complete the survey.  
https://parentview.ofsted.gov.uk/login?destination=/give-your-views
Parents are also asked to complete anonymous surveys throughout the year via the Monkey Survey App. Please see the links below for results of recent surveys.