Recently Sarah was asked to design and deliver a workshop for parents in a South East London borough. The parents all have children attending schools in a particular part of the borough and form what is called a school cluster group. The Local Authority Extended Services team were keen to engage with parents in relation to increasing participation in family learning as well as ensuring that parents had a voice and an opportunity to contribute their ideas for a large scale parent’s conference that would be held in July 2010.
Sarah worked with local practitioners to design a workshop that would encourage participation and inclusion. It was important to make the workshop activities accessible to all parents. Things for consideration were the wide range of cultural backgrounds and varying levels of literacy as many participants had English as a second language.

Sessions ranged from: a creative market place of information; a dot voting and marble voting series of activities; large graffiti walls that the parents could contribute their ideas to using words, images or symbols and small group conversation sessions facilitated by local practitioners.

There were high levels of participation, lots of great ideas for the conference in July and positive feedback from the parents plus a desire to be involved in the future. It was a wonderful session to be a part of.