Parent Partnerships
At Overfields Primary, we view partnership with parents and carers as highly important because it helps meet the needs of the whole child. Successfully involving parents in a child’s education can have a positive impact, equivalent to up to four months additional progress for a child. Developing a partnership with parents and carers in the early years of their schooling, helps teachers to personalise each child’s teaching, establish the importance of education and give each child the best start. At Overfields we aim to continue this close working relationship throughout a child’s complete primary education.
We understand that parents and carers are the most important influence in a child’s life and at Overfields, we have been recognised for our excellent parent partnerships when we achieved our Leading Parent Partnership Award in 2017. For more information on the benefits this award brings to parents and children at Overfields, please click the image opposite.
How we engage our parents and carers
Parent’s evenings
Parents are invited into school in October, February and July each year for a parent’s evening event. Teachers meet with each child’s parents and discuss their progress across the curriculum, their behaviour and engagement in their work and their wellbeing at school. Parents can look through their child’s books and see any work on display and see for themselves the learning environment that their child experiences each day. Any parents who cannot attend our parents evenings are offered alternative appoinments or a video call or telephone call.
Newsletters
The school produces a regular newsletter for parents. It includes information about upcoming school events, news, reminders and other useful information. Every term, each class teacher also sends a detailed newsletter about the topics they will be teaching, how parents can help at home and any year group specific information such as test dates, trips or performances. You can access the latest newsletters here.
Marvellous Me
We encourage all our parents to sign up to the MarvellousMe app on their phones or tablets. MarvellousMe enables teachers to send regular, quick and important news and feedback to parents on all aspects of school life. It is used to give our busy parents reminders about events or deadlines, to provide positive praise about pupils work or behaviour and it also provides access to school forms and other online information or websites. Parents also use MarvellousMe to record when their child has read at home.
Class Events
Every class will invite their parents, carers and families to a special event during the year. This will allow the children to work with their parents in school and it allows parents a more in depth look at what happens in their child’s classroom. Our events in the past have included:
- Craft activities creating felt flowers
- Making Greek jewellery
- Visiting a museum of World War Two artefacts, created in the classroom
- Sharing a story
- Making Christmas cards
- Paper aeroplane competiton
- Making working circuits in science
Year 5 parents and pupils creating their Greek Jewellery
Special Events
Over the course of a year, we plan activities where the whole school community can come together to celebrate in a special event. From Christmas shows and carol services to sports days and summer picnics, we get such a positive feedback from pupils and parents after these events.
Parent Voice
We actively seek the views of our parents throughout their child’s time at primary school. The most important aspect of this is for each teacher to establish an effective and open relationship with each pupil’s parents or carers. This allows us to identify early any problems which may affect the child’s learning and builds an atmosphere of respect and trust between all parties.
We also organise more formal methods of collecting parents’ views through surveys and questionnaires and after special events in school. We always allow parents the opportunity to give their views on safeguarding in school and we have also consulted recently about about remote learning and reading at home.
You can view the results of our most recent safeguarding survey below. The results show the percentage of parents and carers who replied ‘Strongly agree’ or ‘Agree’ to each question. We received a total of 98 responses to this survey.
The school has a twitter account as an additional method of communicating within and outside of our school community. You can open our twitter account (@OverfieldsPri) by clicking below. It is also accessible from the bottom of the home page of this website.
What our parents and carers tell us
We collect the views of our parents in many ways. From informal discussions with staff to formal surveys, we are always willing to listen to what our families are telling us. We have a clear and open mechanism for any parents who are concerned with how we educate their chilren and we actively seek the views of parents and carers about issues such as health and safety, safeguarding, our curriculum and remote and home learning.
Can you help?
We are always looking to build bigger and better relationships with our parents. If you feel you would like to be more involved in how your child’s school is ran, please let us know. If you call the school office on 01642 314548 we will arrange for you to have a cup of coffee and a chat with a member of staff about what different roles are available.
