For those of us who are old enough, it’s hard to believe that this iconic, pre-social media ad campaign featuring the late, great Bob Hoskins is now over a quarter of a century old! In 1995, as a then Deputy Head in a secondary school over 2000 students, how did we operate without email or Facebook or Twitter for instant messaging to parents? Who fondly remembers the memo, and when receipt of a fax was a beautiful moment of awe and wonder?!
In terms of home-school communications, it was then – as now – of course always good to talk. Its just that our means of doing so have changed remarkably, with their application and significance even further heightened by the impact of the pandemic.
In the first weeks and months of the Pandemic I communicated with my school community incessantly, like never before – via daily email, blogs, Twitter and Facebook; it was all about sending reassuring and positive messages to a community which, like all others, was confused, disorientated – and, frankly, afraid. Amongst all the flux and uncertainty, school was the one constant in their individual and collective lives. And my teachers did the same. Daily online lessons via Teams, group and individual tutorials, online feedback and monitoring of student welfare.
Of course, a fundamental difference in all of this was that the whole family could be part of the process. Parents became often directly involved in their children’s learning on a real time basis in a way that they had never been before. The home school-relationship, previously limited to the five-minute set-piece parents’ evening consultation or occasional phone call, often negatively triggered by a ‘concern’ about progress, had shifted to become an on-going, live dialogue about the dynamics and structure of learning.
The opportunity now is to build on this, with the help of Aspire 2Be’s bespoke digital solutions, to sustain a whole new culture of home-school communication where it really is good to talk about the wider process of learning, together.
