Doing it for the kids: Just Add Parents

Sometimes you can’t sit by and watch.

Before I left the world’s third largest communications firm, where I ran the UK tech practice, I was dismayed by a report published at the start of the coronavirus lockdown.

Research conducted in the first weeks of lockdown by Public First and the Sutton Trust — two trustworthy bodies working in the field of education — revealed that the school system was, in terms of delivering education to 10 million children, keeling over.

Children who go to ordinary schools had stopped being educated.

A single gruesome fact leapt out at me: within a week of the shutdown, children who go to ordinary schools had, to all intents and purposes, stopped being educated. Only a quarter of children in state schools were taking part in online classes daily, half the number in private school. And it was clearly hitting poorer children and those of less educated parents the hardest.

I decided to use the strange chunks of spare time that coronavirus had gifted me between video calls to make a positive difference in an area I know well: education. And in particular, how schools could use the vast wealth of communication knowledge I and thousands of my fellow professionals possess, to help parents gain the confidence and skills they need to put a safety net around their children’s education. After all, we think the disruption to education may last weeks but it’s almost certain to affect us for years to come.

Bring on the optimists

It helps to step back and provide a little context here. At the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, it quickly became apparent two camps were emerging in the commentary and the rhetoric used in business, politics, the media: there were the optimists and then there were, let’s call them the realists. The realists were determined to get through this as harmlessly as possible.

When the status quo is jettisoned something almost magic happens. The impossible becomes momentarily plausible.

But the optimists, among whom I count myself, realised that the thing that was most certainly about to be jettisoned was the status quo. That rarely happens and when it does, something almost magic happens. The impossible becomes momentarily plausible.

The optimists have been pointing out, rightly, that the world wasn’t exactly perfect before coronavirus upended our everyday norms. We’d been through a divisive Brexit process in the UK, while countries as far afield as the Austria, Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Russia and even the mighty US had been locked in an embrace with populism and pessimism. Among the first victims of these various political movements were, of course, facts and the truth. But you can safely bet that the ones who will end up having to carry the can are people living in poorer countries, poorer families in rich countries and, in particular given the scale of the economic hit being taken, the next generation: our children.

Meanwhile, the greatest generator of poverty eradication ever devised, trade globalisation has been facing a slowdown. Climate change promises have been watered down. Populations continue to age with no consensus on an equitable split of the costs of social care. A global shortage of teachers — which will reach almost 70 million this decade — has been left unaddressed. Even for the optimists, the damning truth we face is that the next generation of children may all be forced to suffer permanently what our children are experiencing right now as a momentary blip.

Why are the optimists so focused on the negative? The simple answer is this: once the status quo is cast aside, the biggest reason not to fix what’s broken, inertia, is taken off the table. We’re going to need to build a new, well, everything, anyway. So it costs us nothing to make it a good new everything. Whether its our use of energy, our treatment of women, our policies towards pollution, trade, migration, the formula for sharing the burden of social care, the right to education, the enlightened self-interest of “levelling up” the developing world — the list is unending of the things that can be improved if you are forced to reject the old “it’s just the way it is” defence.

Becoming a foot soldier

So even before I’d left the world’s third-largest communications firm, I was thinking I should do something, play a foot soldier in the work of rebuilding that is going to have to happen.

The only difference, having now left, is that I can do this part properly.

Behind my do-goodish sense of responsibility to play my small part, there emerged a bigger goal

My plan is simple: use the scalable potential of Zoom calls to invite schools and school leaders to join free training sessions. It feels like a match made in heaven — I and my fellow professionals know how to communicate so people hear it, how to turn messages into action, how to harness the peer-to-peer connections in a network like a group of parents. We know how to think creatively to turn an idea into a campaign and it costs us almost nothing to package up what we have in such a way that schools can take free and immediate advantage of it. And the direct winners in the UK, for example, are the 10 million children and 11 million parents with children at school today - that’s a third of the entire population.

But behind my do-goodish sense of responsibility to play my small part, there emerged a bigger goal. I have worked in schools and for anyone who’s never done so, I can tell you the relationship with parents takes many forms. The best schools, following decades of research and evidence, see parents as an extension of the education team, a part of what many term the “learning community”. On the other hand, the most embattled schools may see parents as perhaps an inconvenience. As with everything, then there’s a whole spectrum in between.

The winners and losers of this postcode lottery of parent communication are, of course, the children. So I recognised that at the heart of my desire to do some good during this terrible lockdown, was a deeper recognition: that if only we could shed the inertia that compels us to accept the status quo, it might be possible to actually turn this disrupted period into an extraordinary opportunity to transform the way schools communicate with parents. And in particular, to help the majority of schools think again about the boundaries of their learning community. The goal has become to help all schools do what the minority already do brilliantly in respect of their learning community: just add parents.

So that’s the shape of summer 2020. An old friend, a senior teacher at one of the best schools in the country, if not the world, is joining me and we’ll start small with our first workshop via Zoom in the next week or two. Then we’ll follow demand. If nobody comes, it won’t be time wasted because in the two weeks I’ve spent creating the Just Add Parents website, I’ve learned so much about the role of parents in education and it will make me a better parent.

But so far two schools have already said they’d be interested in joining us on this journey, so you never know. Let’s see how many of the 30,000 in the UK we can reach before the end of the summer.

If you are a UK-based school leader or responsible for parent communications, please register for our free training workshops at justaddparents.co.uk