PTA

Strong sense of community

If there’s one thing Southborough is especially known for, it is its strong sense of community. As a relatively small comprehensive, the school benefits immensely from staff and students knowing and understanding each other well. Staff identify well what ‘makes their students tick’ and thus know how to get the very best from them. Students, in return, learn first-hand the life-long benefits of forging positive relationships with the people they work for. Indeed, ‘relationships’ is one of the school’s key values, alongside respect, responsibility, resilience, support and challenge.

But the school’s focus on relationships isn’t just between the staff and students but with all stake-holders, including people living in and around the local community and, of course, with the parents and carers of the pupils themselves.

The benefits of good parental engagement

At Southborough, we encourage our parents and carers to engage in their child’s education right from the very start. After all, research clearly demonstrates that the more parents are engaged in the education of their children, the more likely their children are to succeed in the education system.

Research (from the Sutton Trust and Educational Endowment Foundation) relating to school improvement and school effectiveness consistently shows that parental engagement is one of the key factors in securing higher student achievement. The EEF suggests that parental engagement has a positive impact on average of 4 months’ additional progress. What this means for schools is that family involvement increases the likelihood that students will engage more positively in their schooling, there will be improved parent-teacher-student relationships, attendance will improve and more pupils will go on to positive destinations (university / college / training) after completing their studies.

But the benefits to children aren’t just academic. By engaging in their child’s education, parents are more likely to increase their interaction and discussion with their children and are more responsive and sensitive to their children's social, emotional, and intellectual developmental needs. In turn, parents are more confident in their parenting and decision-making skills.

When parents are more engaged with their child’s education, parents and children tend to bond more as they have a common goal. Not only does this bond strengthen their relationship, it also helps parents better understand their child's strengths and weaknesses which enables them to support their child’s learning from a perspective different from teachers.

Lastly, parents who are enthusiastic and engaged about their children’s learning often nurture children who are more enthusiastic and engaged with their own learning. The involvement of parents during the learning process can also result in more confident children who have better social skills and classroom behaviour, leading to improved motivation in class and less of a need for redirection.

Our parent/carers make the difference!

We live by our school motto of ‘making the difference for ALL our students.’ Staff work incredibly hard to ensure that every single student gets the very best education possible. However, as a community, we recognise that the greater the help and support that we get from outside - particularly from or parents and carers - the better the outcomes for our students. Team work, as the saying goes, makes the dream work!

Examples of parental engagement at Southborough

We have benefited considerably from the engagement of many of our parent/carers over the years. Here are just a few examples:

• We have a fantastic Parent Teacher Association (PTA) that has helped raise thousands of pounds over the years through a variety of events, be it comedy nights, quiz nights, cake and hot chocolate sales, Christmas raffles and more besides. All money raised by the PTA is spent for the direct benefit of the students, for example the latest hi-tech equipment for the media department or new sports kit for our rugby, football and cricket teams.

• We have a thriving ‘Parent Focus Group’ who regularly feed back to our Senior Leadership Team on all manner of things, including school social media presence, marketing material, the school website and other more fundamental, day-to-day areas such as Class Charts, the school calendar, parents evenings, mock exam weeks and even how we are viewed within the local community. Every single piece of feedback is highly valued and acted upon where appropriate.

• We have a growing number of Parent Governors who work tirelessly on behalf of the school in order to ‘make the difference’. These dedicated Parent Governors bring along specific specialisms (e.g. analytics, coding, graphic design, human resource management) which are then channelled into the effective running of our school.

• Parents regularly support our Careers Fairs, either delivering talks to specific year groups or by taking part in our Careers Speed-dating events. For this, we’ve had parents and carers come in and represent all manner of careers including Television, Transport for London engineering, IT, hospitality, the Police, banking, healthcare, advertising, digital communication and journalism.

• Other parents and carers have also contributed towards subject specific events like our STEM careers fairs. In recent years we’ve have parents from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Google and BAE Systems Maritime come in a talk to students about their involvement in their love of and involvement in STEM and how it led them towards their career choices.

• We have had a number of parents working in hospitality who have taken time out to come in and deliver masterclasses in cookery.  A head chef of a local restaurant recently demonstrated how to cook a delicious Moroccan meal to eager (and hungry) young students.

• A parent who is a BBC War Correspondent recently spoke to Year 7 students about his experiences and helped launch our BBC Young Reporter campaign.

However, parental engagement comes in all types of guises, and we have benefitted from other, more diverse ways including the following:

• A parent training to become a professional gardener regularly came into school over a two year period to help develop and nurture our courtyard ‘wellbeing’ garden
• A parent who worked for a merchandising/ sales promotion agency once provided the Sixth Form with boxes of pens, pencils and mugs for the sixth form kitchenette
• A graphic designer parent created a number of promotional flyers for school events over a period of years
• A parent recently spoke to media students about his job working in special effects in film
• A parent brought in an elderly neighbour to talk to younger students about his historical knowledge of the local area over the years
• A parent with great local business links has regularly sourced some fabulous gifts for our school raffles over a number of years

Think you can help in some capacity? Then please get in touch!

To summarise, we recognise how valuable and beneficial parental engagement is to the success of the school and, most importantly, to the success and wellbeing of all our students. We therefore welcome any parental involvement - be it on a regular or ‘one off’ basis – with open arms.

If you are interested in getting involved with the school in some way –however small or large – then please do contact us on office@southborough.kingston.sch.uk

We’d love to hear from you!