Partnering with Parents: Building quality relationships that benefit children

Partnering with Parents is an innovative practice support system designed to assist early childhood educators in their work with parents using essential and practical skills, tools and strategies.

Download Partnering with Parents overview PDF

Developed by the Parenting Research Centre (PRC) with the support of the Victorian Government, Partnering with Parents embeds evidence-based approaches to working in partnership with parents in an early childhood education and care (ECEC) service. The aim is to create an environment welcoming of and responsive to parents, and to strengthen educators’ skills and confidence to interact with parents in a way that supports their parenting.

Parenting Research Centre CEO Warren Cann talks about the importance of the relationship between parents and early childhood educators.

The importance of partnerships with families

Educators are often the first port of call for a parent seeking information about their child, and can also be the first to raise a concern with a family about a child’s behaviour or development.

The relationship between parents and educators is unique, and the importance of partnering with families is reflected in international, national and state policies and standards, including the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework.

However, while working with parents is a critical part of an early childhood educator’s role, research suggests many educators find this challenging. In a 2016 Parenting Research Centre survey, 98% of participating educators said they wanted training in partnering with families, specifically in how to conduct conversations with parents about the children in their care. To meet this need, Partnering with Parents has been developed as a ‘practice support system’ designed to help increase the skills and confidence of early childhood educators in their work with parents.

How training can help

Part of our PracticeWorks method, Partnering with Parents provides practical training and ‘how tos’ that are easy to incorporate into the daily rhythm of a busy early childhood educator’s activities. We can help centres determine their needs, and identify what elements of the Partnering with Parents practice support system should be implemented in the day-to-day operation of the service.

To ensure ongoing support and continuity, Partnering with Parents has been designed so that each centre nominates staff to be trained as ‘practice coaches’, who can then support other educators at their centre to implement key skills and strategies.

These key skills and strategies are embedded into three components which make up the Partnering with Parents support system, outlined in the graphic below.

See more on the Partnering with Parents components

Making Moments Matter

This component helps educators enhance what we call the ‘everyday relational environment’ so parents feel comfortable when having difficult conversations with educators – whether it’s an educator who needs to raise a concern, or a parent.
Strategies for communicating with parents mirror strategies use by educators when working with the children in their care. When educators need support in using these strategies, practice coaches are there to guide them.
Educators employ the strategies when relevant (e.g whether it is using a parent’s name when saying ‘hello’ or pausing and paying full attention to a parent for a few minutes).

More than Moments

In this component, educators learn about constructive conversations (e.g when responding to a parent’s concern about their child). Practice coaches support educators in learning constructive conversations with ‘just-in-time’ coaching, which involves scheduled interactions between coaches and educators to plan approaches, model and role-play strategies, and reflect on actions taken.
Partnering with Parents focuses on the micro skills educators need in these interactions. An example of a micro skill would be the two process models that guide this practice, one which carefully steps through how to raise a concern and the other on how to respond to a concern or a complaint.

Working on concerns with parents

This component addresses how to work collaboratively with parents through a series of structured phases on an issue requiring more intensive, and possibly longer-term, attention.
Coaching for this component is supplied by PRC via a series of live webinars and telephone consultations.
An online learning course and a guidebook titled Working on Concerns are available to educators.

How was Partnering with Parents developed?

A multi-year initiative, the development of Partnering with Parents incorporated an extensive needs analysis, program creation and a randomised control trial to test effectiveness. Throughout 2019 we evaluated Partnering with Parents by conducting a cluster randomised controlled trial with 19 Victorian services, covering a mix of metro and rural services offering long-daycare and kindergarten, or kindergarten only.

For more information on how the trial was conducted, see Study Protocol, Petrovic et al. (2019)

Findings

After an intervention group completed their implementation of Partnering with Parents, but before the control group had begun, we asked educators in both the intervention group and the control group questions about:

changes in the way they interact with parents
changes in their own skills
changes in the skills of others at their service.

We asked parents about their relationship with educators and the communication at the service.

While the results of the multi-level modelling conducted as a part of the cRCT suggested positive improvements in both skills and confidence of educators and parent reports on relationship and communication, no significant differences were found. We interpret that this was due largely to educators and parents providing high ratings at baseline. Given reports from parents and educators do suggest high acceptability and intention to use, further investigation is required to assess scientifically significant change is achieved as a result of Partnering with Parents.

Outcome

There is strong consensus in the sector that, while some educators are skilled in working with families, many lack confidence, particularly in the context of high and complex child and family needs, and are therefore open to, and are seeking, further training.

The ECEC sector has made significant gains in improving quality of services in recent years, and is well placed to focus efforts on supporting educators to more effectively partner with families. We suggest many ECEC services would benefit from Partnering with Parents to convert knowledge into application and thus improve partnerships with families.

How can services sign up?

If your service is interested in finding out more about Partnering with Parents, please contact project lead Olivia Clayton.

Olivia Clayton, Senior Practice Design Specialist
Email: oclayton@parentingrc.org.au