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The Derbyshire Reading Family Homes Strategy

Family Reading Homes in Derbyshire

A strategy for the Derbyshire Strategic Partnership

The Children’s Trust

July 21 2011

Report of the Strategic Director for children and young people and

the Family Reading Champion, Strategic Director for culture and communities.

A strategy to encourage Family Reading Homes in Derbyshire

Despite efforts to improve the standard of literacy in the UK there remains a core of around 16% of adults whose literacy skills are limited to those of an ‘average’ 11 year old.  13% of 15 to 24 year olds are classed as NEET. 17% of young men leaving school at 16 have limited functional skills in English.

Lower literacy skills are linked with poor educational, social and economic outcomes.  Parents with literacy challenges are very likely to be ill prepared to support their children’s communication and literacy development.

These adults and parents are very likely to be disaffected, have low aspirations and to ‘pass on’ limited or negative attitudes towards literacy and learning to their children.  This is thought to be a significant cause of the ‘achievement gap’ between disadvantaged and other children.

This picture is true nationally and in Derbyshire is backed by local research carried out in 2009.  Harder to reach parents from areas of socio –economic decline were likely to report a lack of confidence in their skills and the ability to help their children; yet the evidence suggests that it is parental attitudes and support that make a difference to children’s attainment.

Scope of this document

This strategy document makes the case for an ongoing cross sector approach to supporting the development of literacy* in families; as a part of the support to families offered by the Derbyshire Partnership it fits within the Family Support Strategy.  The document summarises the 'Partners in Literacy' pilot and the learning and development achieved through this.  Strategic aims, objectives and principles are recommended and a list of 'synergies' with existing programmes and strategies are listed. 

This is a time of substantial structural and managerial change; the final section of this document looks at how this strategy fits within new structures and offers an action plan, including staff development, to transfer the knowledge and expertise from the pilot base, ROWA! to ongoing structures.  It is this area, in particular, which requires consideration by managers of emerging ongoing structures in CAYA and partner agencies.

Finally there are 6 case studies in the appendices as illustrations of the proposed partnership work.

Definition of ‘family reading homes’

Families play a significant role in helping a child acquire language, communication skills, a disposition for learning, a readiness for school and a self esteem which enables learning.   Early Years education and schools play a crucial role in providing the knowledge and skills which are the building blocks of literacy competence.  However it is families and communities which provide the opportunities for practice, development, enthusiasm, satisfaction, inclination and fun.  This is made clear in two recent policy publications, ‘Grasping the nettle’ and ‘The Foundation Years’**

Family reading homes help children to develop language, tell stories, listen, learn the names of things, describe, follow instructions, develop an argument, be praised, be encouraged, try new things, acquire reading tastes, learn how reading and information are linked, develop language for different purposes e.g. maths, predicting, understanding, disagreeing and so on.  This is achieved through conversation, observation, playing games, bedtime reading, singing and nursery rhymes, experimenting with sounds, role models and enjoying activities together.

In many homes, parents do not know how important it is for them to play an active role in their children’s language, communication, reading and writing development.  Increasingly children are starting school with worryingly low levels of language skill.  This strategy is designed to inform parents of the role they need to play to help their children to develop literacy skills. 

This is a universal strategy as all children need the benefit of ‘Family Reading Homes’.  However, the emphasis is on helping those parents, through information and the sharing of skills, whose children are at the greatest risk of educational disadvantage. 

During the pilot phase of this work we have discovered remarkable synergies between supporting families’ reading and other outcomes.  The activity outcomes have been far reaching, enhancing not only literacy but also family bonding and participation, social capital and parental confidence.  This win:win outcome has been achieved at very low cost; it seems that the same activities which support family reading practice are those which encourage bonding between family members and therefore family cohesion.

The ‘Partners in Literacy’ Pilot

ROWA! has supported community literacy development since 1997 by attracting funding to develop projects.  ROWA! and Derbyshire Adult and Community Education(DACE) have developed significant experience of working with parents to help them to become more confident readers and to develop a better understanding of their role in their child’s development.  In 2009 ROWA! became part of a national pilot designed to consider how a strategic partnership approach to supporting family reading could make an impact on children’s achievement and parents’ skills.

This pilot was endorsed by the Derbyshire Partnership Forum and a cross-sector Advisory Group, chaired by Martin Molloy, Strategic Director for culture and communities and the Family Reading Champion, was established to develop cross-sector coordination and approaches.  In year one research was carried out with ‘harder to reach’ parents and staff from the public and VCI sectors to ascertain their experience of, and attitudes towards, both the need for literacy support and the support which was available at the time.

Full details of this research can be found at http://www.rowa.org.uk/pil_facts.html.  In brief we learned that:

• many colleagues working with families acknowledge that literacy is an underlying factor in the families’ problems and hampers their own ability to help clients achieve positive outcomes

• colleagues would like to be part of the solution but lacked confidence in their own identification and referral skills and in the current options for support.  They asked for training, family reading resources and up to date information for signposting

• parents told us of both their lack of confidence in, and, their disaffection with, education systems and support which ‘felt like’ school

• a third of parents said that they did not know how to encourage their children’s development and some said they would leave this to nursery and school

• parents had access issues and wanted local community support, possibly by peers, which was defined by neighbourhood and can be a very small territory.

In year two we ran a number of pilots which were all designed to:

• create new partnerships between colleagues from different sectors and disciplines in order to improve access to reading support
  

• offer training to non-literacy colleagues to assess how literacy is connected to their core work and to help them adapt their work processes to include an appropriate level of family reading support
  

• create new pathways for accessing families who need support in order to  model literacy skills and introduce them to literacy resources in the community

• re-model and badge what we know as literacy support so that it is more accessible to parents

• begin to create a volunteer mentor / champion approach to bring family reading support very close to the community.
  

We developed new ways of cross-sector working with; social housing providers, health care providers, the voluntary, community and independent sector, early years child care providers, Children’s Centres, Derbyshire Adult and Community Education (DACE), family resource workers, family intervention project workers, parenting support and cultural services including libraries.  

We created new workforce development resources, materials to assist the identification of family reading issues during use of the Child Assessment Framework (CAF) and a proposal to link family reading support into the commissioning process.

It is this work, based on these pilots, which provides the evidence for the proposed Family Reading Homes Strategy.  While ROWA! was well positioned to lead this pilot, the strategy needs to be adopted by the successor of the Derbyshire Strategic Partnership and embedded into ongoing structures.

For illustration purpose, summaries of some of the pilots can be found in the appendices to this document:

The new partnership strategy for developing Family Reading Homes in Derbyshire

Strategic aims:

• for locality partners within the ‘Derbyshire Strategic Partnership’ to work to a shared strategic vision to eliminate the effects of disadvantage in the development of children’s communication and literacy by developing and delivering a process of support for Family Reading Homes

• to find synergy between this strategy and others within the ‘Derbyshire Strategic Partnership’, and locality partners, to create a continuum for achieving better communication, language and learning outcomes through improved service provision and teaching especially in Family Learning, 'Early Years' and Key Stage 1.
  

Strategic objectives:

• to develop at locality and community level, robust inter-agency processes for recognising families who need literacy support
  

• to identify the range of literacy resources available in communities, especially those communities with higher ‘achievement gap’ records and to develop this into a comprehensive and accessible continuum of support including: volunteer family reading champions, first steps interventions delivered in the families’ home, informal opportunities through the VCI sector and libraries, promotion of parents’ role in child development, family literacy resources and activities, Family Learning (both specialist literacy support sessions and courses and other opportunities for families to learn together) and adult education accessed by parents for their own pleasure through informal or formal learning
  

• to prepare workforce development resources to support a multi-agency approach to delivering first steps literacy interventions and confident signposting to accessible literacy support.
  

• to develop this package within the remit of Multi Agency Teams (MATs) and their extended networks

• to deliver this targeted support within the context of a universal message to parents about the importance of family reading
  

• to monitor the outcomes of this activity through outcomes in literacy and language at Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1.  To monitor additional outcomes for parents through take up of adult education and to monitor the impact on library membership and sustained use.
  

Strategic Principles:

• Partnership working, ambitious shared vision, shared goals with an understanding of each partner’s different role within this process

• To value reciprocal learning between partners so that joint effort towards shared outcomes can be achieved through transformation of the way service is offered and partners work together to create win:win outcomes.
  

• Acknowledgement of the significant influence of parents, carers and wider families on the development of communication and literacy.

• Focus on family units, parental involvement, exchange of information and support to parents to enable them to become partners in this process
  

• Early identification of literacy challenges within families

• Recognition of some parents' antipathy to education environments and, therefore, to develop an appropriate community response with a robust pathway to increased levels of support.

• Clarity of easily identifiable step by step options within localities.

• Monitoring and reporting through the Children's Trust 

Strategic Synergies:

This approach to family reading has close synergies with other strategic plans and operational systems.

1. Helping children to achieve more: the governments approach to improving outcomes for children.  Literacy confidence affects: safety, health, achievement, economic well-being and participation, and continues to have an impact on outcomes throughout life.
   

2. The Derbyshire Family Support Strategy: this strategy sets guidelines and processes for early intervention and support for families.  In terms of helping parents to purposively promote their child’s education, workforce development, partnership working and monitoring, the two strategies are linked.  This strategy fits within the Family Support Strategy where literacy is recognised as one of the differentiated layers of family support.

3. Family Learning:  Derbyshire Adult and Community Education (DACE) is the lead partner on Family Learning.  There is a universal offer on a wide range of DACE courses for families to learn together.  Additionally there are targeted family learning opportunities and specific family learning literacy courses.  Within the Family Learning Literacy offer there are introductory courses and courses leading to a basic skills qualification in literacy for the parent.
   
   The new Skills Funding Agency criteria for family learning will allow greater freedom to offer the support that families need in more accessible ways.  The DACE family learning coordinator has considerable experience in Family Literacy and community based approaches to delivery.  This element of the DACE programme is very well placed to be a key player and funder in the delivery options for this strategy.

4. Every Child a Talker (ECAT) this one year pilot has enhanced training for supporting communication in early years settings.  ELKLAN training, to develop language rich environments for children, has been introduced as workforce development; some training for parents is also being offered.  A 2 year old communication screening test has been developed for Health Visitors to use.
   

5. Speech, Language, Communication Needs network.  This is a partnership planning and development group for those working with children who have SLCN.  Increasingly the children referred to these specialists are children whose development is delayed by family practice.  The information and support these parents require is a precursor to that required to support family literacy.  Therefore similar reach and access issues apply. The SLCN group is responsible for service improvement in language and communication. There is a possibility of close monitoring and reporting links between communication, language and literacy, possibly to the Children's Trust. 
   
   2011 is the National Year of Communication for children, known as ‘Hello’, and this provides another opportunity to begin to embed this work in 2011.

6. Health Visitors: play a key role in developing and disseminating information to parents.  A piloted Partners in Literacy approach using the book gifted by Bookstart as a talking point could be rolled out through Health Visitor Locality Managers.  Health Visitors also have a role in identifying delayed speech and language.  PCT locality managers have a role in extending the learning from this pilot within health services.  The Healthy Child Programme (in progress, Derbyshire PCT) will guide health visitors to supporting parents to help baby learn.  Health Visitors will be more involved with signposting and referring to other language and literacy support.

7. Bookstart: a book gifting programme to children under one and in their third year.  This is linked to the children and family offer in libraries.  A Library / DACE partnership is developing a course for parents based on the book gifts to show parents how to use books with their children.  The Bookstart programme and associated support needs to be made accessible to parents and delivered in communities in ways which are acceptable to them.
   

8. Parenting Support:  ‘Positive parenting’, ‘living with children’, ‘living with teenagers’.  The ideas and skills encouraged in these courses have a lot of synergy with good family reading practice but reading is, so far, not used as a means to an end.  The inclusion of literacy activities and parents’ role in supporting literacy as a means to engage with children in a positive way is being trialled and evaluated. 

9. Children’s Centres, PEEP: these courses are designed to help parents better understand how they can support their children’s learning and development.

10. Culture and Communities, Libraries: the library service makes a number of offers to support emergent adult readers and families.  By working in closer partnership with agencies which can identify target families, libraries are better able to focus services for these families with literacy need and adapt to their needs for information, guidance and support. The library service could also play a crucial part in making other resources available on loan and in working with family support agencies to ensure the best use of these loans.

11. Culture and Communities: Museums, Art Galleries and Heritage sites: these centres could offer a range of support on communication, participation and adult education matched to children’s syllabus subjects.

12. Family Resource Workers / Family Intervention Project key workers: these workers can support literacy in families by working with them on first step interventions and signposting to supported participation.  Colleagues using literacy resources have been impressed with the positive affect on bonding between family members.

13. Volunteering: there is a huge potential resource, at various levels, for literacy support through volunteering.  Volunteers could be engaged as follows, to:

• be community mentors and help encourage better reading in families
• be buddies in schools or start a family reading project from a school
• work with established volunteer services such as Home Start and CVS.
• be encouraged to obtain the Derbyshire Trust Volunteer Passport

Volunteering opportunities are provided though workforce development and could be created from within DCC workforce.  Elsewhere literacy volunteering is sold as workforce development to the private sector. Through social housing and the VCI sector and Children’s Centres literacy volunteering could be included in community development and confidence building programmes. There is the potential for volunteering programmes to be supported through the 'Big Society' policy as yet to be fully described by the government.  DACE is currently developing a Community Learning Volunteer programme which could be explicitly linked to family literacy support.

Linked strategic synergies:

Adult education and skills for life:  parents who become involved in family learning and skill development often address their own skills and are more likely to return to education or training. 

In house workforce development: as part of public sector workforce development, sessions in family reading could be offered to parents of young children.  This could be linked to the GO Award initiative.  A volunteer programme could be developed as part of workforce development.

Regeneration and Worklessness: the communities which need the most intervention are those that are also affected by worklessness.  Improving the literacy skills of parents in these areas could be linked to other forms of support for returning to work.

Health and Wellbeing: poor health and shorter lifespan are significantly correlated with low educational achievement.  Furthermore problems with reading instructions and leaflets make it difficult for some families to understand health advice,

Infrastructure development to be achieved through the transition to new structures.

Multi Agency Team training:  Family Reading should be taken on as an explicit target for MATs; many of the key roles mentioned above are represented in the teams or are linked to them.  Initially this will mean additional input to MATs to establish processes to identify the full extent of the local literacy offer and to augment this by increasing the offer through all of the links mentioned above.  Workforce development will be required to equip colleagues with information and confidence to tackle literacy issues either within the MAT or through work with wider networks including volunteers.

To make this strategy work and to ensure that the MATs are equipped and prepared to develop family reading as a shared goal the following elements of managerial infrastructure are required:

• Shared vision between partners
  

• Operation processes for identifying a current pathway of available Family Reading support and for developing solutions to any identified gaps

• Operation process for monitoring activity and evaluating outcomes, including long term outcomes.  ROWA! has started developing these tools and this work should be continued through the Single System data management programme (for children) and the DACE Management Information System (AQUA) for adults.

• Workforce development to support colleagues who are not literacy specialists to have information and confidence to play a part in this process.  ROWA! has been doing this as part of the PiL programme but, in the long run, colleagues in DACE and workforce development could take this on. 
  

• A shared language and sense of audience so that Family Reading offers are very visible to colleagues and communities.

• Resources for work with families.  Two types of resources are required.  Physical resources to take into families and leave with them (ROWA! has piloted such a ‘back pack’ project) and information resources about age appropriate family reading activities. (Currently on the ROWA! website).
  

• Volunteering development and support.  ROWA! and DACE have been developing this but the Big Society programme could result in a DCC project for volunteering, of which, this could be one aspect.  There could also be a core element about literacy included as part of ‘Volunteer Passport’ which is being designed to meet the needs of all volunteers in Derbyshire.
  

Commissioning: The commissioning process has already been amended so that tenderers competing for contracts to work with children and families already have to sign up to supporting a literacy first steps initiative.  To be effective, successful tenderers need access to workforce development and literacy resources.

Common Assessment Framework: although levels of family literacy are not excluded from the CAF process they are not specifically covered.  CAF training has been amended to include literacy as a concern.  CAF teams need access to options to support family literacy once identified.

Specialist family support: such as support for foster carers. Carer Reading Champions have been established and training for foster carers on reading support for their foster children is being offered. 

Universal: In addition to the needs of targeted families there is also evidence that other families, who are better placed to support family literacy, do not understand the necessity of doing this.  The strategy should retain the option of a wider promotional campaign to encourage enabling family reading practice.  Many of the strategies and processes mentioned above could be included in such a wider campaign.

Transition: Given the amount of work which needs to be relocated from ROWA! and embedded and linked to programmes which are, as yet, not fully described it would be advisable to allow a transition period for this work to be supervised during its introduction to new CAYA systems.

Development and reporting

Throughout the pilot project a Family Reading Champion, Martin Molloy, held the responsibility of guiding the strategic development of these ideas.  An Advisory Group was formed to offer advice and to support the implementation of research and pilot projects.  The emerging plan was reported to the Culture Thematic Board of the Derbyshire Partnership, to the Community Safety Forum, the Housing Partnership and to other forums at district level. There were two presentations to the Derbyshire Partnership Forum.

In going forward a Family Reading Champion should be retained to be the principle lead on this strategic work.  A strategic planning group is required to support operational development at locality level and to ensure that development funding and programmes are accessible throughout the county. This group would also advise on shared monitoring and evaluation processes.

At locality level there needs to be a person or process which encourages and monitors partnership working to this end.

Recommended Actions

Immediate

• Ensure specific staff continue to take a strategic lead on PiL for a finite period to effect the embedding of this strategy within emerging work streams.

• Maintain the role of a Family Reading Champion and identify an ongoing strategic planning group.
  

• Agree to work towards a schedule between partners and identify implementation milestones, soft outcomes, hard outcomes and monitoring procedures.

• Identify reciprocated contributions within all strategic synergies and to develop a way of indicating the effectiveness of joint working (e.g. costs, outcomes).

• Identify an effective communication and reporting mechanism to keep partners involved and informed at strategic and operational levels.
  

• Make available resources for partners to use at various levels of intervention based on the learning in the pilot phase.

Short/Medium Term

Working with DCC CAYA to:

• support MAT induction training and identify processes which support the development of a family literacy offer at locality level

• recognise the significant contribution of children’s centres and identify a clear role for them within this strategy

• identify and develop the role of early years care and education settings and primary schools in encouraging parental involvement

• support specific volunteer training through the passport scheme

• develop, in conjunction with ECAT and ‘Hello’ the information and support made available to parents through child carers

• continue to develop a literacy element within programmes such as positive parents and Webster –Stratton ‘ The incredible years’

• continue to include foster carers in supporting the reading of Children in Care

• embed family literacy as a vulnerability within the Common Assessment Framework

• develop the commissioning process to include services commissioned to children and families in this approach.

 Working with DCC DACE to develop:

• a community based approach to supporting families in a variety of accessible ways, e.g. volunteer support, family learning, Bookstart

• stronger accessible links to Family Learning Literacy/Numeracy

• a workforce development strategy which supports collaborative operations between partner agencies including volunteers
  

Working with DCC Culture and Communities to:

• further develop Bookstart as an opportunity to support parents (with DACE)

• help library services to develop a bank of resources that can be made available to families through other staff supporting families and to reconsider their own offer to families who need more encouragement to use library resources

• consider the family resource within museums, art galleries and heritage sites and maximise the opportunity for facilities to support reading families
  

Working with DCC Communications and Access to develop:

• a universal strategy for encouraging family reading

• to create a web based resource for all partners to inform them of family reading support activities, agencies and resources

Working with Health Services to further develop the role of health visitors and nursery nurses in the family reading element of ‘thriving babies’

Working with Social Housing agencies to develop:

• a family reading offer to families moving to new homes and temporary homes

• enhanced floating support

Working with the VCI sector to further develop:

• a reading champion role for agencies supporting families

• peer mentoring within communities

Working to explore links with community safety including the police, probation services and the family intervention project

Maintaining the link with the National Literacy Trust to take advantage of further opportunities and information which become available through their on-going project.

Sarah Burkinshaw   January 2011
Director, Read On Write Away!