 Today I'm going to tell you about 100 ideas for primary teachers about engaging parents. This is a book by Janet Goodall and Catherine Weston. Janet Goodall, Dr Janet Goodall, sorry, is a lecturer in educational leadership at the University of Bath and Dr Catherine Weston is a motivational speaker on the topic of parents. Now I have a copy of this book which is published by Bloomsbury because I asked them to send me a review copy because I was writing a book and in that book I wanted to make recommendations or further reading around parental engagement and Kathy, one of the authors suggested that I might like her book and you know what? She was right. I love it. So this book is designed to be incredibly practical. It's exactly as it says on the tin there are 100 ideas in here although actually loads more because lots of them kind of span off several other ideas but there are 100 kind of key ideas in here and each of them is explained why this is a good idea for parental engagement and then there's a lot about the how you would implement it to. It's part of a series so there are other books in the 100 ideas series. I can't tell you how good the rest of them are because I haven't read them but I really like this one. Now I will show you the contents here that might take a moment because there's a lot in this book and so the contents actually outline one by one the ideas which is great. So the key thing though then that you need to know is the book is broken down into sections. So we start with the background and here we're learning about why. Why engage with parents and carers anyway? Like what's the point of that? What do we get from it? So we do a bit of that. Then we have a bit around understanding parents and the kind of things you can do to get a better understanding of your parents and that can really help with lots of the ideas that you're going to implement later on as well because the ideas in the book are great but you're always going to need to tailor them to the needs of the community in which you're working. So getting a bit of an understanding about the parents and carers in your specific community is really really helpful. Then there's part three is about setting up support then going on to being approachable. This is a really great section. Section four on being approachable is probably my favorite bit. So I coach schools all the time and lots of them struggle with parental engagement and one of the biggest barriers to parental engagement that I come across is when parents find it difficult to come into school because they find it intimidating. Perhaps they've got their own negative experiences and memories of school going on and they just don't really know how to get in there and feel comfortable in that environment. So making yourselves approachable is really, really important and this section is quite challenging. So for example, idea 52 is around are you helping or hindering and makes you really explore that. Part five is around communication styles. This is really good in terms of thinking about how we are communicating with our parents helping us to think outside the box a bit on that as well and also then thinking about how we communicate the good stuff that we've been doing. So we don't only do the parental engagement like on the day in the moment but also think about how we communicate that afterwards too. Part six is around helping parents to help, you know, getting them in, getting them to help you out with stuff. Part seven is the final part and that is around sustainable practice. So this is about okay, you're going to do all this great stuff, wonderful. How do we make sure that this kind of works over time? Because actually you've got an evolving parent body here and it's going to churn and change over time. How do we make sure that some of these ideas actually work over the course of time? So let's have a look at one of the pages. So we'll just take one so you can have a look at kind of how the book is laid out. So I'll show you one here hopefully. Hopefully my video editing magic will work. So I am looking at idea 43 on page 54, so making information easy to find. If we want to be able to communicate with parents, the lines of communication have to be open and easy to use. Now you'll see with how the page is laid out here that there's a bit of an explanation and then there's some really, really simple practical things that you need to actually go and do. So making sure that your email accounts are checked regularly, that you're having reasonable expectations and it's kind of very, very clear in terms of what we should be expecting. And then I really like that on most pages we also have a teaching tip. So here we've got simply adding an auto response to your email account with a friendly message setting out how busy you are that week and when you'll be able to respond will be appreciated. So simple tips that we can put into practice. Some pages also, so for example here the next page, page 55 has this bonus idea and this is quite nice because that builds on the ideas that we're already seeing in the pages. Now you'll have got an idea from the overview I did that this is a really wide ranging book. So it's my favourite kind of book. It looks small and manageable. You feel like you could pick it up and read it in one and you kind of do because it's really, you know, each idea makes you want to read the next one. But yeah, so it's really, really kind of, it feels achievable, feels doable, isn't like, oh my God, am I going to get through that? But actually it's just gold. It's full of gold. It's a treasure trove of ideas. So a really, really fab one to dip into and out of. Some of these ideas will work for you. Some of them won't. That's the nature of the beast. The other thing I would say, this is aimed at primary teachers. It says that clearly in the title. I don't know why it says that because I think it would be perfectly suitable for secondary too. Maybe they're doing a separate secondary one or something. I don't know. So some of these things, yeah, they're a bit more primary, but yeah, I think most of these ideas or many enough to make it worthwhile would be suitable for secondary as well. And potentially, you know, some of these ideas might even work in college. So what are my three favourite things about this book? Okay, my first thing would be, I love the idea of a hundred. I love that there are a hundred different things in here. And maybe, you know, five of them are things that I'm going to take away and use. And those are five brilliant things because I've had so many to choose from. So I like the fact there are so many ideas in here. The next thing I like is that it's written in a really practical way. These feel like ideas I can pick up and use right away. I can imagine using this in a staff meeting, you know, kind of brainstorming out a bit and literally the next day feeling empowered to go off and try stuff. And then the final thing I really like is all the little additional bits. So the teaching tips, the taking it further and the bonus ideas. So you don't just have your hundred ideas. Actually some of these are things that you can build on and that will grow and flourish over time. So they're my three favourite things. Would I recommend it? Yeah, I absolutely would. I think if you are struggling with parental engagement or maybe it's something you're doing quite well and you want to do it even better, then I think there would be really, really good food for thought in here. Yeah, I really enjoyed it and it made me think as well and it gave me loads of good ideas that I've already begun sharing with lots of the schools that I coach. So thank you very much to Janet and Kathy, hugely appreciated. Hope you liked it. If you would like to hear me review other books, let me know what books you'd like to hear me review in a comment below and I will endeavour to try and endeavour to try. I'll try and get around to reviewing them too. Cool. Thank you. Bye.