As part of our work to support ethnic and cultural minority parents to become more involved in their child’s education and the school community we will be holding sessions for parents in ABERDEEN at the end of October.
We have two sessions booked for Parents and one for Parent Councils, have a look below for details of the sessions.
The Gathered Together team were at the Scottish Learning Festival last week. It’s an amazing event bringing together a huge range of organisations involved in education and children’s learning – from Skills Development Scotland to Amnesty International. This year was the first time that parents had been officially invited to attend and the National Parent Forum Scotland (NPFS) and our partners Scottish Parent Teacher Council had a “Parent Connect” stall just for parents. It seemed to be constantly busy- and not just because of the tempting home baking available! There were sessions on how parents can support their children with literacy and numeracy and what Parent Councils do, visiting displays from organisations supporting families- including Gathered Together and vast amounts of information about parents’ rights, the Curriculum for Excellence and the role of Parent Councils. (more…)
We are really excited for this years Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow’s SECC on Wednesday and Thursday.
Gathered Together will be delivering a seminar on Thursday 25th at 12pm, and we will be looking at the impact of parents being involved in their children’s education and the benefits of getting parents from different cultures to the school and the children. 100 people (!) have signed up for our seminar so unfortunately there are no spaces left but we’ll make sure we put information from the seminar up on our website.
We are looking to hear from teachers about their experience with parental involvement. We want to know what are the barriers you’ve faced, who are the parents that have inspired and supported you, and why you think parental involvement matters. Use #parentsaspartners to get your voice heard and you may be featured in Thursday’s seminar!
Hi Everyone,
My name is Maryam and I am a new intern Development Officer with BEMIS. I applied for this role as I belong to an ethnic minority as well as I am a mother and I understand the importance for parental involvement in schools and community and how not being engaged with your child’s education and activity can affect the outcome of their future. I am currently involved in the Gathered Together Project with BEMIS and my role involves to collect stories, case studies from ethnic minority parents, teachers, parents councils by using videos, blogs, podcasts and social media.
I was recently a part of an interview with an EAL teacher Marylin Gordon at the Golfhill Primary school who also runs a Learning Together Club which offers bilingual parents advice, guidance & support on how to be active partners in their child’s learning. This includes the benefits of reading & developing skills at home and the value of using the first language to support and develop English as an addition a Language. The interview was quite interesting as she spoke about what efforts she is putting into this club in order to get the parents from the Ethnic Minority Community and what difference it has made so far. I am looking forward to attending the Media Trust Training next week which will allow me to develop some media skills.
We ran our second Community Champion training session in Falkirk at the end of August. This session was marked by having participants from a couple of different local authority areas (Stirling and Falkirk) who brought their interesting experiences with them, as well as their different perspectives on being an ethnic and cultural minority parent in Scotland.
In addition to this, we were lucky enough to have Megan Farr from Falkirk education department attending too to hear the experiences of delegates. Gathered Together promotes that the results of its sessions are passed on to Local Authorities, but in this case, it was self-evident. The experience appeared to be useful for both the delegates and for the council, so this was great for all of those attending.
We are really excited to continue to work with our Community Champions – hopefully you’ll be hearing from them on our blog as they share their experiences as parents.
