Why is it important to collaborate with educators and families to support childrens learning?

It’s essential to understand the importance of focusing on the relationships you create with families — not just the children in your care, but their parents and carers too.

Table of Contents Show

Creating effective relationships with families: benefits
Benefits for children
Benefits for families
Benefits for early learning services
Building partnerships with families to meet the Quality Standard
How you can achieve positive family partnerships
Exceptional outcomes through collaboration

Research suggests that enhancing family engagement with children’s experience in early childhood education enhances children’s development and wellbeing. By strengthening the relationship between early learning services and families, we can also improve children’s outcomes.

Creating effective relationships with families: benefits

The benefits of fostering solid working relationships with families of children at your service can be far-reaching. Taking the time to develop and foster partnerships with families and carers has advantages for all involved in the early childhood education experience.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that you might notice in services with positive family/service relationships.

Benefits for children

Enhanced feelings of safety and belonging
Comfortable and positive relationships with their carers
Positive relationships with other children
Engaged in learning experiences
Calmer transitions

Benefits for families

Actively involved in children’s education and care
Understanding of and commitment to children’s development
Continuity of learning in the home
Increased family wellbeing
High levels of advocacy within and for the service

Benefits for early learning services

A positive learning environment
A positive working environment
Reduced staff turnover
Improved outcomes for children
Families as service advocates

Building partnerships with families to meet the Quality Standard

As well as the benefits listed, early childhood education services who focus on their relationships with families will also have the opportunity to enhance their NQS Rating. Quality Area 6 of the National Quality Framework is Collaborative partnerships with families and communities.

This Quality Area recognises just how crucial it is for centres to have strong, collaborative relationships with children’s parents and carers to get the very best outcomes for children. Elements cover the development of respectful relationships, supporting parents in their own role, informing families and sharing information, and including families in decision-making for their children’s learning.

How you can achieve positive family partnerships

Every family should feel welcome, safe and connected with your early childhood education service. Your service should provide a sense of community – one that families feel they belong to and are an active participant within. After all, families and educators share the same vision for the children attending the service to feel nurtured and engage in learning experiences that help them reach their fullest potential.

So how can you achieve this, and build those relationships? These tips will help:

Keep communication open and regular: Ensuring families are in the know with everything going on at the service and with their child’s learning will help them to feel included in their child’s early childhood education experience. Emails, video group call sessions, newsletters — try a few different means of communication to ensure you cover all bases.
Share current learning themes: Continuing learning from within services through to homes can enhance a child’s engagement, education and outcomes. Let parents know the words to songs that are being sung at the service, fill them in on what explorations have been undertaken and offer resources to extend on learning in the home.
Get to know families: Surveys, questionnaires or even just conversations can help you get to know the families at your service, and get to know children better. Send one out each term or a few times a year to ensure you are always aware of family situations, changes and how families might like to be involved with the service.
Involve families: Sharing cultures, skills and special talents in services is always enjoyable and engaging, but what about if you could involve children’s families? Put a call out to families about what they might be willing to share. It might be their cultural background, a job, musical prowess or a special talent.
Keep your team of educators inspired: Inspired, empowered educators will feel more inclined to work on their relationships with families. Keep your team upskilling and engaged. This means more confidence in their skillset and an enhanced commitment to being an educator making a difference for children and their families.
Actively collaborate with families: Working bees, sharing ideas, asking for feedback, getting their input with decisions at the service — let families know they are a part of your early childhood education service’s community and their input is valued.

Exceptional outcomes through collaboration

Families, children, educators and those running early childhood education services should feel connected. They share a vision and mission to provide their children with the best start in life and a strong foundation for their future.

Families trust early childhood educators to support and nurture their children. Working towards effective, meaningful partnerships ensures a sense of mutual respect as we work toward achieving these shared goals.

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Home / Educators / Professional Development (3 - 5 YEARS) / Getting Families Involved

instructional coherence: the experience learners have when messages that come from different sources (families and educators, for example) are the same or build on each other
cognitive development: the process of knowing, thinking, reasoning, and remembering
language development: the process of developing language skills to understand and engage in conversation
self-regulate: the ability to regulate or control one’s emotions, thoughts, and behavior
social development: the ability to use appropriate social skills to communicate and interact with others

Before watching this video, read the text below. When instructed, watch the video from the beginning to end.

A child’s social, emotional, cognitive, and academic development is strengthened when educators and families work together. When a child sees a positive relationship developing between educators and family, the child recognizes that the important people in his or her life are working together and trust each other, and he or she will do the same. This collaboration also provides a strong foundation for communication about children’s learning. To foster family involvement, interactions between educators and families should be positive, purposeful, reciprocal, and consistent.

Communicate with families often. When there is good communication between educators and families, learning is collaborative, accomplishments are acknowledged, problems are recognized, and solutions are provided.
Communicate the positive and the negative. Families will have a better sense of their child’s behaviors and accomplishments if all behaviors are reported (not only those that are negative or challenging).
Foster two-way communication. It is as important for the educator to hear from the parent or caregiver what the child is doing at home as it is for the parent or caregiver to hear what the child is doing in the early learning program. Share what children are learning and how parents and caregivers can offer support. Ask for feedback from families about the child’s academic and social development outside of the program.
Use multiple modes communication. Create a constant flow of communication. Engage with families in person at drop-off and pick-up, keep a journal for each child that families can read and contribute to, set up a Parent Information Board, write regular newsletters or blog posts, and send emails or text messages.
Understand each family’s expectations and views about their involvement. What parents and caregivers view as family engagement may differ from family to family. For example, in some cultures families believe that the most respectful way to treat an educator is not to question, suggest, or share information. Be explicit about the kind of involvement that you expect and welcome from families, but also honor the limits families may want to maintain.
Approach the relationship with respect. Treat the educator and family relationship the way you would treat any important relationship in your life. Work to create a respectful and reciprocal relationship—one in which families feel valued and supported.

In this video, you’ll see educators use various strategies to build strong relationships with families. As you watch, look for effective strategies used by the educators in the video and jot down answers to these viewing questions in your Learning Log.

How do the educators keep families informed of their child’s learning and activities?
How do the educators engage with families?

Review

Why is it important for you to build relationships with families?

Families and educators each have unique knowledge about a child.
- A parent or caregiver can share information with educators about how the child feels, thinks, and learns outside of the formal learning environment.
- An educator can offer insight about how the child learns and behaves in group situations, as well as on his or her own.
Strong relationships between educators and families can strengthen children’s emotional health. They show children that they can trust the adults in their lives because those adults trust each other.
Children’s academic growth benefits from instructional coherence (when the learning in the program is supported by the learning at home and vice-versa).
Respectful relationships between educators and families provide children with models for how to create positive relationships with others.

What are some helpful ways to share information about what children are doing and learning?

Set up a Parent Information Board in the drop-off and pick-up area to post learning objectives, key vocabulary words, and explicit examples of ways parents can reinforce the learning. For example, Today we read a book about scientists. We learned how scientists look, touch, smell, listen to, and learn about the world around them. On your way home, ask your child to look, touch, smell, and listen as he or she practices being a scientist.
Use blogs, newsletters, text messages, and social media pages to keep families up-to-date on learning, provide ideas on home connections, share photos, and encourage families to share home experiences with educators.
Keep a journal for each child. Educators can write weekly entries about each child, highlighting a new project, a new learning, a new challenge, or a new development. Family members can read and contribute to the journal.

Reflect

Think about the learning environment at your own program as you answer these reflection questions in your Learning Log.

How do you build positive and collaborative relationships with families?
What did you learn that you will put into practice in your own learning environment?