Families and communities

The views of parents of gifted children are a valuable consideration for those concerned with educating the children. Equally important, are the views of the classroom teachers who are implementing programmes for the gifted children. Do these two groups hold similar or different views?

Social interactions are very much an individual matter, but what factors in a school setting also influence students with disabilities in developing social relationships?

Interviews with nine families about the transition to school for their special needs children showed that parents faced rejection and a multitude of dilemmas over access to resources, specialist support, and the amount of time their child was able to have at school. Sue Wartmann offers a set of principles for successfully completing all four stages of the transition to school, in which early childhood teachers can play a significant role.

Nga Iwi’s commitment to forming educative partnerships between the school and its community led it to change how it reported to parents on their children’s achievement. Specifically, the school wanted to report on achievement more accurately while ensuring that parents could understand the reports. They also wanted to report the children’s achievement against an explicit standard agreed to by both the parents and the school. Further work is needed to ensure that the reports are well understood by parents.

Supportive friendships and relationships at school contribute to children’s quality of life as well as their learning. There are some concerns that students with disabilities may be isolated, lonely and have few friends at school, even when they have always been taught in the mainstream. This article explores a range of friendship and relationship themes described by three students with disabilities and their families, and looks at some of the ways in which schools can support or create barriers to the development of friendships for students with disabilities.

East Tamaki School worked with researchers to learn about how teachers viewed the requirements on reporting to parents, and how parents understood what was written. Teachers experienced the same technical, ethical, and practical dilemmas as their local and international counterparts. They resolved these in ways that inadvertently sent mixed messages to parents about their children’s achievement.

Starting school is a major life event for all involved: children, families, preschool educators, and school staff. All groups engage in a range of activities designed to make the time of transition to school positive. Yet each group has different perceptions of, expectations for, and experiences with this transition. The authors present some of the findings from the Starting School Research Project.

The notion of “kanohi ki te kanohi” contact between boards of trustees, teachers and Māori whānau is explored as a simple yet effective mode for developing genuine partnership between schools and their Māori communities.

Teachers are often asked to work in partnership with others to meet the educational needs of their students. If the partnership is to be successful, it is important that people are clear about why they are in that relationship and what they hope to accomplish together. The authors illustrate their theory of partnership by describing a study of how teachers report to parents, which showed that both parties need to understand each other’s expectations for the child’s achievement and take joint responsibility for working together to realise those expectations.

Schools spend huge amounts of time producing school reports which are one of the main vehicles for communicating students’ progress to parents. The writers investigated a series of school reports and looked at the nature of the information contained in them. They make a number of suggestions about how reports can reflect the performance of students in ways that are meaningful for parents and easy to interpret.