Empowering Parents

Erica Stanford announced:

Every parent wants to see their child thrive at school — to feel confident, supported, and capable. Today, the Government is taking a major step toward making that aspiration a reality with the launch of a new Parent Portal: an online resource designed to enable families to play their part in their child’s learning.

“This is about giving parents clarity, confidence, and practical tools to support their child’s learning journey,” says Erica Stanford.

Launching today, the Parent Portal will provide a clear, easy-to-understand year by year guide to what children will be learning in English and maths under New Zealand’s refreshed, knowledge-rich curriculum.

This is a great, much needed, initiative. By chance I have been meeting with a variety of parents of school aged kids, discussing changes to the education system which would help empower parents – who are meant to be active partners – in the schooling system.

One of the issues we identified was that so many parents have no idea what their child should be able to do each year. And two ten minute meetings a year isn’t sufficient.

The idea we had is that every term a parent should get from their school a short plain English summary of what subject areas will be taught in the next term, and what they will be covering in class.

The Government’s parent portal goes 90% of the way towards this goal. It provides simple summaries of the curriculum by subject, and year. So for example I can look up the Year 4 Maths curriculum and get:

• work with larger numbers and use estimation by comparing numbers up to 10,000 and adding and subtracting 2 and 3-digit numbers. They’re also using rounding and words like ‘about’, ‘more or less’, and ‘close to’ to estimate and check their answers
• multiply and divide building on their Year 3 multiplication facts (2-, 3-, 5-, and 10-times tables). Your child is learning the 4- and 6-times tables. They practise multiplication and division, like 23 x 5 or 44 ÷ 4, using methods such as the ‘family of facts’ (for example, 4 x 5 = 20, 20 ÷ 4 = 5)
• begin learning about decimals and develop fraction ideas by connecting ideas about fractions to decimal numbers (for example, 3/10 is the same as 0.3) and adding numbers with 1 decimal place (for example, 1.3 + 0.2 = 1.5). They’re also learning to add simple fractions and find fractions of whole amounts (for example, “if you eat 1/5 of 40 strawberries, how many did you eat?”)
• work with money by making amounts of money using dollars and cents, calculating amounts with dollars and cents, and working out change using whole-dollar amounts.

This allows parents to supplement school time, by working at home with their kids. And the portal even has suggestions as to stuff you can do with them at home.

I hope the portal is widely promoted to parents.

It is so nice to have a government that wants to empower parents in the education system. This has not always been the case.