Self-Assessment

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What is the self-assessment for?

This self-assessment has been designed to help your service

• Develop a common understanding of Parental Engagement
• Self-assess your standards of Parental Engagement
• Plan ways to extend and develop Parental Engagement

The self-assessment can be used annually as part of the services’ planning and development cycle.

Who should carry out the assessment?

In order to carry out the self-assessment you will first of all need an Assessment Team. The Team should comprise of:

• At least one senior manager
• Four members of staff (who have different roles within the service)
• At least five parents

The size of the Assessment Team can be decreased if the service is a very small one, but it is important to maintain a 50:50 ratio of parents to staff, so that parents do not fall into the minority. If you are a large service or corporate organisation, you made need to set up an Assessment Team for each of your services strands.

The Assessment Team will need to meet three times. The first meeting will be prior to carrying out the self-assessment in order to build a common understanding of Parental Engagement (see Step 1 below), the second meeting will be to do the self-assessment (see Step 2 below), and the third meeting will be to decide the action to be taken as a result of the self-assessment findings (see Steps 3 and 4 below). Each meeting will take approximately three hours.

How to do the self-assessment

It is recommended that the person(s) managing the assessment process takes time to familiarise themselves with each of four steps below. They will need to print off the downloadable resources that will be used during each meeting. The Assessment Team will then work through each of the steps together.

• Step 1: Building a common understanding of engagement
• Step 2: Carrying out the assessment
• Step 3: Identifying your strengths and areas for development
• Step 4: Developing an action plan

TIP: If you have not engaged parents in partnership work like this before, it would be a good idea for you to read the section on ‘support’ in ‘Tips for better quality engagement’. It will give you some handy hints and tips on how to make sure you support parents to engage effectively with the self assessment.