At Kindred we think that everybody should have uh an understanding of early brain development and knowledge of how we can all support healthy brain development which is why back in 2021 uh when we were working with oxy University we developed a a collection of school lessons about this topic um so
They focus on the importance of brain development and the role caregivers can play in shaping healthy brain development so this known as the scene program um and currently we’ve reached around 20,000 students in the UK and we continue to kind of grow and schools pick continue to pick up the lessons um
And I’m going to talk a little bit about a little bit more about that at the end so firstly I’m going to discuss how do brains develop so the development of our nervous system so that’s our brain our spinal cord and our nerves begins at about 3 weeks so I guess just before
Here um by 11 we week so at some point kind of between this point um the basic structure of the brain is already in place then when we get to birth so this N9 month Mark um the brain as you can see is structurally similar to that of a
Fully developed brain however only weighs 25% of that of an adult sprin within two years so by the China Charles 2 it has reached 80% of the size of an adults so we see a massive amount of growth in this period and then by five
Or six it’s about 90 to 95% of that other adults so when we think of brain development we could think about the story of The Three Little Pigs obviously that story focuses on uh bricks being better than sticks or straw however we know that the real difference is in the
Foundations um a brick house is built on strong foundations giving it its strength in the same way brains are built from the bottom up the basic circuits are built in utero and in the first few years of a baby’s life and they form the foundations on which other
Circuits are built on later in life the stronger the foundations the better set up an individual is to succeed in terms of their physical mental health learning and earning potential so the structure and the makeup of those foundations and those circuits its strength is determined by a combination of our genes and experiences
So experiences in the early years are primarily determined by our caregivers usually our parents but there are many other people that have help influence those experience whether that’s grandparents um people working in child care um and this is why we believe in a universal education around or around
Health gr how to grow healthy brains so all around brain development really whether you work whether you have children yourself or you’re going to work say in the police or in medicine you’re likely to come into contact with children so we think this information is vital for us all to
Learn um brains continue to develop and change throughout our life enabling us to learn and adapt to new things at every age but early childhoods is a critically sensitive period of development in the words of Jack shanov from Harvard center for the developing child get it right the first time rather
Than trying to fix it later if you are interested in learning more about brain development after this talk um the Harvard center for the developing child has a huge huge array of resources that are really helpful in uh going to kind of more depth than I will and explain
Various different elements really well I’m going to show a video shortly well well in a bit about with one of their videos but they have lots of videos that are really helpful so brain development in the earlier so these black lines are brain cells uh so we call them neurons and
Neurons send electrical signals to communicate with each other um they’re tree like structures with branches and that’s how they connect together and these form Pathways or circuits which become the basic Foundation of brain architecture so that includes the foundation for Behavioral and cognitive functions and really everything else in
The first few years of life more than 1 million new neuronal connections are formed every second um so we have this huge uh or this kind of two-year period of really rapid proliferation um followed by a period of synaptic pruning and that’s when connections are reduced away making
Brain circuits more efficient so that we can see from kind of pregnancy to 2 years we get a lot of new Nuance forming and lots of new connections being made um and throughout these kind of early years our experiences and our environment whether positive or negative dictate which circuits and connections
Get more use so connections that are used more grow stronger and more permanent meanwhile the connections um that are used less begin to prune away um and Fade Away through this pruning process so we can see that kind of pair on this diagram sorry um so here we can begin to see
That um what children or what we are exposed to in our earliest years can shape how our brains develop supportive caregiving or supportive caregiver interactions enables a child to form strong health circuits um and this is the foundation for more complex circuits to be built on
Later in life um I’m going to share a short animation now to show the connections kind of between neurons and the importance of these experiences uh shaping which circuits are strengthened so hopefully it works and it doesn’t cause anything to crash we’ll screen that just attempting to full screen so you can better
See we have lost sound now but maybe experiences during the earliest years of life have a lasting impact on the architecture of the developing brain genes provide the basic blueprint but experiences shape the process that determines whether a child’s brain will provide a strong or weak foundation for all future learning Behavior and
Health during this important period of brain development billions of brain cells called neurons send electrical signals to communicate with each other these connections form circuits that become the basic Foundation of brain architecture circuits and connections proliferate at a rapid pace and are reinforced through repeated use our experiences and environment dictate
Which circuits and connections get more use connections that are used more grow stronger and more permanent meanwhile connections that are used less Fade Away through a normal process called pruning well-used circuits create lightning fast Pathways for neural signals to travel across regions of the brain simple circuits form first providing a
Foundation for more complex circuits to build on later through this process neurons form strong circuits and connections for emotions motor skills behavioral control logic language and memory during the early critical period of development with repeated use these circuits become more efficient and connect to other areas of the brain more
Rapidly while they originate in specific areas of the brain the circuits are interconnected you can’t have one type of skill without the others to support it like building a house everything is connected and what comes first forms a foundation for all that comes later so um there are so that’s sorry an example
Of one of the Harvard videos so there’s lots like that if you’re interested in seeing more um so safe stable nurturing relationships and environments provide the context um for healthy brain development where children have lots of opportunities to learn and explore uh I’m going to share a few different things here
Um and here we’re exploring what we can do to support healthy brain development and this is something that we talk about in our lessons um so one really important thing is uh and this is things we all know but being attentive and present being there reading with your
Children engaging activities is a great way of supporting uh early brain development serve and return interactions are a bit like a a bit like a tennis match between the caregiver and the child but instead of a ball passing between the two um it’s various different forms of communication whether
That’s eye contact singing uh chatty noises hand games whatever it could be it’s that uh caregiver responding to the child when they they squirm they make noise they smile it’s having that reciprocal interaction and repetition of these activities throughout the early years are kind of the building blocks the bricks for healthy
Development um we have playful learning um we know that play isn’t just about fun but supports development and learning joining in with play showing interest in make believe uh games labeling things can help as you’re showing attention um you’re developing vocabulary things like uh peekaboo um
Kind of can build or can build uh an understanding of taking turns Focus concentration and then finally we’ve got baby talk and baby talk is so much more than just a silly and acute way of talking to babies um with baby talk we use our normal
Language so we use the same words often um but make it much simpler we repeat the words we speak slower and we kind of use a sing song voice and we really exaggerate our facial expressions so we have big smiley faces open eyes open mouths and so babies are really kind of
Both hearing and seeing baby talk immersing babies in speech is especially important for improving their own language abilities and baby talk kind of access as a spotlight um they hear they have so many sounds around them but baby tool kind of knows it’s they know it’s kind of their time
To start listening and paying attention because it’s easier for babies to kind of hear um with that exaggerated pitch and uh the kind of melodic patterns and positive emotions help kind of capture the baby’s attention more than adults speak so I’m going to now briefly talk
About Aces I would like to say that this is not something we ever talk about in our lessons uh we just wanted to cover it here because I know there’s been some talk about it in the TA forum and people have shown interesting um and we know
That not all children have a lot of the experience that I’ve just mentioned and many face substantial challenges um so what are Aces uh Aces stand for adverse childhood experience the children’s mental children and Adolescence mental health Charity Young Minds describes Aces as highly stressful and potentially traumatic events or situations that
Occur during childhood and or adolescence they can be a single event or prolonged threats to and breaches of The Young Person’s safety security trust or bodily Integrity these experiences can include things like physical and emotional abuse neglect caregiver mental illness and household violence um almost half of the
Population experienced at least 1 a growing up so they they’re fairly common um but the more races of child experiences the more likely they are to suffer from things such as heart disease poor educ educational achievement and substance abuse later in life there are many ways in which it impacts a person
And we’re going to explore that a little bit more later um kind of percentages that how common aces are vary so on here you can see there’s 9% of the PO population have four or more races a Welsh study from 2016 that found found that it’s about 14% experiencing four or
More um but experiencing many aces as well as things such as racism poverty especially um and kind of crucially without a supportive adult relationship can cause what’s known as toxic stress so learning how to cope with adversity is an is an important part of kind of healthy child development and
It’s helping children learn how to react to Future challenges when we are are threatened our bodies prepare us to respond by kind of slightly increasing our heart rate and blood pressure and kind mild elevations in our stress hormones such as cortisol um so when a young child stress responses are
Activated within an environment with a supportive relationship with adults these physiological effects are kind of buffered and brought back down to Baseline the result is the development of a healthy stress response system however if stress if the stress response system is um extreme and longlasting and there aren’t any
Buffering relationships there this can result in kind of a weak damage and weaken systems and impact brain architecture leading to these potentially leading to these lifelong repercussions so the experience of a parent responding uh responding to a child kind of supports that child to form a secure attachment and they can
Learn that they are important that they’re loved and that they can trust adults uh to respond to their needs when a child’s needs are constantly not met and they they begin to learn or feel that they’re not very important and they cannot turn to others especially adults for support when this
Is consistently happening the Pathways in their brain are kind of being laid down and the children learns or the child learns that the world is in an unsafe environment and that nobody’s there to help these Pathways can be really tricky to undo and it’s one of
Reasons why it’s so important to get the right Pathways for in first extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that healthy development can be derailed by this excessive or prolonged activation of the stress response impacting both the brain and body and this toxic stress can have
That long lasting wear and tear on on our on our bodily systems so we know that the more Aces you experience you’re more likely to have a greater risk of developing later problems or later health problems later in life um and we can see here oh sorry M on the
Wrong page we can see here that individuals who have four or more aces are about two times uh at greater risk for developing heart disease and cancer they’re significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer or dementia and we see here 32 times more likely to experience learning and behavioral challenges at school
This slightly older study from 1998 shows that individuals with six or more races had a life exp and see that was shortened by nearly 20 years so we can really see how significant uh an impact it has on on ourselves so a bit about EP epigenetics and the epig genome
Here um so we’ve talked about how uh our brain architectures can can be affected by a combination of our genes and experiences um and our epigenome so those are the chemicals that regulate gene expression can be impacted by both positive and negative experiences so our experiences can affect our genes epigenetics is the
Study of how behaviors and environments can cause changes that affect the way genes work and have expressed um and we could see from the last slide that high doses of adversity not only affect kind of how our brains work their structure and function they can be they can affect
The developing immune system hormonal systems in many different ways in many different regions of the body are affected and it’s all kind of to do with this interaction between our genes and environment so epigenetics studies factors that influence the expressions of genes and epigenetic research has concluded that during early life um the
Exper or the environment we live in and our experiences can affect the way our genes are expressed so environmental factors and uh experiences like um sorry um feeling safe and supported being loved um can alter how our genes switch on and off or simply how they
Work um so we can see here that we’ve got positive experiences shaping our epigone but also negative experiences and these don’t have to just be um stressful life circumstances they can be things uh like chemicals or drug exposure either in utero or afterwards so this schematic represents
The role of cortisol so that stress hormone on major organ systems in the body and we can see here that corol can have an impact on many many different things um so we can begin to see how persistently um elevated levels of stress hormones can have a really wide range of
Effects so here is a protection wheel and this is from uh the young minds charity it’s on their website um and children that have their own characteristics and experiences that protect them and help them develop resilience despite the exposure to Aces so resilience is positive adaption um
Within the context of adversity so in the face of adversity neither resilience nor disease is a certain outcome protective factors help uh a child feel safe safe more quickly After experiencing toxic stress of ases um and help to neutralize the phys physical changes that naturally occur during and after
Trauma resilience is the result of a dynamic set of interactions between a person’s adverse experiences and his or their protective factors and it’s this in this interaction is determined by the development by um the developmental path towards health or well and well-being or towards illness or dysfunction so no
Child is just kind of born with resilience or an invulnerability to Ace as no child um is automatically doomed if they face uh Aces uh these protect Ive factors can include a person’s own biological and developmental characteristics but crucially they also include the characteristics of the family the
Communities the school settings um and systems that mitigate these negative impacts of Aces protective factors kind of help explain how some people who have sustained kind of a great deal of adversity have uh fed relatively well in terms of adulthood and we can see just on this wheel here um all of those
Person structural and environmental factors that can protect against adverse outcomes so something that’s really important to remember is that whilst the early years are kind of very sensitive and critically important our brains can and do change throughout our lives our brain’s ability to adapt and change based on our experiences is called
Neuroplasticity as our brains are plastic and moldable um and neuroplasticity is a kind of a key focused on the scene program I’m just going to play this video uh now um is it discusses it in a little bit more a little bit more depth not so long ago many scientists
Believe that the brain did not change after childhood that it was hard wide and fixed by the time we became adults but recent advances in only the last decade now tell us that this is simply not true the brain can and does change throughout our lives it is adaptable like plastic hence
Neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity how does neuroplasticity work if you think of your brain as a dynamic connected power grid there are billions of Pathways or roads lighting up every time you think feel or do something some of these roads are well traveled these are our habits our established ways of thinking thinking
Feeling and doing every time we think in a certain way practice a particular task or feel a specific emotion we strengthen this road it becomes easier for our brains to travel this pathway say we think about something differently learn a new task or choose a different emotion we start carving out a
New road if we keep traveling that road our brains begin to use this pathway more and this new way of thinking feeling or doing becomes second nature the old pathway gets used less and less and weakens this process of rewiring your brain by forming new connections and weakening old ones is neuroplasticity in
Action the good news is that we all have the ability to learn and change by rewiring our brains if you have ever changed a bad habit or thought about something differently you have carved a new pathway in your brain and experienced neuroplasticity firsthand with repeated and directed attention
Towards your desired change you can rewire your Brain so neuroplasticity is a really important topic that we think all children should uh all students should learn about as it really underpins the basis of learning which is really what schools all about um and the scene program focuses a lot on neuroplastic throughout the lessons so I’ll give you
A very brief overview of what the scene program actually is I won’t talk too much about it because I don’t want to run too much over um but it was originally developed by Oxford University in 2021 um and we had a board of academic and education advisers helping us shape
Both the content the science content of the lessons and how they were delivered as well so we came up with 12 curriculum statements which kind of cover uh brain development in the early years caregivers and kind of what you can do to support healthy brain development and then brain
Development throughout life so here we’re talking about resilience and how the early is are not deterministic so at Oxford we developed three lessons um intended for science keystage three um and they are fully resource they have slide decks they have um all of the activities and teach training you want
We offer free teach training if that’s something you’re interested in and we’ve since expanded this to include a a keystage two resource package and we also now have keystage two or primary and secondary assembly resources so that’s kind of broader and key stage two and key stage three um it’s all completely
Free and we last year received the uh ASC green tick and and have a review on their website so this is just kind of a collection of our resources um and you’ll see we got concept cartoons you’ll see these are the two videos we’ve watched so that’s the kind of
Content we’ll be seeing in the classroom and those are the topics we’re covering and again I’ll mention again we don’t talk about Aces during the lessons themselves um this is a bit of snippet of our assembly pack which is called experiences matter um we’ve got lots of
Teacher information on there but we have slides for uh assembly so primary and secondary so as I mentioned it’s been received by over 20,000 students at this point and it’s received really well students find it engaging and interesting and 75% said that they would change the way
They interact with babies and a young children directly as a result of this lesson or these lessons um you can begin sorry I’m flicking through these quite quickly but you can begin we do quizzes before and after to assess knowledge and understanding and uh feedback um and you can see here kind
Of the learning from before and after learning an attitude before and after the lessons in terms of this question was looking at um what can you do to support brain development when you’re or babysitting and 2-year olders something like that um we’ve got quite short answers before and we’ve got really
Lovely extended answers after talking about ser and return um joining in and baby talk um we have n well in our uh Oxford pilot we had 100% of teachers saying that they thought all young people should learn this in school and we consistently get about 91% of students saying yes
Children other students our age should learn this um we get a few saying that it should be talked to a different age group but why we get so many children or students saying we should learn this is a lot to do with relevance they find it really relevant to themselves now as
Older siblings um but to the future future jobs and careers and subject specialisms um but classes are typically very engaged they have Lively discussions and both teachers and students really enjoy teaching and receiving the lessons so I won’t the next one as a video I won’t play that as we’re running
Out of time um these are a few reasons why we should teach we think we should teach the scene lessons and we have a Blog on this on our website if you’re interested um but if you are interested in the scene program and have any further questions please feel free to
Drop me an an email um or you can scan this which goes directly to our website um if you’ve got any questions about this talk I think we’re doing questions at the end so please feel free to pop them in the chat and I will get back to
You either in the chat or at the end of the session so I’ll stop sharing now and thank you all for your time thank you Ella that was amazing and to be able to to see at first hand some of those resources some of those videos
And to have you explain your work on the scene project and yes we’re going to do questions at the end but I think what’s really really interesting is that you know the the neuroplasticity very interesting and also doing something like this at keystage three so with with our sort of
Younger students will really help towards a broad and balanced curriculum a balance of pastoral and what we might want to to call traditional academic subject areas and that is going to make so much more difference to being in control of of things or feeling um that they can gain control so that was
Fantastic thank you very much so lots of thoughts for coming in um on in in the chat and we’ll pick those up at the end thank you very very much for your Inspire for your inspiration and we’re carrying on with that journey of inspiration so um it’s a
Great pleasure to be able I’m looking at my notes I don’t want to get this title wrong um to welcome you all to um the deputy director for families at campaign for learning Miranda um Miranda Baxter and we are desperate to hear more about what you do at campaign for learning
Over to you Miranda thank you all just unmute there well we know it works because we tried it out at the beginning here so yeah we can hear you we can hear you with me a second presentation again and I will share that with you and just a reminder
Um I’m I will try to uh run through this a bit more quickly um but a reminder to uh Janet and Angie as well that I do have a qu I have some questions for all of you so uh and I can’t actually see the chat when I have
My PowerPoint up so I’ll need uh Janet and Angie if you could shat out some answers here so uh thank you so much for having me uh I’m Miranda Baxter at the campaign for Learning and I’m here to talk to you about parental engagement and thanks to Angie and Janet it’s
Amazing and Ella I’m so inspired by your presentation and I can’t wait to talk to you more um about how our work intersects and how we might be able to collaborate and um I think we can all agree that kind of front loading and working preventatively um as such and getting it
Right early uh is so crucial to better outcomes later on but thank goodness for like I said a neuroplasticity so um I’m going to give you a quick overview of the campaign for learning to give you some context about why parental engagement is essential to successful family learning um and also
Talk about the project that we’re working on right now with the fair education Alliance um so the campaign for learning uh started out as a charity over 25 years ago promoting lifelong learning and we joined forces with ncfe uh in 2020 and we’re dedicated to enabling social change by empowering people
Through lifelong learning so uh when you’re a baby to um later in life um you know learning is active learning is essential to ensuring we’re happier healthier longer living and wealthier and it benefits everybody and and I think as Ella has demonstrated as well it helps us to adapt and build
Resilience and solve the challenges that we face um and we focus on three different areas at campaign for Learning and uh the one in the middle here is learning at work we run a learning at work Work Week campaign uh which is an annual event to build learning cultures
At work um so I encourage you to check out the campaign for learning uh website to see how you might get involved get your employers involved or get involved as uh employees um to really Spotlight the importance and benefits of continuing to learn uh even in the workplace so and
Then we also focus on policy uh presenting relevant viewpoints and reports uh from the sector from sector leaders and seeking to influence policy makers through these dialogues and lastly family learning and family learning is any learning that includes a child or a young person and another generation of their family and
As we know families come in all shapes and sizes and if they create a strong learning culture they’re really setting everyone up for better life outcomes so and one of the ways that you can find out more and get involved is through the national Center for Family learning
Which is a virtual space it’s an association it’s free it’s a free association for professionals who work with families in any learning context to share our best pra practice take part in events um Inspire the families they’re working with directly to learn it’ll be celebrating its first year at the end of
March this year we W launched last year at the House of Lords and we already have 1,200 members working with over 240,000 families directly uh we have a Resource Bank uh which Ella I’d love to talk to you about maybe how we can insert um your work into our our
Resource Bank somehow uh events and opportunities to network so check it out um I’ll share some things at the end that you might want to get involved with as well so this brings me to our current initiative on Parental engagement and the campaign for learning was successful in winning a fair
Education Alliance Innovation award in Spring 23 and I’m on saonet leading this parental engagement pilot um which at this stage is about Consulting family adults um the fair education Alliance tackles education inequality through Partnerships they have over 250 partners of which campaign for learning is one others you may have heard of include
Magic breakfast or the ark Academy um and and our our project focuses on Parental engagement so why focus on it we want to raise Children’s Learning outcomes by raising parents awareness about their vital importance to their children’s learning and the entainment Gap is particularly acute in families from lower socioeconomic
Backgrounds so we’re developing a campaign to boost parental motivation to engage in their children’s learning which is key to closing those attainment gaps equally successful family learning is only possible with successful parental engagement so to boost the success of all family learning we’re pushing a message about the importance
Of Parental engagement and our initiative it starts with parents and I want to clarify I use the term parents uh we here at the campaign for learning in this initiative use parents to mean all the family adults that have carrying responsibilities for children um but we’re starting with
Parents because as as who’ve seen parents are a child’s first teacher and they’re a child’s best coach and parents want the best for their children and in my consultations parents said their Ambitions and measures for success for their children were to be happy healthy and safe and when it comes to learning
And attainment in school many parents don’t realize their importance and the difference they can make and they Al often also don’t already realize the things that they’re doing or that they could extend as well so at age seven parents have six times the influence of schools which is
Unsurprising when once a child gets to school the majority of their waking hours are spent out of school with their families and in other learning environments or other environments altogether and I crunch the numbers and 79% of time spent by school age children is not in school so this means only 21%
Of their time is at school so what children do with their families matters a lot and this is schoolage children we’re talking about not early years so if you consider the effective parental engagement in the earlier as we’ve seen another point is that effective parental engagement can lead to learning
Gain of three plus months over the course of a year so we want parents to feel motivated to engage and to continue to engage with their children’s learning we have reception aged children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in particular that are four and a half months behind their better off peers so
If we can encourage deeper parental engagement earlier we can we can close those gaps and we want all parents to know how much they matter to their child’s learning and feel motivated and confident to engage to create a learning culture within the family which empowers and enables children and adults to
Succeed and I want to point out too that I’ve been talking a lot about how people feel because our feelings Drive our behaviors and actions which therefore Drive results so changing how people think and feel is really crucial and we’ve seen we can do that because our brains are neuroplastic
So um parents are only going to get involved to the extent that they feel their contributions will make a difference so it’s important to tackle this um from a feelings values and motivations perspective because there’s also disparity in how parents and others within a br you know the broader Community value parental
Contributions and the reality is that most parents feel they have the skills to support their children’s learning but might not know what they’re doing or might not know how they can extend what they’re doing already uh so we want to ship mindsets to an assets based perspective but also offer some practical
Support and quite often what parents hear is that um what they don’t hear pardon me is that they are enough and that they can do it so our approach is designed to change parents attitudes and behaviors around learning to increase the support they’re able to to give to help their
Children and we’re embedding parents voices in this campaign as well because it’s really important that it’s of by and for uh the audience at which this campaign is directed um it’s also important to say that an essential part of this project um in the future is going to be
Embedding a relational practice appr um uh in terms of involving other various sector practitioners to support this change and shifting attitudes around parents contributions so I wanted to just recap and I think we all understand the importance of family learning and parental engagement to boosting Children’s Learning outcomes and historically many solutions
Have focused on Parental engagement in activities interventions and programs they still do you can find CPD uh programs for uh family hubs and schools but our solution is a campaign focused on feelings and motivations that change thinking and drive Behavior actions and therefore results and that’s by addressing addressing these issues is
That we want parents to know that they have a bigger influence on their child’s learning than school and that’s not to say that school is not important it’s vital but it’s different but they’re connected and we want to make sure that parents know that they matter because
Research shows that they don’t know that they matter and we want to push the message to that what parents do is more important than who they are and that small changes can make a big difference I’m really mindful of time and so I think perhaps I’m going to ask
Everybody because I won’t be able to see in the chat um I am really interested in unpicking what engagement is and I think Ella you offered some really practical call um let’s say tips uh things that parents can do and that’s one thing that we want
To provide but we also want to talk about what does it feel like to be engaged and how can we measure it um so some of the questions I had to you that I really like you to think about and do come back to me at another time or maybe
At the end of uh the presentation when we’re having a fuller conversation um I’d love to know what you think what is engagement how do you feel if you are engaged how do you want people to feel um how do you want the people that you’re engaging to feel what is Parental
Engagement in practice um it’s a really widely used term and misunderstood term across many different sectors I spent 20 years in museums and Galleries and learning in museums and Galleries and we used engagement a lot to mean taking part but that can mean so many different things
And it’s also very diff difficult to measure so I’ll just I think one of the best I’ll share for the for the bit of time that we have for Gravity here is that one of the best uh definitions that I found was feeling uh the feeling of being compelled drawn in and connected
To what is happening and interested in what will what will happen next so curiosity is really important to this but again what does it look like in practice and how do we measure it so I’ll just go through through what we’re doing for the project we sum up
And then we can have a conversation all together so the fair education Alliance is supporting the pilot and consultation on content messages and approach so our approach is the campaign um I’ve listed our key messages one that parents have a greater influence on their children’s learning outcomes in schools they’re their best
And first teachers and making small changes can make a huge difference to children and it’s what parents do not who they are that help children become brilliant Learners and I’m really excited to announce we just found out last week I did my first training program this
Morning is that we have a media media Trust immerser Company volunteer film project uh award that we’re participating in to be able to make a much more polished film that we can launch in September as part of this campaign which is hugely exciting um so we’re raising awareness
We use the national Center for Family learning to promote the message uh and also continue to make an evidence-based case for Parental engagement um we’re working on a film for parents and practitioners and also are looking to support what we’re doing with webinars training and tools for practitioners who
Are on the ground directly with families and I’ll just finish up I have a few just they’re not videos they’re just actually screenshots for um for a couple videos that I’m testing messaging uh in the coming month so um it’s called best coach and we have different things that you can do to
Support uh children your children um that have come from parents they’ve asked for practical tips um and if you’re interested we’ll be doing focus groups uh during February we don’t have dates yet locked down but if you do have a child at least one child seven and
Under please email me and we’ll let you know when those focus groups are and you can share your views on the messaging of the paral engagement campaign we also have a math through storytelling online focus group that my colleague Stacy is running on Monday if you’d like to join that looking at
Resources um that will be used and the mass through storytelling project and we also have a math mindset conference coming up on the 22nd of February so if you check out the um National Center for Family learning you can find all of this information get invol involved and do get in touch come
Back with thoughts questions anything sign up to the National Center for Family learning and I’d love to hear your views or have a conversation thank you so much WoW amazing Miranda thank you so so much um I don’t think despite the technology I don’t think we could have
Wished for a better uh way to Kickstart January with our with our 2024 ta Forum so thank you you so so much um to Ella and Miranda now I know that um there’s been some thoughts and viewpoints in the uh in the chat it’s been difficult to
Try and unmute you and I I don’t want to risk losing us all if I try to fiddle and take mics off Etc I just want to extend thanks um from Angie and myself and I know Angie’s going to talk about what’s coming next in the TA Forum World
Um but there’s been some thoughts around the um the aces Ella and the neuroplasticity and technology and the role it might play in altering not necessarily increasing um Aces but who knows because we’re all um with a different blueprint we’re all coming from a different starting point but also
The evolution of of the the blueprint in the first place with the impact of technology very interesting comments that were that were going on in the chat there um and also Miranda what you said about the importance um do parents value um or feel valued in terms of what they
Do and and and your reference back to the Janet good old report there very very interesting and it almost to me makes me think that we could kind of combine these things in terms of that Broad and balanced curriculum and instead of trying to break a cycle that’s already got different priorities
Because we’re now parents we should go the other side maybe um and I can see how the scam project and the family learn learning takes that cycle and just says hang on a minute we need to start right here rather than here when our priorities are different and try as you
Might it’s going to be a very difficult nut to crack and so thank you so much for that I’m going to um say please keep the questions coming in um in the chat because we will respond but I’m now just going to hand over to Angie uh for closing remarks thanks Angie
Oh we’ve all done it now you you’re on mute also you can tell it’s that time in the in the evening can’t you I just hat it’s a hat an absolute massive thank you to you both um despite the technical issues that we had it doesn’t take away
Any of the absolutely superb information that you were able to share with us this evening so thank you so much but thank you to everybody that is on the call PA as well um for bearing with us um through very technical issues including uh the various mutes that we’ve had so
Thank you um please do feel free to message myself or Janet on our emails if you have any questions following this event because I know uh we’re a bit short short of time now um and I know it’s what it’s like at the end of the
Day um but I just wanted to very quickly say if you are interested in joining R ta for that we hold our meetings about every 6 to eight weeks please feel free to email Janet or myself um because at ncfe we are absolutely committed in listening to the needs of the sector um
To be able to be that voice to support you in the ways that you need to to um improve and to be able to support you in any which way we can um so please do check out the education and um early year toolkit link that I’ve put on the
Page so once again an absolutely massive thank you to everybody thank you thank you an have a wonderful evening everyone thank you