Annie Simpson explores what family learning means – and how it can benefit you and your family.

The term “family learning” covers all forms of informal and formal learning that take place in and around families. It involves more than one generation of the family learning together and ‘family’ members can include childminders or friends as well as family – anyone who cares for a child and is interested in supporting their learning.

The Pre-school Learning Alliance recognises that parents are children’s first and most important educators. Children spend far more time at home than in school or nursery. Family life therefore forms the foundation for learning. The attitudes of the wider family to learning and achievement have the most profound effect on a child’s interest and involvement in learning throughout life.

Family learning starts from birth – evidence shows that involvement in your child’s learning in the early years results in longer-term benefits for both you and your child. Experts say that talking and listening to babies and toddlers can help with their educational and social development. Babies learn to communicate through playing and interacting with their parents. Songs, rhymes and games help develop the language skills that underpin literacy. Children can also learn about colours, texture, shape and quantity through games and everyday experiences.

Formal family learning describes a whole range of activities and programmes that involve parents, children and the wider family in learning, often with children and adults learning together. Families can learn new skills through creative arts, technology, science and sport. Sometimes, children are the teachers, for example, older children sharing their expertise in modern technology with other family members. Parenting, emotional literacy and understanding family life are also important elements of family learning.

The benefits of family learning

Research has shown that children whose parents show an interest in their learning achieve much more regardless of the parents’ level of education.A family learning programme can also be the first step in parents and carers returning to education and employment. To learn more about how to help your child get the most from school, you might want to improve your own skills. This involvement could then lead to further learning and employment opportunities for you.

Increasing your knowledge of child development could help you to make better life choices for your children and may give you more confidence to talk to staff about your children from an informed point of view.  You may also wish to become more involved in your child’s early years setting. For example, in one nursery, after a Family Learning Shadow Puppets course (see following), all the parents went on to join the parents’ committee and one parent now volunteers in a local school: “We learned to encourage confidence in our children and it gave adults confidence too.”

Parents who have been on family learning courses have said that they were reassured that what they were already doing with their children was supporting their learning. They also appreciated the opportunity to meet other parents: “It’s a nice way to learn in an informal setting and to meet other people in similar situations and to share views.”

Family learning programmes

Many early years settings offer parents short family learning programmes. These programmes give you the opportunity to find out more about how children learn and develop, how play activities help these processes and also give you the chance to try out activities to support your child’s learning at home. As one parent says, it’s about “how to bring the school environment into the home without them realising.”

The Pre-school Learning Alliance has produced family learning programmes, which settings can offer to parents and carers. Although most settings will plan their family learning programme to suit the needs of their particular setting and parents, all programmes aim to help parents and carers to increase their knowledge of how pre-school age children learn and how to develop their children’s skills.

Family learning programmes such as Jump Start offer you the opportunity to work together with your children to find out more about how they gain literacy and numeracy skills. The programme suggests activities that your family can do together at home to improve your children’s skills.  For example, maths is a particularly interesting subject for family learning, because many parents lack confidence in this subject and don’t realise that they can play a key role in supporting their young children with maths. However, you can easily help your children with basic maths concepts such as colour, shape and number recognition, counting and simple addition. So, for example, you can help a pre-verbal child with colour recognition by pointing to a bus and saying, “The bus is red,” or with shape recognition by saying, “The ball is round.” You can ask young children to look for a particular number on house doors as you are walking down the street or you can help them count stairs as they go up and down them.

The Looking at Learning Together course explores how to help young children with early maths and communication skills and also gives tips on how to manage children’s behaviour.

Shadow Puppets focuses on developing children’s speaking and listening skills through creative activities such as music, dance and puppet-making.

Parents and Carers Matter – from Birth to Three supports parents in developing language and communication skills in children under three years old.

These programmes include sessions where you will either do an activity with your child or parents learn as a group while someone else looks after the children. In some sessions, you could be preparing or practising activities and developing your own skills, then trying them out with the children. To make the sessions more accessible to parents, all the courses can be run as one-off workshops for two hours. There are also programmes to help parents to gain qualifications, such as the National Certificate in Literacy or Numeracy.