A wide range of organisations deliver developments and provision to families in hostels and refuges; via community and faith networks; using parents’ motivations about their child’s literacy and numeracy skills; via neighbourhood nursery developments; building on schools’ need to engage large numbers of parents etc.

The schools’ family literacy and numeracy activities include:

Inspire – now enabling 300 schools to engage more than 40,000 parents with their child’s teacher, re literacy and numeracy skills development.

Keeping Up with the Children – a national model, delivered by schools, to deepen parents’ understandings of the national literacy and numeracy strategies at primary and Key Stage 3 levels. Last year this involved 200 of these twelve hour programmes, involving 2,000 adults.

Family Literacy and Numeracy – substantial 48-72 hour courses jointly delivered by teachers and by the adult basic skills providers across the city. Birmingham schools deliver one of the largest national programmes, with around 70 of these substantial courses per year.

The approach has been to link the content to the skills from the literacy/numeracy framework that the children are practising in class at the time; to use these same skills as a route into parents practising their own literacy/numeracy skills (now mapped to the new adult curriculum and standards).

The powerful effect of this approach on the children’s literacy and numeracy developments is well documented by schools. Ensuring the same accelerated impact for adults is one of this Partnership’s targets for this year.

All of this is adding up to one of the largest, and most successful, family programmes nationally.