Home-school reading partnerships
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Creating home-school reading partnerships can improve equity of access to factors that encourage reading. Explore ways to strengthen collaboration so young people have resources and support to read for pleasure at school and home.
Why home-school partnerships in reading?
When students read for pleasure, they are likely to read more. This improves reading, learning and literacy outcomes, empathy and wellbeing.
Effective home-school reading partnerships:
improve equity of access to factors that support and encourage reading for pleasure
foster a sense of community, drawing on the concept of ako and other culturally sustaining strategies
use inclusive and consistent messaging about reading
communicate regularly
evaluate the impact of their partnership.
Improve equity of access to important factors
Collaboration between staff, parents and whānau can improve equity of access to factors that support and encourage reading for pleasure. These factors include:
plenty of diverse and appealing reading material
time to read books of choice
time to talk about books and reading
being read aloud to
reading role models
other positive reading experiences — such as author, library, bookshop visits, and having reading spaces at home or school that they can enjoy and use.
Reading for pleasure — a door to success
Reading for wellbeing (hauora)
Foster a sense of community, drawing on ako
Having an established sense of community recognises that everybody has something useful to contribute.
The focus of home-school partnerships draws on the concept of ‘ako’ — learning together and learning from one another — and other culturally sustaining strategies. The aim is for a reciprocal flow of information and support.
Strengthening the following relationships will give students the best chance of success:
staff to student
staff to parent and whānau
staff to community
student to student.
The concept of ako — from the Ministry of Education.
Opportunities for support and knowledge-sharing
Strengthening partnerships helps parents feel more comfortable and willing to ask for support, discuss progress and share stories of success.
I have learned that you need time and patience and it’s not necessary to be a reading scholar to help. That it can be a time of enjoyment and closeness with your child.
— Parent from Reading Together® Programme
They also add value for school staff. Reading partnerships foster cross-school knowledge-sharing and collaboration between school leadership, teachers, library staff and specialist teachers.
Use inclusive and consistent messaging
Know the key messages
It’s important that staff, parents and whānau:
understand the value of reading for pleasure
know the value of:
reading little and often with children
keeping reading at home fun and relaxing, with no work attached
understand their role as reading role models
make explicit their expectation that every student is a reader.
The Ministry of Education's Literacy & Communication and Maths strategy also wants:
Parents and caregivers feeling confident supporting their children’s learning progress, including through reading for pleasure … in everyday life.
— Literacy & Communication and Maths Strategy
Ensure parents and whānau understand their influence
Parents and whānau have an influential role in children’s educational achievement and personal growth.
A child spends about 85% of their time out of school. Using some of that time reading will help their progress in all areas of learning.
Share some key ways they can help their children become engaged readers:
Be reading role models — so students see people in their lives read and chat about books.
Read with their children for pleasure. Children familiar with books and stories before they start school are better prepared to engage in literacy and learning activities.
Surround their home with books in a range of genre, magazines, newspapers and catalogues.
Be involved. This can help improve students’ attendance at school, their behaviour, and achievement in reading and learning outcomes.
Give support. For example, students encouraged to keep reading over the long summer break avoid the ‘summer slide’ or ‘summer slump’ in reading gains made during the year.
Reading at home should be fun and easy … Be a great role model. Let your child see you enjoying reading. Read magazines, newspapers, and books in your first language … Be positive whenever your child is reading, no matter what they are reading. Respect your child’s opinion as it shows they are thinking about what they read.
— Ideas to help with reading, writing and maths, Ministry of Education
Tips to help parents encourage reading
Encourage parents and whānau to make time, space and routines to read for pleasure including over the holidays.
Provide opportunities for staff, parents, whānau and students to share knowledge of students' reading life, interests and needs. This builds a common understanding of student identity, culture and language. And a common understanding helps your schools provide inclusive resources and responsive reading programmes.
Invite parents to participate in planning reading programmes and related activities. This helps ensure programmes and activities reflect the diverse types of experiences that take place in their home and community.
Encourage members of the wider whānau to read with students. Reading can be special, cementing close bonds between generations. Digital tools allow long-distance relatives to share books.
Share the best places to get books. Include public libraries, bookshops with a good range of children's literature, and websites with recommendations and reviews of books.
Look at targeted support. Keep the momentum going for ‘reluctant readers’ or parents with children who have been through reading support interventions, such as the Reading Together® programme.
Books and Reads — for kids and teens — explore, find, and share children’s and young adult (YA) books and reviews, and find reading communities.
Encourage family membership of your school library
You can help parents feel welcome in the library and encourage them to visit in several ways:
Set up a parent library in your school, and promote this to whānau. Include books to read for pleasure and informative books and brochures for parents about reading. Consult your literacy lead teacher and RTLit (Resource Teacher Literacy) for suggestions.
Invite parents into the library to choose books for and with their children. Guide them about how they can help their children choose what to read.
Provide access to a range of diverse resources.
Have generous borrowing limits that allow parents to borrow books for reading aloud at home.
Arrange for parents to borrow books for pre-schoolers — liaise with kōhanga reo, Pacific Island language nests and early childhood centres to assist transitions to school.
Helping students choose books to read for pleasure
Building an inclusive collection
National Library’s school lending service
Encourage family membership of their public library
Encourage parents and whānau to join their public library and use it with their children. Provide opportunities for students to visit a public library during school time and after school.
Arrange for an evening or weekend family event at the public library with a guided tour.
Encourage whānau to participate in their library's special events and programmes.
Collaborating with public libraries
Communicate regularly
Communicate regularly with families, using a range of channels.
Share resources and tips for reading activities, and strategies for modelling and supporting reading.
Some methods for communicating include:
informal conversations and meetings
regular snippets in the school and classroom newsletter
notes to parents in homework diaries or attached to resources, such as a suggested bedtime reading book
a letter or flyer home each term
talking about reading during parent/teacher interviews
online with links on school websites, a link for parents on the classroom blog, social media.
Community engagement — the Ministry of Education has a range of resources for working in partnerships with communities, including whānau, hapū, iwi as well as Pasifika parents and communities.
Evaluate the impact of reading partnerships
An evidence-based approach will help you:
gather evidence before, during, and afterwards of practices to show what made a difference
target support for parents, whānau and their children
monitor and review the impact of initiatives
use findings to inform future home-school practice and initiatives.
Some ideas for data-gathering activities
Identify successes and areas requiring improvement. What worked and didn’t work, what you would do differently? What evidence have you gathered?
Use success stories to promote and continuously improve home-school practices in supporting reading.
Keep school leadership informed of plans, developments, successes and issues.
Evaluate the effectiveness of home-school initiatives on student learning.
Gathering data in your school library
Check the library catalogue’s ‘reports’ section on issue statistics. Link this information with students’ reading data.
Collect anecdotes, testimonials and photographs of whānau and students. Focus on how whānau and the library’s services enrich the reading lives of students.
Report on your school library’s involvement in your library’s annual report.
Evidence-based school library practice
Measuring the impact of summer reading
A school-wide reading culture — use the School Reading Culture Review tools to review your school's current reading for pleasure practice. These include a section on home-school reading partnerships.
Resources to share, find out more
Resources for parents and whānau
Reading at home — ideas and tips for parents and whānau to support and encourage reading for pleasure at home. Download our brochures, including the ‘Help your child become a reader’ (available in multiple languages).
My reading superhero videos — a series of animated short episodes celebrating the teachers, librarians and family members who read to and inspire us to read.
Reading aloud — tips and advice on reading aloud to children of all ages. Download our ‘Read aloud’ brochure (available in multiple languages).
Families — keeping your child or teen reading over summer — learn ways parents and whānau can support children or teenagers to read for pleasure over our long holiday.
Materials to share with parents — resources from the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) which includes an article by Kaye Lowe ‘Valuing parents in the reading process’ (PETTA Paper 168).
Find out more
Home-school partnerships — The Education Hub.
Growing Readers — a section for parents of primary level students on the Reading Rockets website, with ideas to help raise ‘strong readers and writers’.
