BusinessLab and Hull City Council

How schools and families are using the Family Learning Signature to achieve success

For the last 10 years Hull City Council have been at the leading edge of family involvement in children’s learning. Schools and families across the city have been actively working together, harnessing the potential of the city's unique ICT infrastructure, to help achieve successful learning both in the school and in home environments.

A long standing collaboration between BusinessLab and Hull schools has seen the Family Learning Signature go from use in individual schools to adoption on a city-wide basis by the City Council as part of Hull's strategic family engagement and capacity development programmes.

Today through the vision, leadership and teamwork at Sydney Smith School, Hull is now a major hub for Family Learning Signature deployment and development.

On one level the Family Learning Signature enables schools to engage with families in an interactive and non-threatening manner. The process of completing the Family Learning Signature allows both family and the school to recognise and share the learning strengths and challenges associated with each family. The very act of completing a Family Learning Signature has empowered families to take greater ownership of their learning. Other families are now benefiting from the targeted interventions deliver by the school.

At the strategic level, Sydney Smith School, through the Family Learning Signature, discovered strong linkages between attendance and examination results. For example, families that did not create family ‘time’ for learning had a 37% chance of scoring below the KS2 average. Families that made ‘time’ available for learning had on average 3% higher attendance.

Through the adoption of the Family Learning Signature as part of Hull City Council’s BSF strategy, work has now begun on deploying the signature process across all City schools. With the aim of every family having a Family Learning Signature, city level strategic initiatives and interventions will become possible.