Parent Consultation
Improving & Connecting Education
As the 2026 RSE curriculum comes into place, there is a greater emphasis on involving parent carers in RSE teaching.
For learners with Down’s syndrome and other learning disabilities, this is particularly important. Understanding their routines, home lives, and different abilities is tied into RSE and life skills teaching.
Our Learning for Life project has integrated parent carer resources to help improve the connection between home and school, and make education for learners more relevant and effective.
Communication Sheets
Each series has a Communication Sheet to send home ahead of starting the learning. This gives parent carers:
Information about the series - what it will be covering
Requests for photos - to better personalise learning
Questions to answer - to give insight into learners’ home lives
As teachers, we know each learner in their own way. But certain insights from parents can greatly improve personalisation and relevance of learning. For example: if a learner shares their bedroom with a sibling, it isn’t a private space in the same way a single-person bedroom is. This impacts the activities and level of privacy within that room.
Take Home Sheets
After each session in each series, teachers can send home these sheets to share more about what we learned:
Information & language learned in the session
Things to consider & next steps - ways to make this teaching applicable in real life to their learner
Notes - personalised notes from teacher to parent
Keeping parent carers involved in learning helps them be able to apply it in their lives at home. If learners aren’t getting consistent teaching, this can complicate and confuse the concepts they’re learning.
Why is parent involvement so important?
You might have seen us mention it time and time again in our blogs about the RSE curriculum updates, and the SEND White Paper. But we really do know it’s important, and it’s not just from us.
Down Syndrome Cheshire have been using the Learning for Life project in groups and with 1-to-1s for the last few years.
As a local support group, they can create long-lasting relationships with their members and their families. Involving the families in their learning is so important, to reinforce new learning and skills, and help equip young people as they enter adulthood.
They have been using the Communication Sheets and Take Home Sheets to support group-home communication and parent involvement. In this video, you can see Lucy, Employment & Life Skills Coordinator, talk more about how these sheets have been helpful for their group and the parent carers.
Shared language and it’s impact for parents and educators
When we talk about repeating teaching at home, we don’t just mean talking about the same things, or doing the same learning. We mean using a shared language.
For learners with SEND, recognising repeated words and phrases is a key way to reinforce learning. We can’t talk around a topic and expect them to get it - using the same language, like identifying public and private spaces, means that they can take their learning and language from one setting to another.
As Esther, CEO at Down’s Syndrome Manchester shares, not only does learning become more effective, but parents feel more capable of uncomfortable conversations when they are armed with the right language to address it.
How Can We Help?
At Learn and Thrive, we’re in the middle ground. Supporting parent carers, educators, and local charities, we are in a unique situation to be setting several different sides of these young people’s lives. And from personal and shared experience, we know that communication between these key groups is crucial for helping our young people to thrive.
Consistency and repetition - the same message over and over helps with remembering new skills and concepts
Personalisation - making teaching real by relating it to their every day lives and experiences (as well as being aware of any sensitivities)
Implementation - putting new skills in place across all aspects of life
Try out a whole session. This ‘Puberty Bundle’ includes the video, activities, and all teacher content to get you started.
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