Parents, carers and guardians have significant influence on their young person’s career decisions. It is very important that you are engaging with parents, carers and guardians as part of your careers programme.
Ensuring that you have considered parental engagement is also included within the requirements to fully achieve Gatsby Benchmark 1 within the Compass evaluation.
For support to deliver impactful parental engagement in careers, access resources and free online modules here - Talking Futures | CEC Resource Directory (careersandenterprise.co.uk)
Hear from others about how they integrate parental engagement into their careers provision - Parental Engagement Case Studies.
If you are using Compass+, you can record parental engagement on Compass + by creating an activity, and clearly identifying that the activity has been designed to engage parents.
We recommend:
When an activity involves parents, in any capacity, add ‘Incl Parents’ as a prefix to the title of the activity.
When you are viewing your Activities, you can quickly and easily see the range of activities you have planned, or completed, that have all focused on parental engagement.
Please note: When we refer to ‘parental engagement’ or ‘parents’, carers and guardians are also included within this.
Recording a parental engagement activity on Compass+
Watch a short video walkthrough of how to record parental engagement activity on Compass+ or alternatively follow the step-by-step guide below:
1. Login to Compass+, from the main navigation bar go to Activities > Create new activity.
2. Give your activity a name, using ‘Incl Parents’ as the prefix to the title of the activity.
3. Select the main category for this activity.
You can choose from specific encounters that involve parents, mapped to the Gatsby Benchmarks, when you select the main category for the activity. Specific encounters that involve parents, mapped to the Gatsby Benchmarks, are identified in the table below:
Gatsby Benchmark | Main category for activity | Example activity |
GB2 – CAREER INFORMATION |
Sending career information and/or explaining LMI to parents, via newsletter, letter, email etc Information evening exploring how to use LMI to inform decision making |
|
GB5 – EMPLOYER ENCOUNTERS |
|
Careers Fair where multiple employers will be attending, and parents are invited Employer presentation to learners and parents on pathways into industry |
GB6 – WORKPLACE EXPERIENCES |
|
Student attends an experience of the workplace with their parent Family workplace safari |
GB7 – EDUCATIONAL ENCOUNTERS |
|
Event specifically delivered by FE/HE providers to inform parents of pathways Visit to local university for families |
4. Add any additional categories that may relate to the activity.
5. Enter the member of staff who will be leading the activity.
6. Select when the activity will be taking place:
7. Add learners or groups to the activity. (Don’t forget you can filter your list by unticking the relevant categories.):
8. Add a provider or employer to your activity. (For this example, an FE College that has already been added to the school’s Careers Partner database, has been selected.):
If the provider/employer hasn’t been added to your database, please read our Help Centre article to learn how to create a new organisation and add contacts.
TOP TIP – If you are adding events that are predominantly organised ‘in-house’ by curriculum or careers staff, parents evenings for example, or transition evenings, it is good practice to ensure that your school has been added to your Careers Partner database.
If your school hasn’t been added to your Careers Partners database, click the ‘Add a new employer or provider to your database’ option to do this.
A pop-up box will then appear where you enter the relevant details.
9. Finally add any notes for the activity and then click ‘save activity’.
Recording parental activities that target specific groups of parents.
Very often, it is the same groups of parents that engage in every activity and potentially those who would benefit the most, may not participate. Sometimes, it may be beneficial to target key groups of parents using personalised invitations through people who hold already established, trusted relationships, such as pastoral staff.
Depending on your parental community and/or the need of your learners, a specific session for Pupil Premium families, parents of learners with SEND or EAL (English as an Additional Language) for example, may be impactful. Our new, free parental engagement modules or Talking Futures toolkit may provide some more useful insight.
Viewing Parental Engagement activities data.
1. From the main navigation bar in Compass+, go to Activities > Your Activities.
2. Under the 'Actions' section, click on the downward arrow to download Your Activities into an Excel spreadsheet. (When you hover over the downward arrow with your cursor, it will say 'Download Plan as we still have areas of Compass+ that need updating with the new language changes introduced at the start of 23/24 academic year.)
3. The excel spreadsheet will download to your computer, there is normally a pop up message in the top righthand corner of the screen that tells you when the file has downloaded.
Alternatively, you can also access the spreadsheet from your Downloads folder on your computer.
4. Open the Excel spreadsheet and apply filters to view parental engagement activities.
If you're not sure how to apply filters in Excel, follow the steps below:
- Highlight the top row of the spreadsheet, then click on 'Sort & Filter' at the top of the screen, click on 'Filter'.
- Small black arrows will appear next to the title of each column.
- Go to the 'Activity Name' column, click on the small black filter arrow, untick the ‘Select All’ box so that all the boxes are blank.
- Now select all activities that are prefixed with ‘Incl Parents’.
This will filter the spreadsheet to display parental engagement activities that have been planned or completed within your institution.