Rachel Griffiths:
So we'd had the Community Hub idea for a few years before RESP even, and we just had this idea that that was a need within our community. How would we connect with our families? We'd made some big assumptions as to why we weren't getting people in, but they were assumptions, and we needed to unpack what was the reason why families weren't coming in. I remember sitting in one of the workshops and this light bulb moment like we keep inviting them, we're putting it in the newsletter, asking them to come and they just won't come. And I think it was in one of the workshops like, well, what will they come for? Well, they come every time we do a celebration of learning, we're inundated with parents. All right, well, let's use that vehicle to get them here, and then hopefully bring that into the Hub idea. It wasn't rocket science. It was such a simple idea that someone had to tell us because we weren't seeing it for ourselves.
Jessica Duncan:
Yeah. Even the idea of we're promoting this in English, and so we weren't translating for a community that's 60% of EAL families. So having that as well, that instead of just putting it in the newsletter, translating into Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and some other languages as well really helped because then our audience was able to properly read it.
Rachel Griffiths:
We were a little bit worried, I think at one point like will they, still will they show up? We've gone for all this effort and we've put all this work in, and every single invite came back and every single parent turned up to that first session so it was really rewarding.
Jessica Duncan:
One of the activities that we do at Community Hub is pass the parcel, and so we have the parents and children working together and you can just see them light up like they love it. The kids love it, they get this high energy, and the parents love joining in with them. And then what we've done is we've put questions around culture in each layer so that the child can get to know their parent and that background even more, so.
Rachel Griffiths:
The prize is an added bonus.
Jessica Duncan:
Yeah, the prize. Yeah. Very excited about that.
Rachel Griffiths:
So another activity we did multiple times actually was had students and parents reading books together. We had some in our own library and we also used LMERC. It's a free service. They will ship books out to you in any language. And so we just had books all the way around the room, most sessions. And as families were coming in, they were reading the books with their students, and it gave us a nice way to go and engage as well to talk about the books, linking that, what we're doing here with the learning in the classroom.
Jessica Duncan:
And those books were in Arabic and Persian and all different languages so that the parents could read to the child, or the child could reach them in those first languages.
Rachel Griffiths:
We have a combination of sessions for the parents, sometimes focusing on services within the school that are going to support them and sometimes services outside of the school, so we have the translators here all of the time while we talk through the information. I think the most successful one has been about reports. Some families said that they'd never understood a report before, ever, and some of their kids are in grade four. And so that's been, I think, really successful.
Rewshen Hussein:
Epping Views is really caring about the families, the parents, and how they try to make them understand everything about the school, about Compass, about end of the term reports. I heard from some parents that they didn't know that their kids are really educating and learning from the school until they came here.
Jessica Duncan:
A lot of the families come together now, so they've met each other here and they've formed that friendship. We even have a parent saying to us this morning that she really wants to come on camp, and I don't think she would've put her hand up if it hadn't have been for this because her confidence around coming into the school, she does have English as an additional language. And so for her to put her hand up, that was a really nice sign that she is feeling connected to the school.
Maryana:
[foreign language 00:04:18].
Jessica Duncan:
And we were saying it's the highlight of our year doing this program, like getting to know the families and whilst the program's supported families to understand Compass, which we use, understand reports and things like that, whilst they would say they've learned a lot, I think that we have probably learnt more from connecting with those families and about culture and about how to serve our community. So that's been the best part, I think.
Augusta Zeeng:
I think one of the things that we want schools to know is that it's not more work, it's just work that makes actually the rest of your work easier in the long run, but also, work that you do is supporting not only refugee students and refugee likely students and their families, but also supporting other students, so it might be disengaged students or it might be EAL learners outside of a refugee cohort. So there's a lot of benefits to have, but also, the more engaged you have families, the easier the work is in general because outcomes for academic and wellbeing success are much higher for everyone.
Jessica Duncan:
We know how busy a school can be and how many competing priorities there are, but it was so beneficial and it was the best part of our year, and absolutely I think you should do it.
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