How to engage with any parent community in 4 steps

Engaging with your local community is an essential ingredient for school success, but can seem hard to achieve. Kate Owbridge shares her secrets of how to turn even the most disengaged families and pushy parents and carers into positive partners. From learning about your local area to letting everyone know what you’re like as a leader, there’s a lot you can do to bring everyone on board.

Last reviewed on 5 February 2025
School types: AllSchool phases: AllRef: 49975
Contents
  1. Watch the on-demand talk 
  2. Resources for this talk
  3. Kate's recommended further reading
  4. Meet our speaker

Watch the on-demand talk 

This video offers 'bite-sized' CPD for teachers, with accompanying handouts/resources.

It represents the speaker's role and approach (and where relevant, their school/trust's approach) at the time it was recorded, but still serves as both a source of inspiration and practical tips for you to use in practice.

Please note: any commercial providers, products or resources mentioned in this talk, and relevant links here, are on the speaker's own recommendation and should not be considered an endorsement by The Key.

 

 

Resources for this talk

How to engage with any parent community in 4 steps: key points PDF, 250.7 KB
Download
How to engage with any parent community in 4 steps: note-taking template DOCX, 68.1 KB
Download

Kate's recommended further reading

Meet our speaker

Kate Owbridge has been a headteacher since 2004, and is now executive headteacher at Ashdown Primary School, East Sussex. Kate spent most of her career