Parents
Engagement with Parents
Riverside’s two key stage team leaders take responsibility for parent links, and will be organising regular parent support meetings in school in the summer term, 2012. A high level of responsibility is attached to this post since the majority of students at Riverside arrive on Haringey transport and therefore few parents have daily contact with the school through a daily ‘school gate’ drop-off.
The support meetings will operate on a ‘coffee morning’ model with parents driving the agenda, which could range from informal discussion forums to share experiences, group visits and invitations to guest speakers and advisers according to parental group requests. Links with other Haringey parent associations will be encouraged.
In the same summer term we also intend to set up a Parent Staff Association, (PSA), which could organise fund-raising and social events, and this group may wish to become involved in our plans for a termly newsletter, (as was produced at Moselle and WCH schools), to go out to all parents, and which would contain student, staff and parent articles covering ongoing details of school life.
Prior to students joining Riverside School, at secondary transfer from primary school, or at any other point in their school careers, parents are invited in for a tour of the school and are given a thorough induction process with their child.
Parents of Riverside students are encouraged to visit the school at any time by arrangement and staff are prepared to visit family homes in the interests of students. To sustain communication links between home and school, staff commit to a home-school book which goes between home and school daily. The frequency of input into the books will be governed by parental request.
During the autumn term a parents’ evening is arranged for parents to meet their child’s class teacher and specialist teachers by appointment to discuss their child’s progress. At the spring term parents’ evening parents are invited to look at and discuss their child’s revised individual targets in the light of progress made during the first half of the school year.
In the summer term all parents are invited to the school by appointment to their child’s annual review meeting, (see Assessment, Recording and Reporting above). Also in the summer term a social evening is held at which all parents, (established and new), are able to meet their child’s class staff for the following school year.
Help for parents and families experiencing difficulties, be they emotional, financial or concerned with family relationships, or for families in need of respite services, continues to be made available by the borough’s social services Disabled Children’s Team.
Parental Contributions
The school may ask parents for contributions towards the cost of residential visits and other activities outside school hours. Voluntary contributions towards the cost of some educational visits that take place during the school day are also welcomed.
Riverside has a school educational visits fund ‘Out and About’, (see section below), to ensure that on occasions where contributions may be requested, no student will be disadvantaged solely by their inability to pay.
Parents may occasionally be asked to make voluntary contributions towards the cost of materials for cookery and craft work. Whether or not contributions are made, all students take part in the full range of practical activities. The school may request a contribution when a student wishes to take the finished product home.
On the rare occasions when a student damages school property and has the capacity to understand what they have done, a contribution is requested towards the cost of repair.
