Episode 223: Navigating volunteer support in schools

Adam Gifford

Welcome back. It's another episode of the School to School podcast. It feels like it's been a million years since I've seen the other two regulars on here, Andy and Robin. How are you both for me this afternoon, for you this morning?

Andy Psarianos

Very good. Yeah.

Robin Potter

Really good. So nice to see your face, Adam. It's been a while.

Andy Psarianos

So a million years, how much does it, how much does a, so a million ants weighs as much as what?

Robin Potter

Okay, here we go. The math has begun.

Adam Gifford

There is an answer to this. I know it was on the cover of one of our books.

Andy Psarianos

There is. Yeah, it's one of our books. I think a million ants weigh as much as a small cat. I think.

Adam Gifford

Small cat, that's right. Yes. Yeah, a person too much.

Robin Potter

Okay, and how much is a small cat weigh?

Andy Psarianos

As much as a million ants. So maybe we should make ants the standard unit of measure.

Robin Potter

Yeah, good answer. Good answer.

Adam Gifford

There's no reason why not. Get enough people to buy into it and it'll be, it'll take off. Your regular garden ant.

Andy Psarianos

How many ants? I'm sorry. I lost four ants today. I wouldn't be very much with it.

Robin Potter

Does this have anything to do with what we're talking about today? No, okay.

Adam Gifford

No, not much. But actually, maybe, I don't know. I'll let you weave it in. One of the topics that we were talking about off the air, and I sort of, I came at it from one angle and Robin, I think you came at it from another, is volunteers in school, right? So whenever I think we hear volunteering, we usually think that's an inherently good thing. And I think by and large it is. It's people wanting to do good generally for something else like or for someone else or for an organization and um one of the topics we talking about was volunteers in school

And the first thing that came to my mind. I actually said these words to Robin. I said it can actually be really damaging which sounds quite full-on when it comes to Volunteers in school and I probably need to to qualify that but I think that that's what we're going to talk about So links to ants. I'll let you make up your own mind on this

But I guess at the heart of it is that schools are part of a community. Communities want to do right by the people who are in them as a general rule. And one of the ways that certainly schools can be massively helped out is through volunteering. And so I've seen real good.

When I talk about the damaging aspect is that sometimes I think that the help that we get may not be at the level that's needed to assist the child. That's, you know, like I've heard many times, a parent's coming in to listen to a child read, right?

They'll sit alongside them and listen to them read, or they'll help out with a group who struggle with maths. And I think that sometimes that sense of doing the right thing, sparing some time, it's like anything, I suppose, the effectiveness of it.

is only as good as how well that person can deal with often our most complex cases. And sometimes I think that that gets misunderstood as that if a child's struggling with some really early stuff, be it reading, be it anything really, is that actually every step of that learning journey is incredibly complex. The practitioners that support those children are incredibly skilled. And so that's why I think volunteering.

Certainly the first thing I did when I became a head was ensuring that we had the capacity to train volunteers. We had a waiting list of people that wanted to come into the school and so it was quite hard saying no. But I felt that if we couldn't give them the appropriate training then we couldn't allow them, we morally couldn't allow them to come in and work with the children.

Robin Potter

That's really interesting, Adam. I haven't heard that before. And I think back to when my kids were in primary school and I was one of those volunteers that would go in weekly and I worked with Andy, keep your opinions to yourself. Yeah, and I would go in and work with, you know, a small group of children and often one-on-one.

where they come out into the hallway or something, we have a table set up and it was spelling or it was reading. And I think I was given maybe a 5 or 10 minute, I'm gonna say 10 just to make it sound better. And these are at different schools I've helped with and just kind of what the goal is, what I was going to be doing and that's about it.

you know, kind of left up to my own imagination other than that. So interesting that you're saying that you actually at your school implemented something where the training was done ahead of time and up to a certain expectation level, I guess, because I know I wasn't. Now I'm hoping I didn't damage those children. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Well, there's a bunch of stuff to unpack there. like, I mean, you know, I think it's great that the community wants to come in and pitch in and help, you know, we all know that schools, uh, are, you know, largely, if you ask any school, even the wealthiest school, you go and ask them and they'll tell you they're under resourced. mean, that's just, you know, because yeah, it, there's, takes a lot to run the school. takes a lot of people.

It takes a lot of like, amount, takes a lot of time, like individual time. Like as a teacher, you know, you have only a certain amount of hours in a day and you've got a whole lot of children that you need to try to, to, to influence. So, so time is, one of the toughest resources. And the idea of like, I can get somebody in to help and get them to look after this thing.

So it sounds like a great idea, you know, from, from,at a glance, right? And there's obvious things where for sure you can't, like if you're going on a school trip, you need some parents to help chaperone the children. That's, you know, well, you haven't got a choice, right? Cause you're not, you're not, you know, one teacher isn't going out into the city with 30 children, 30, you know, seven year olds on their own, right? It's not going to happen, right? So, so.

But then on the pedic.., what we're talking about is the pedagogical side of it. It's like, well, should a parent be sitting with the child with like, you know, helping them with their learning journey. I think that really depends on what the, what the ask is. Right. And I think that, that, that, you know, for sure, you know, supervision and teaching are not the same thing. Right.

Supervising in the sense of like, let's make sure no, kids get, you know, go missing or get hit by a vehicle or something is one thing. you know, making sure that they learn how to read or learn how to write or, or, or, or do some mathematical thing or whatever is an entirely different thing.

Right. And, there's always, there's always, seems to me, there's always a trend to that, that we think like, the, the struggling ones are the ones that need the one-to-one support. So we'll put them with the additional help to make sure they get the one-on-one support. But actually sometimes that's really misguided too, right? Because what they actually need is they do probably do need some one-on-one support, but they need one-on-one support with a qualified teacher, not one-on-one support with a parent, right?

Adam Gifford

And I think we all know, I mean, look, schools can't run just as Andy said, I was so fortunate because we had an incredible parent community that was so engaged and they did so much for our school. was, I mean, our children benefited. I can't even tell you how much they benefited if you had a comparison of taking sort of parent involvement out and putting it back in. I couldn't even put a figure on it. I mean, it was just night and day.

because we had such an effective parent group, they were incredible. And yeah, I think it is that, and there's lots of things that go on in school that are really, really useful. like that thing around reading, listening to children read, you know, like we know what we're listening for, we might be able to help them out inherently, those sorts of things. Of course, that's not doing damage. but it is that thing around those children that struggle with things.

They're often the children who are the hardest, even if you've been in a game for a while, you know, that's why we have children that get to the end of their schooling career really struggling with certain things. Now, keep in mind, I've had experts with them every step of the way for years at a time. You know, over a thousand days at primary school with various experts and we still, they're coming through unable to do some, in some cases, really basic things. So that, I think that's the thing, it's the complexity around that.

that's tough because yeah, schools can't survive without volunteers. Well, schools, they can't survive at their best without some form of volunteers to help in all sorts of ways. I mean, we got phenomenal amounts of money raised for us. We had many children who were helped. And the other lovely thing that happened was on two occasions, the parents that came in when we decided to put the training in for them,

They went on to become teaching assistants and one of them went on to become a teacher. So I think that was really lovely because they could see that that level of sort of input allowed them to help even more, which is always, you know, it's awesome. You feel really good about it. But yeah, I think it is. It's just understanding that. think it's, and managing it in a way that you don't want the parent community to feel alienated, you know, that you can.

Andy Psarianos

So where can it go wrong, Adam? Like what? Yeah.

Adam Gifford

I think the biggest thing for me is that, like, classic example, you can't do maths, Andy, okay? So you're six, seven years old, and Robin's the teacher, and she says, oh, Adam's one of the dads, and he's volunteered, and he's going to help Andy. And what you're presenting me is that you just can't do it, but I don't know how to help you.

So in that time and maybe we spend half an hour, a couple of times a week and I just say, well, here's how I do maths, right? And so I do it in such a way that no one knows what's going on, but it seems in hand. And I say, don't panic because throughout the school year, honestly, I've got Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I can always work with Andy. So there's an assumption then that whatever you need, Andy, is being taken care of by me, except it's not.

And so you get asked when you come in, hey, listen, was it good working with Adam? yeah, it was great. What did you do? Well, we did some numbers and we did it and we played a couple of games and it was awesome. great. Hey, this is awesome. This is taken care of because like you're saying, busy, 30 kids. And I think that's the problem is that the longer that goes on, there's a couple of things that happen. We run out of more. We run out of time to help you.

But not only that, we could be bringing in some misconceptions or some pretty bad habits that we might be reinforcing every Tuesday and Thursday forever in a day. So that's where I think it goes wrong.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. Yeah. And so because they're not trained, they're not trained in, in, yeah, in, uh, in, teaching and in assessment and this, you know, we all know that a big part of teaching, especially those who are challenged, uh, for what, uh, you know,

like finding a particular topic challenging or they're struggling for a variety of reasons, whatever they may be, a big part of it is assessment, right? It's like being able to assess, okay, if they can't do this, the prior skills for this thing are this, that, and the other thing.

And it's got to be one of those, which one of those is it? And how far, how do you trace that back to where does the problem lie? That's a real skill. And that comes from experience and even newly qualified teachers, teachers coming out of, you know, they don't necessarily even have the experience to do that. So to expect that a parent to say, look, you know, this child is struggling with this. I'm going to give them a shortcut to produce the right answer. Right.

So, know, what, what an example would be like, there's these different things you run into sometimes like where you can, you know, if you're using a nine times table, you can do something with your fingers here and you're always going to get the answer or whatever, you know, things like that. And it's like, it's like, yeah, it works. Why does it work? That kid has no idea why it works. Have you helped them? Well, you kind of showed them how to, how to come up with the right answer or whatever, but they

You know, how does that help them with their eight times table or their, you know, it's just, they're not further ahead, right? You've just, you kind of cheated the system a little bit and parents can come in and do those kinds of things. Cause maybe they have to rely on it. Cause maybe they weren't taught how to, you know, and then that becomes a perpetual thing. Right.

Robin Potter

Yeah, and that maybe, Adam, you talking about how you would train up the volunteers before they were let loose in the classroom. And I think that would be beneficial for that very reason that Andy's just brought up, because say they're using Maths — No Problem! in the classroom and you want them to help some students with maths, and I'm teaching it the way I learned.

you know, back when I was in year three and it's completely different. It's a different program, it's different way of learning and I'm just being let loose to do. And so now maybe I'm working with someone who needs more support and now I'm confusing them even more because, or I'm explaining it my way and they kind of get that and then they go back in the classroom and it's not the way it's being done with the rest of the class. That could end up being more detrimental.

Andy Psarianos

And parents can also give misinformation, you know, which is like some kind of misconception, like, you know, and math is a perfect example again, because there's so many possible things that it can highlight. So, you know, it could be something as seemingly hard, harmless as when you divide two numbers, you see, see a parent saying, so when you divide two numbers, the answer is always small, it's always smaller.

Right? Well, wait a minute. Whoa, that's not true. Right? Yeah. That's not true. Don't say that. Or when you multiply, the answer is always bigger. Why? Yeah. If you're multiplying by fraction, it's not true. Or if you're a decimal or where, you know, like there's lots of cases where that's not true. Right? So, but in the most instances, but you know, you put that in a kid's head and they go, this is my self check now. Right? Whenever I multiply two numbers, the answer is going to be bigger. Right? Well, hold on now.

This is like this is going to be a problem later, right? Because you know, when you start to multiply, you're just doing, you're doing, you know, multiplication tables of whole numbers and they're small and they're less than 10, whatever. But at some point you have to apply multiplication in different types of scenarios where there's other types of numbers and that rule then breaks down.

but they may have that rules ingrained in their mind because of what happened in a year three lesson with the parent, right? And it could surface as a problem in, you know, year six or year seven, right? And, and that's, that's kind of where, that's where it getting potentially problematic. Mind you, teachers can do that too. So let's not put it all on the volunteers.

Adam Gifford

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, of course. I've seen that. No, no, no, absolutely not. And this isn't, it's not to sort of, I think we're not beating up the volunteers. I think it's just the seriousness of the nature of learning, right?

Because I think the other thing that we used to say was the time commitment and that you needed to be consistent. So we'll put the effort into you with the training and that sort of thing. so it was, but I know in the broader community, I think it did us good.

Because I put it in the newsletter, this is what's going to happen, right? So volunteers, here's the rationale, here's what we're doing, just so everyone knows, if you're keen, we would love to hear from you. These are the commitments that we ask, that you will do the training, that you will turn up, and there's a consistency in those sorts of things. So it became, I guess it became like a job, but I think there was no other way to do it because the people couldn't commit to that, and they thought, well, I'll turn up when I can, and I might have a day here and a day here.

To me that was never going to help, but there were loads of other ways that they might be able to help in the school, which was really meaningful that suited what they could do. So I can't commit to this, that's fine, because we've got other stuff that will be really beneficial to the children that might suit you better. And I think that it's that transparency around that commitment that's, you know, for me it was really important.

Robin Potter

Yeah, and as a parent again having done some volunteering in classes, I mean I really did love getting to interact with the students in a different way and getting to know them a little bit better as a teacher would get to know them and you know becoming familiar to them because they saw me every week coming in and and so there are some added bonuses as a volunteer you know.

Getting to know the teacher of your, most likely of one of your children, and getting to know the other pupils in the class. I just, I think it's a win-win both ways. There's no question.