The education of children is one of the greatest concerns of families, especially when minors present learning difficulties of some kind. In these cases, the alliance between parents and educational centers is essential for students with special needs to achieve greater success.
The special role of families of students with special needs
As Ivette Aranda Salas explains in her work Special educational needs. The school-family-community relationship , “the family possesses detailed and valuable information regarding the development and behavior of their sons and daughters and plays a fundamental role in the detection and timely evaluation of special educational needs.” In parallel, the educational center needs to know what the child’s family environment is like in order to understand their situation globally and be able to provide an adequate response to the student’s circumstances that allows the maximum possible formative development.
Therefore, the parent/school partnership must be unbreakable, especially in the case of families of students with special needs. In this sense, the active participation and involvement of the family in the child’s educational programs generates an enormous positive impact on the maintenance and generalization of learning.
How can these ties be strengthened?
Recommendations for educational centers
There is no specific protocol to encourage the integration of families of students with special needs, although educational centers should strive to implement initiatives and projects that promote joint work.
In this sense, the following strategies will improve the relationship of parents with the educational institution and, therefore, promote student learning:
- Develop a Center Educational Project that contemplates the criteria and measures of the training institution regarding diversity of the student body from an inclusive approach that promotes the common development of all students, regardless of their individual, cultural, and social diversities in the face of learning. It is not only about collecting general objectives, but also about setting specific actions with which the center will respond to each purpose, the recipients of the measures, the human resources assigned to the plan, and the action protocol in each case.
- Involve families in the elaboration of the Center Educational Project and the specific plans destined to improve the inclusion and equal opportunities of young people, so that they can contribute their proposals and suggestions to the management team.
- Convene collective meetings and open house days with families at the beginning of each school period in order to explain and involve them in the objectives, evaluation criteria, and methodology that will be used during the course. In this guide, you can see more about how to organize an open house day and what activities you can undertake to communicate better with families. You can download it for free.
- Communicate to parents the problems that have been detected in minors early and help to face the care and education of the student during the phases of shock, denial, reaction, and adaptation described by Gema Panigua in The families of children with special needs.
- Inform families of students with special needs of the progress achieved by their children and providing them with guidelines so that they can help them at home.
- Organize periodic meetings between parents and tutors to report on the evolution of the minor and coordinate the work that is carried out in the school or institute and the home.
- Hold interviews between the center’s counselor and the families in which the best educational itinerary for the minors is analyzed.
- Use telephone or digital communication channels to strengthen the information of parents.
- Launch specific programs and innovative educational projects in which both the teachers and specialists of the center, as well as the students and family members, actively participate (parent school, workshops, extracurricular activities, participation in the classroom…).
Advice for families of students with special needs
However, the efforts should not come only from the educational center. The families of students with special needs must also get involved in their child’s learning. In this sense, Michael Develay, in his work Parents, school and children, proposes the following behaviors for parents:
- Give affective and emotional support to minors, so that their achievements are recognized, their self-esteem is reinforced and the student’s development is stimulated.
- Trust in the professionalism of the members of the educational center.
- Get actively involved in the activity of the center, attending tutorials and interviews and participating in the projects and initiatives organized.
- Provide the center with all possible information about the family environment and the evolution of the minor.
- Carry out a continuous monitoring of school work, of the tasks and personal study activities of the son or daughter, providing support and advice to the student at all times.
