Levelling The Field

The Levelling the Field initiative was formed with the idea of encouraging parental engagement within their child’s education and development, with the aim of offering further learning as well as the chance of volunteering at Achieve More Scotland and other local organisations. Working alongside Glasgow City Council’s Quality improvement team, Glasgow Life’s family learning team, headteachers within the schools and the Glasgow Life Early learning team a plan was devised on how this would be run.

We are in 4 schools within the north of Glasgow, in some of the most deprived areas, such as Possilpark and Maryhill. With the original aim of targeting the ‘Covid Children – p3/4’, this was soon changed as we realised it needed a whole school approach. Currently, we have worked with over 200 people, with many of those families being English as an additional language families, who are not entitled to public funding due to their time within the country. Due to this, we have found these families are more reliant on the support of attending the weekly sessions as it is a time for the families to come together and receive the much needed support from the Achieve More Scotland staff as well as the other professionals involved.

Our sessions run for 1.5 hours weekly within each school, and the families will come along to receive a nutritious meal, participate in a family activity as well as having the chance to meet with professionals such as the NHS Health Improvement team, the Glasgow Library team and the Glasgow ESOL team. We also encourage parent carer time, where we provide a safe space for the adults to talk about any issues they may currently be facing. This time allows for us to reach out to the professionals needed as well as ensuring the support is in place within the school.

Recently we have found that there has been more of a demand to our services due to many of our families experiencing trauma and are waiting further input from professionals, this has meant that our small team is bridging the gap to provide support to ensure the families feel that they can cope while at home.

If you are a school and would like to work with us, please contact our Project Co-Ordinator Ellis Palazzo at [email protected]

If you are a participant and you would like to send us any questions or feedback, you can do so emailing us at [email protected] Our team will get back to you as soon as possible within working hours.