“Read with me”: How teachers in Aarhus support parents to improve their children's reading skills

Objectives

According to the African saying “it takes a village to educate a child” the Municipality of Aarhus (almost 300,000 inhabitants) in Denmark has made school education a priority and taken action to work with parents in school education. In Denmark, local government is responsible for local schools. Based on the belief that parents are the most important adults for a child, the Municipality seeks to create strong relationships with parents through co-production.

The parent satisfaction survey undertaken by the Department of Children and Young People Services of the Municipality of Aarhus in 2013 revealed key success factors in effective cooperation between schools and parents:

• close contacts between schools and parents
• mutually matched expectations between parents and teachers.

However, about half of parents stated that they do not have a clear understanding of what schools expect from them.

A co-production approach was launched to improve the reading skills of children and young people and to reduce the gap between poor and skilled readers. Whereas skilled readers understand the language in the text and can control their understanding, poor readers exhibit poor word identification, poor knowledge of vocabulary, poor awareness of comprehension strategies and low reading enjoyment. There is also a clear pattern that reading ability amongst bilingual children and children from low-SES (socio-economic status) families tend to be significantly lower than in high-SES families.