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

READ (Research in Educational Achievement and Development) is a co-production project in Aarhus which aims at helping parents of school children to improve their child’s reading ability. This new co-production initiative is closely linked to the Early Child Programme of the City of Aarhus which targets young children attending pre-schools. Both projects are managed by the Municipality of Aarhus, VIA University College and Trygfonden’s Centre for Child Research at Aarhus University, which is an interdisciplinary research centre founded by the non-profit foundation Trygfonden.

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.

The City of Aarhus has the ambition of engaging citizens and professionals in an effort to improve education outcomes through two co-production initiatives:

• the Early Childhood Programme, targeted at young children aged 3-6 years
• The READ Programme, focussed on children aged 8-9 years.

The Early Childhood Programme

The Municipality of Aarhus had evidence from an earlier co-production experiment – The Early Childhood Programme led by Morten Jakobsen and Simon Calmar Andersen from Aarhus University – that supplying immigrant parents with a suitcase containing children’s books, games, and a tutorial DVD about language development techniques had a remarkably positive effect on language proficiency among the most challenged immigrant pre-school children. In the Early Childhood Programme, the Municipality of Aarhus and Aarhus University were engaged in a joint effort to inform parents of bilingual children at pre-school about why it is important to read with their children and how best to read with their children; moreover, it provided them with resources to do this reading. Since the parents and children were bilingual, all materials were supplied in several languages. The results of the evaluation of The Early Childhood Programme showed that most parents – despite their social background – were willing and able to support their children’s language development, if given adequate tools.

The suitcases were delivered to the parents by the municipality via the professionals at pre-schools. The suitcases were free of charge to the parents. An important part of the initiative was the interaction between the parents and the professionals.

READ

READ is a follow-up programme to the Early Childhood Programme and is provided in schools in Aarhus. The children taking part in the Early Childhood Programme were in 2^nd and 3^rd grade in 2013, which is why this age group was chosen for the follow-up programme. This allowed research to identify whether an early co-production approach at pre-school level was more effective than a later intervention at school level and whether two interventions involving the same child are better than one intervention or none at all.

The READ project provides an invitation to parents to help their child read in short periods of 15 minutes each day or as often as possible.

The project ran for one year and on two occasions provided parents with instructions on how they can support their children’s reading. During the first stage, teachers provided parents and children with books and instructions on how to engage in shared reading, and how to find additional reading resources either online, at the library or at the school. The schoolteachers were instructed to provide additional reading materials tailored to the competencies of each child.  Four months later, the teachers provided parents and children with additional books and instructions, now with a focus on reading aloud (in the 2^nd grade) and numeracy (in the 3^rd grade). Again parents were provided with information on how to support their children and were given different materials to do so.

The information provided to the parents included:

• research-based information about the importance of their involvement in their child’s education.
• suggestions about how to create a peaceful environment, where their child would have a chance to sit down and focus for 15 minutes on their reading.
• instructions on how to support their child – for instance, by asking open-ended questions about what they are reading and other kinds of dialogue techniques.

Inspired by the research on reading and on having dialogues around reading, a leaflet and a film was produced to show how parents can talk with the child about the content of the text. The main message for parents was that, when reading with their children, they should focus on the child's comprehension of the text and, especially, that they should have a conversation about the text to enhance their child’s understanding. All parents - regardless of their own reading ability or linguistic background – can speak with their child about the pictures and the contents of the text by bringing in their own and their child's experiences of the world. This thereby contributes to the child's most important learning about reading: understanding that content is the purpose of reading.

The evaluation of the READ co-production project is still being undertaken by researchers from the University of Aarhus. A crucial element of the projects is the 2X2 design, in which 4 different groups have varying degrees of support: 1) Children who benefitted from the early Child Programme; 2) children who benefitted from READ in schools; 3) children who benefitted from both co-production projects; 4) children who did not benefit from either co-production project.

However, the Early Child Programme has already been evaluated. The results show increased language comprehension among children with low-SES parents, as measured in a municipal language comprehension test. In particular, the reading ability of low-SES children participating in the Early Child Programme increased significantly – the effect corresponds to the difference between having a mother with a higher education and a mother with a lower education. Furthermore, the Early Child Programme substantially lowered the share of children attending reception classes when they started in school, down from 6.7 % in the control group to just 0.7% in the Early Child Programme group – a reduction of 89 %. The co-production approach was clearly effective in improving education outcomes for disadvantaged children.

There was also an increased volume of reading with their children on the part of parents who state they have low Danish proficiency but who do have the time to help their child with reading. These families read aloud 3.84 times per week on average, whereas the control group families read aloud 3.0 times per week on average.

Finally, on average there was an 8.8 % increase in the knowledge of parents about what they can do to help children read. However, amongst disadvantaged children this increase was as high as 16.5 %. The remarkable thing about this co-production approach is that these results were achieved with fairly small resources, both on the part of professionals and of parents.

The Danish National Tests will be used to assess the effects of READ. These tests assess the language, text comprehension and text decoding skills of children. Tests about number and algebra, geometry and applied mathematics will be used for evaluating the maths part of the co-production project. Moreover, a special writing assignment has been developed for the evaluation of READ. This was administered both before and after the READ Programme.  Results from these assignments will also contribute to the final evaluation of READ. 

All written materials were supplied in nine languages, the film was translated into six languages. The materials can be found at www.aarhus.dk/read. The cost of the material provided to one child and its parents in the READ-project is 600 kr. (about £65 or €80), ignoring the cost of wages. READ did not require employment of more staff, as the training of parents was done through the existing teachers, who themselves were trained through a 3 hour course.

While we are still waiting for the full evaluation, the most important learning point from the Early Child Programme is that governments can actually successfully increase the level of citizen co-production and, by doing so, improve outcomes for the citizens and civic society.

We have also learned that even small-scale co-production initiatives require cooperation and extensive coordination between different organisations to succeed. Both the Early Child Programme and READ are based on a strong partnership between local government, schools and day care institutions and two universities.

Project website: www.aarhus.dk/read.

Academic literature

Jakobsen, M. (2013) ‘Can Government Initiatives Increase Citizen Coproduction? Results of a Randomized Field Experiment’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 23(1), 27–54.

Jakobsen, M., Andersen, S.C. (2013) ‘Coproduction and Equity in Public Service Delivery’, Public Administration Review, 73(5), 704–713.