Supporting parents to build literacy at home

What does a strengths-based approach for working with parents look like? ORIM is a framework for helping parents support and build their children’s literacy.  Developed out of the University of Sheffield as part of Sheffield REAL (Raising Early Literacy Achievement) and trialled over 10 years, ORIM has spread nationally and is used in a variety of contexts  – mainstream early schooling, children’s centres, bilingual services, and even in prisons. 

 There are four components to the framework: Parents create and recognise opportunities to learn; parents recognise children’s readiness to learn and their learning activities; parents interact with children and learning and literacy activities; modelling reading and writing, encouraging children to have a go.

Recognition is key – parents come to realise their job is to create literacy opportunities and they become confident at picking up and acting on those learning moments.  

What makes ORIM distinctive ? First, it is underpinned by an understanding of parents as learners – so it builds on good adult education practice.  It’s not a pre-determined programme so it can be picked up by diverse providers and services and applied in a variety of contexts; it doesn’t assume or require any literacy level –   it starts where parents are at.

And its effective. Children whose parents took part in an ORIM  programme when the children were pre-schoolers  had their literacy measured at age 7, as part of a randomised control trial. All programme children had an edge over the control group children.  The biggest impact was on children whose mothers had no qualifications. This research involved mostly poor white children but similar  findings came from another smaller trial in a dual language settings with Pakistani families.

Its been 20 years since the first development project in one Sheffield school. Its now embedded in early learing services in many local authorities and has been taken up in Johannesbug, Portugal and Melbourne.  I came away from my meeting with Professor Cathy Nutbrown inspired, keen to join the ORIM network and to explore how to incorporate ORIM to our work on early learning and oracy through Learning Auckland.