Parents play a vital role in their child’s education; some might even say they play as an important role as a teacher. Leading academic in this field, Professor Charles Desforges notes that parental involvement makes more of an impact on educational outcomes than any other demographic measure including social class or level of income (Desforges, Feinstein et al, EFLN).
In Ireland there are serious and worsening literacy problems - 1 in 10 Irish children leave school with serious literacy difficulties and more than 1 in 4 Irish adults have the same problems. From this we can see that family literacy is of the utmost importance in regards to the development and overall wellbeing of not only children, but the parents and adults alike.
The introduction of quality time between parents and their children to read together can help tackle the severity of the problem. The National Adult Literacy Agency (NALA) has introduced a number of literacy programmes to help the situation. Family literacy programmes improve the literacy and numeracy skills of parents and other family members which has a significant knock-on effect on the performance of children at school. Engaging the entire family unit with literacy provides a win-win scenario to policy makers and practitioners, particularly those involved in education in disadvantaged communities.
Family Literacy, language and numeracy programmes aim to:
• Improve the literacy, language and numeracy skills of parents.
• Improve parents’ ability to help their children learn.
• Improve the developmental skills of young children and their acquisition of literacy, language and numeracy.
Here at MS Ireland, we aim to help tackle the problem through our annual MS READaTHON. Through participation and engagement you are helping us provide support to people living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and in turn, improving the literacy standards among children and adults in Ireland.