Opening the School Gate | Planning meetings & events

To begin with you will have to decide whether you want to hold a meeting for parents/carers from diverse language groups or focus on one language group at a time. Language or culture-specific meetings are effective if you have a few larger cultural groups in the school.

Separate meetings will reduce complex cross-cultural communication, address the particular needs of each community and make parents feel more at ease. Multilingual formats can be effective when there are small groups from a number of language backgrounds, or when the issue you want to discuss is relevant for many groups.

However if holding a meeting with more than two or three language groups, consider the challenges placed on interpreters particularly if several are required to interpret at the same time. The meeting may take longer and noise levels may be a real problem when several people are speaking at the same time.

Generalist meetings including both Australian-born and migrant or refugee parents tend not to be successful in the first instance, but adopting a more generalist approach later on, once families are engaged, will prevent groups from being marginalised in the school.

Ooptions for language or culture-specific parent meetings

• Invite each language group to a specific meeting.
• Have guests present in English with an interpreter. This can be useful if there is one main language group in the school other than English speakers.
• When bilingual staff members are available, hold the meeting in a language other than English and use an interpreter for English speakers such as teachers.