The Parent and Family Involvement Project: skills for early years educators

The importance of parent and family involvement is generally acknowledged by early years educators, but many of them feel that they lack the appropriate skills. The challenge is to find new ways of working with families in a changing world. The aim of the PFI Project (beginning in October 2003) is to meet this need, to develop a model for the training of early years educators in developing these skills and to provide them with a bank of resources which may be adapted to local needs. A training module is currently being piloted in collaboration with a group of experienced people from a variety of early years services. This paper outlines the aims and methodology of the project and presents some of the ideas which we have already discovere