Community Cohesion

Park View is at the heart of ‘Britain’s most diverse postcode’ (Evening Standard 2005); the size and range of its diversity is our most wonderfully distinctive feature, which we proudly celebrate both in and outside the classrooms throughout the year.

Over 90% of our students are from ethnic minority communities, while 75% have EAL (English as an Additional Language) and speak over 50 community languages.

Over the last three years, we’ve had a significant increase in the intake of our new arrivals who speak EAL, which meant that our EAL focus group has trebled, currently making up 15% of our school population.

In order to support the families of our new students to settle into our community, understand the UK schooling system and other key British values, the EMA (Ethnic Minority Achievement team) at Park View hold a termly parent forum.

The agendas are mainly set by themselves and consist of key aspects they would like to gain a deeper understanding of. To ensure this, the parent forum meetings are conducted in the parents’ first languages and they consist of a presentation, followed by a comprehensive question and answer session.  

The languages catered for are: Bulgarian, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Somali, Italian and Russian. Presentations are also delivered in English to those parents whose level of English enables them to access the information.

The parent forums are very well-attended – on average, since we implemented the parent forums three years ago, we have had approximately 80% of our focus parent group attending every term.

Typical agenda items:

  • UK grading system
  • Achievement, rewards and behaviour systems
  • Attendance and punctuality systems
  • Introduction to key British values
  • Your child’s termly academic progress (current grades and target grades)
  • Existing support your child receives from the EMA team
  • Lunchtime and after school clubs your child may benefit from
  • Curricular maps: topics studied in English, Maths and Science
  • How to best support your child with their learning at home i.e. reading, revision
  • How to access and monitor your child’s activity on Hegarty Maths and Educake Science portals
  • How to access and monitor your child’s SMHW (Show My homework)
  • Explanation of our GCSE Options offer in Year 10
  • Post-16 education options and guidance
  • Safeguarding i.e. well-being of our students and their families, cyber-bullying, bullying, online safety, ‘hands-off’ policy

For further information about the above, please contact:

Telephone: 0208 826 9172