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The Government is urging teachers to engage more closely with families and is promoting the concept of the ‘extended’ school. This article reports on the literacy strand of the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE) project, directed by Professor Martin Hughes at the University of Bristol. A selection of literacy activities developed during this project is discussed – activities that enabled teachers and parents to share their knowledge about children in order to enhance their learning. These included ‘school-to-home’ activities where the direction of knowledge was primarily from teachers to families and ‘home-to-school’ activities where families' knowledge of children impacted on school learning. Practical aspects of planning and conducting home–school knowledge exchange activities are discussed, and challenges are explored. The approaches presented in this article provide examples that could be considered and adapted by schools interested in extending their provision for families. This article draws on the recently published Improving Primary Literacy: Linking Home and School ( Feiler et al., 2007 ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report some of the literacy and numeracy actions developed on the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HKSE) project and examine these in relation to the engagement of participants. The exchanges of knowledge included two‐way processes where aspects of children's out‐of‐school worlds informed teaching and learning in the classroom as well as the more usual sharing of knowledge about school with children's families. We comment on patterns of parental engagement and on the development of actions that built not only on parental knowledge but also on the agency of the child. A key implication of this work is that ‘one size does not fit all’—more successful actions include different family members at different times and in different ways. Although the positive potential of home–school knowledge exchange for engagement is discussed, the difficulties and complexities of this field are recognized and explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective two‐way communication between home and school has been frequently promoted by policy‐makers and educationalists in the UK and elsewhere. In practice, however, home–school communication can often resemble ‘one way traffic’ which makes little attempt to acknowledge the out‐of‐school lives of children and their families. This paper argues for a different approach which aims to recognise and exchange ‘funds of knowledge’ between teachers, parents and children. The paper describes in detail two home–school knowledge exchange activities—one in which the exchange of knowledge is from school‐to‐home and one in which it is from home‐to‐school. In the discussion, it is argued that activities like these can provide a genuine exchange of ‘funds of knowledge’ between home and school. At the same time, home–school knowledge exchange activities cannot be seen as the simple transmission of depersonalised knowledge from one party to another. Instead they need to be seen as complex communicative activities in which the participants actively represent their practices and interests, and interpret these representations in terms of their own particular purposes and agendas. Two processes of ‘personalisation’ and ‘curricularisation’ appear to be involved here, as are underlying issues of power and control, risk and threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]