WILLIAM Martin Schools are celebrating that they have successfully continued to provide Parent workshops to their school community throughout both National Lockdowns.
Bonnie Jones, Pastoral Manager, has worked tirelessly alongside Joanne Ingall, Adult Community Learning (ACL) to ensure that the ACL workshops, which support an increasing number of William Martin families have continued, despite moving over to remote learning methods. Their brilliant hard work is now paying dividends.
Bonnie and Joanne have provided weekly workshops, including family wellbeing, story sacks, English for EAL families and study skills, which are complimented by resources that Bonnie and Joanne drop round to families homes, to ensure they have all the equipment they need to fully interact with each workshop. This has taken a huge amount of work to achieve, but they feel so passionately about the project they have been happy to provide this service to their families.
Adult Community Learning aims to support local families through learning workshops, and have tailored these to provide a bespoke service to meet the needs of the William Martin Community. This might take the form of helping adults to gain qualifications for employment that they missed out on at school, or to give ideas for healthy and productive ways for families to spend time together. In normal times, the weekly workshops are hosted within the school, giving parents the opportunity to form friendships and connections with other likeminded families. 
Joanne Ingall said “During these times of Covid and lockdown, ACL have moved sessions out of schools and centres, and is now working completely online. Families who are now forced to stay at home, are joining ACL through the school for weekly sessions to produce craft, looking at strategies for supporting home learning, and to have a chat with people from outside their household. Some families are also accessing skills and qualifications courses, or improving their English.
Our sessions are available to all families who live in Essex, either through their school or virtually. Our courses are listed on the ACL website. https://aclessex.com/
