Bahrain School created R.A.W. Bites, a monthly family support programme partnering with community resources to help parents better support their children’s academic, social and emotional wellbeing.

Please share a brief background of your innovation.

The goal of this innovation is to build a partnership between our families, the school community, and other community resources – to build a sort of “hub” at Bahrain School where things happen and families can feel connected and supported.

How was the innovation planned?

This innovation was planned through the collaborative efforts of our school leadership, teachers, parents, and community resources to identify the needs of families and students. Informal conversations were used to gather feedback from the wider school community, ensuring that the program addresses real priorities and concerns among our students and their families.

What were the challenges faced during implementation?

Participation was a challenge we encountered early on in the implementation. Finding the right resources and people in the community to partner with was a bit difficult, but we were able to, in the end, find theright people through the ‘Fleet and Family Resource Centre’. Now we have an ongoing rotation where Fleet and family have become the forefront of our initiative!

Together, we brainstorm topics based on feedback from previous R.A.W. Bites and the community at large to see exactly what our families need and what discussions they want to have. Another challenge we faced was the frequency of our R.A.W. Bites. Last year, when we started, we held our Bites quarterly; thisyear, we have scheduled them monthly so more of our families can attend.

Give us a brief assessment of your results.

We feel like this initiative has had a positive impact not only on our students but also on our parents. Parents feel like they have the connection and support from the school that they need to better support their kids at home.

Whether that be with building new skills, developing their academics, or improving their overall well-being. Because our focus is the whole child, being able to provide resources and strategies that can help parents at home makes school life a whole lot easier for kids. Our parents are also discovering resources for themselves that they didn’t realise were available!

In hindsight, what were the most valuable lessons learned while implementing theinnovation? Could things have been done differently?

Right now, we are trying to make our R.A.W. Bites more accessible for working parents to be able to attend. For example, we are working with the Base to see if our military-connected parents can receive “special leave” of just a few hours so that they can attend our sessions.

This is something that we would have approached differently in the beginning and that we are actively working on right now. After each R.A.W. Bites session, we collect feedback from all of our participants, and we monitor and adjust things here and there to make the next session even better!