Self-paced courses

Using Effective Communication to Build and Maintain Relationships with Families

  • NQS Areas
  • 6
    Area 6Collaborative partnerships with families and communities

This course supports you to deepen your approach to engaging families, particularly those experiencing financial adversity. Through practical strategies, reflection and real-world scenarios, you will strengthen your communication skills, navigate sensitive conversations with confidence, and build meaningful, trust-based relationships that support children’s learning and wellbeing.

Course overview
Enrolment
Modules
Hours of study
Digital certificate
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Course overview

What you'll learn

This course explores strategies for building partnerships with families, with a particular focus on engaging families in high-poverty contexts using effective communication.   

By completing this course, you will be able to: 

  • Appreciate that engaging families, particularly those struggling financially, is an ongoing process that requires a repertoire of interpersonal communication skills.  
  • Understand the barriers that can impede engagement with families, especially for those experiencing financial adversity.  
  • Apply effective interpersonal communication principles and practices in your work with families.  
  • Approach sensitive conversations with purpose and care.  
  • Incorporate learnings from your interpersonal communication with families into your teaching practice  
  • Critically reflect on your own and your service’s current and potential approaches to engaging families.   

Explore other topics in this series

Enrolment

Accessing the training platform

You will be enrolled in our dedicated training platform by a CELA representative using the unique email address provided at the time of booking. Once enrolment is complete, each participant will receive a welcome email with instructions to log in and set their password.

Please note that enrolment may take up to 24 hours to process on weekdays. Courses purchased after 12pm on Fridays, or over the weekend, will receive their login invitation on the following Monday.

Participants have 12 months from the date of purchase to complete the course and can begin as soon as their enrolment is confirmed.

Modules

This course is organised into the following chapters:   

  • Welcome and introduction   
  • The importance of interpersonal communication in high-poverty contexts  
  • Initial engagement with families   
  • Effective interpersonal communication for initial and ongoing engagement  
  • Barriers and enablers of family engagement  
  • Sensitive conversations   
  • Critical reflections and actions   
  • Useful resources and reference list  

The course is delivered as self-paced online training for early childhood educators and teachers offering a rich blend of multimodal learning and activities to consolidate professional learning. 

Hours of study

How many hours of study are suggested?

This course will take around 2.5 hours of study.  

You have one year from the date of enrolment to complete this course. 

Digital certificate

You will receive a digital certificate on completion.

Your facilitators

Leonie Arthur

Leonie Arthur

Leonie has worked as an early childhood educator in long day care, preschool, and the early years of school, including teaching in Aboriginal communities in Sydney and the Northern Territory. She is one of the authors of Programming and Planning in Early Childhood Settings and was part of the team that developed the first edition of the Early Years Learning Framework. She was a lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Western Sydney, where her research focused on effective pedagogies for learning and teaching in low socioeconomic communities, and the role of collaborative action research in educators’ professional learning and curriculum design. 

Marianne French

Marianne French

Associate Professor Marianne Fenech is Director of the Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood) program at the University of Sydney.   Marianne is passionate about quality, inclusive early childhood education in Australia, with a particular interest in early childhood teacher, service, and sector governance; partnerships with families; and how policies locally and nationally support and/or constrain a well-prepared, professional early childhood workforce. Marianne is lead author of Professional Communication for Early Childhood Educators and co-author of Leadership: Contexts and Complexities in early Childhood Education. 

Acknowledgment

The Engaging Families research team would like to acknowledge:

  • Our research participants, including families, educators and community members
  • Our research institutions - UNSW Sydney, Western Sydney University, the University of Sydney, and Griffith University
  • Our research partners – KU Children’s Services, Family Day Care Australia, Goodstart Early Learning, Childcare & Kindergarten (C&K), Early Childhood Australia
  • Our creative team – the still and moving images used within this course were provided by Jamie James, Nisa East, and Sivani Yaddanapudi
  • Our funders – Australian Research Council and NSW Government

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