What is the Parents as Tutors Program?

The Parents as Tutors Program (PTP) is a literacy intervention designed to help children who are failing to develop age-appropriate literacy skills.

The program represents a twenty five year collaboration between the University of Canberra and ACT Department of Education & Training. This partnership has ensured that the program has evolved in a way that is both grounded in classroom practice and informed by the most up-to-date research and theory in literacy teaching and learning. The program is unique in that:

• It combines parent seminars with a series of intensive one-on-one literacy learning tutorials. These tutorials are attended by both the child facing literacy difficulties and his or her parent or carer.
• It utilises the Scaffolding Literacy pedagogy developed in the Schools & Community Centre at the University of Canberra.
• Literacy learning places great demands on children’s short term memory. This program overtly addresses the stress placed on both the child and their parent/carer when the child is not progressing in an age-appropriate way.
• The program has consistently demonstrated that poor and non-readers can, with appropriate support (or ‘Scaffolding’) work on text they could not read independently. Using this approach, children experience learning success and this success provides the basis upon which further literacy learning can be built.
• It provides a highly integrated method for developing skills in reading, spelling and writing.
• For each child in the program measured outcomes are produced through the use of pre- and post- reading assessments on benchmarked texts.
• The average reading gain is between one to three year levels over the 12-week program for children of ‘average’ ability (gains are slower for children with special needs but are usually still significant in terms of the child’s overall developmental ability).
• Its effectiveness with children of all ages and various levels of intellectual development has been consistently demonstrated.

Can your child join the program?

Enrolments are considered from families with a child enrolled in an ACT primary or high school, and who is having significant difficulties with literacy learning. Children need to be in Year 2 or above. A referral from the child’s school counsellor is required. Interested parents should talk to their child’s classroom teacher, Principal or school counsellor or can contact the Schools & Community Centre.

How is the program structured?

There are two parts to the program:

• Six two-hour seminars for parents/ carers. Children do not attend the parent seminars
• Up to twelve one-hour, one-on-one, intensive teaching tutorial sessions conducted by a qualified literacy teacher with the child and parent/carer.

Although children can be referred at any time of the year, there are two program intakes per year, one in February and another in July.

The parent seminars

The two-hour parent seminars are held once a week. One series is on Tuesday evenings and the other is on Wednesday mornings. Participants choose whether to come to evening or morning sessions. One parent or carer from each family will be asked to commit to the whole program, including working on homework tasks with the child. In two-parent households, it is helpful if the non-teaching parent or partner understands the program and can support the teaching parent and the child. We therefore encourage both parents to attend at least the first two seminars.

The individual tutorial sessions

The one-hour weekly individual tutorial sessions are held during the day, Monday – Friday. Appointments begin at 8.30 am. The latest appointment any day is 4.00 pm.

Enrolling in PTP

Application forms and further information is available from the Schools & Community Centre.

Want to learn more about the PTP?

The following papers are in PDF format for Adobe Acrobat 4 or later. If you do not have this application, you may be download it free of charge from http://www.adobe.com.au

Axford, B (2007) Parents and their children working together: A Scaffolding Literacy case study. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 30 (1): 21-39.

Axford, B. (2005) “My child couldn't help but blossom …” An evaluation of the Parents as Tutors Program. Schools & Community Centre, University of Canberra.

Axford, B. (2004) Parents as Tutors Program: A unique literacy intervention. Schools & Community Centre, University of Canberra.

Schools & Community Centre (2008) Parents as Tutors Program, Annual Report, 2007. 

Adoniou,M.,Macken-Horarik,M. (2007) Scaffolding Literacy meets ESL: Some insights from ACT classrooms. Tesol in Context, 17(1)

Williams, P. (2007) Parents as Tutors Program: Stateline. Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Application forms and further information is available from the Schools & Community Centre.