ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a number of activities and points for reflection that can help practitioners understand the range of needs of parents whose children are approaching school age. Early years settings can also model best practice in parental involvement so parents who are less confident have already had experience in building trusting relationships and understand how much their engagement with the settings is valued. The involvement of parents in a pre-school setting can make all the difference to the transition from pre-school to school, as knowledge sharing can take place between practitioners but also between parents, so in pre-school phase it is vitally important that parents start to engage–before they move to the school. One pressure that might be during the pre-school phase is the feeling that children should be preparing for school and of course, that must mean the end of play-based learning.
