Research School Network: Parental Engagement – EEF’s Evidence Day (Anna Tapper) Unity Research School’s Anna Tapper reflects on her experience of the day

Parental Engagement Matters

The ​‘Putting the Evidence to Work’ day at the Education Endowment Foundation, started with an interesting question: When a flyer was sent home to 3740 families for a parent event in school, how many responded? We all knew the answer would be low, but no-one guessed it would be just 18 (0.5%). Engaging parents is one of the challenges all schools face and, following a meta-analysis of 1300 studies, the guidance report is rather thin, and the recommendations are somewhat tentative.

There is promising evidence of association and schools should be optimistic about the potential there but…it should be cautious optimism. The evidence on effective strategies is limited, it can be hard to implement well and, crucially, if not done carefully, it can be a gap-widener.

We know that what a parent does at home with their child matters more than their qualifications or income and that developing strong relationships with parents builds trust, supports safeguarding and creates a shared mission. In brief, parental engagement matters.

3 things I’ve learnt from the day:

• Quality first teaching still has the biggest impact on pupil attainment, this may be a challenge to teachers who feel that parental involvement is having a bigger impact than the evidence suggests.
• The EEF is recruiting primary schools to become involved with a trial that uses texting to engage parents based on the ​‘Ready4K’ study in the US. A text is sent to parents three times a week offering them a fact, a motivational tip and growth point promoting their child’s development.
• As always, implementation of any changes in policy regarding parents is key. 

2 tips for school leaders:

• Undertake a review of practice. Think about what’s working well and what’s not in your current parental engagement activity? What could you stop?
• Support staff to engage with parents. Although 80% of school leaders say that it is a whole school responsibility to engage with parents, only 8% of teachers say they have received training around this.

1 thing to implement immediately:

• One suggested approach to support parents to have high academic expectations for their children was to build communication around school activities and homework. I particularly like the simple approach of texting parents to explain what their children has been learning about and offering an activity they could do or question they could ask their child based on this. It can be as simple as ​‘Your child has been learning about right angles today. Can you ask them to spot right angles around the home?’

Read the EEF’s Parental Engagement news and access the Guidance Report here.