What is it?

Actively involving parents in supporting their children’s learning at school. This includes programmes focused on parents and their skills (such as improving literacy or IT skills), general approaches to encourage parents to support their children to read or do mathematics, and more intensive programmes for families in crisis.

How effective is it?

Although parental involvement is consistently associated with pupils’ success at school, the evidence about how to increase involvement to improve attainment is much less conclusive. This is particularly the case for disadvantaged families. There is some evidence that supporting parents with their first child will have benefits for siblings. However there is also conflicting evidence which suggests that, at least in terms of Early Years Intervention for example, the involvement of parents does not increase the benefits. This suggests that developing effective parental involvement to improve their children’s attainment is challenging and will need effective monitoring and evaluation. The impact of parents’ aspirations is also important, though again there is insufficient evidence to show that changing parents’ aspirations will raise their children’s aspirations and achievement over the longer term. Two recent meta-analyses from the USA suggest that increasing parental involvement in primary and secondary schools has on average 2-3 months positive impact.

How secure is the evidence?

Although there is a long history of research into parental involvement programmes, there is surprisingly little robust evidence of the impact of programmes which have tried to increase involvement to improve learning. The association between parental involvement and a child’s academic success is well established, but rigorous evaluation of approaches to improve learning through parental involvement is more sparse.

The evidence is predominantly from primary level and the early years, though there are studies which have looked at secondary schools. Impact studies tend to focus on reading and mathematics attainment.

What are the costs?

The costs of different approaches vary enormously, from running parent workshops (about £80 per session) and improving communications, which are cheap, to intensive family support programmes with specially trained staff. The cost of a specialist community or home/school liaison teacher is about £35,000, or about 60 Pupil Premium allocations. Costs per pupil are therefore estimated as moderate.