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Overview
What this guidance report covers
This guidance report aims to help schools consider how they can work with parents and carers to improve children’s learning.*Schools work with parents and families in many ways and with a range of aims, for example, to involve parents in school decisionmaking, to be proactive about safeguarding, and to engender relationships of trust and respect between school and home. In this report, we focus mostly on activities that aim to improve children’s learning directly. So, when we refer to ‘parental engagement’, we mean ‘schools working with parents to improve children’s academic outcomes’.
This EEF guidance report reviews the best available research to offer schools and teachers four recommendations to support parental engagement in children’s learning.
Parents play a crucial role in supporting their children’s learning, and levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes. Evidence from our Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective parental engagement can lead to learning gains of +3 months over the course of a year.
Yet it can be difficult to involve all parents in ways that support children’s learning, especially if parents’ own experiences of school weren’t positive.
This is why we’ve produced this guidance report, designed to support primary and secondary schools to work with parents – particularly those from disadvantaged homes.
It offers four clear and actionable recommendations which we hope will support an evidence-informed approach.