Laura Barbour explains the background to today’s parental engagement announcement.

As a mother I have felt constantly bombarded with conflicting media messages on how best to support my child’s development, with parenting role models ranging from the “tiger mother” to “slummy mummy”.

Many of us feel ill equipped to perform the role of our child’s first teacher. It is therefore tempting to hand over responsibility to a professional as soon as the opportunity arises, which could be as soon as your child enters a formal early years setting aged two.

However, there have been a number of key studies which are clear on the importance of ongoing parental engagement in their child’s learning, including the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE), which coined the phrase: What parents do with their children is more important than who parents are. This has been consistently reinforced by further research including the Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook study using Millennium Cohort data commissioned by the Sutton Trust, which found that good parenting and a supportive home environment are more important determinants of a child’s good test scores at age 5 than family income.

The Sutton Trust / Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit  finds that parental engagement is consistently associated with pupils’ success at school.  Sound Foundations: A Review of the Research Evidence on Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care for Children Under Three, commissioned by the Sutton Trust, found that one of five key conditions for quality was to have engaged and involved parents.

Professor Stephen Gorard and Dr Ben Huat See attempted to identify the most promising parental engagement interventions which are most likely to increase child attainment. The findings were disappointing, because the evaluation research to date has not been of the highest quality; we still don’t yet know whether they work or not. There is a need to make a distinction between failure of the evaluation process in detecting impact and failure of the intervention in showing impact.

Today the Sutton Trust and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation announce their support for initiatives developed by six organisations, as part of the Parental Engagement Fund, including Easy Peasy, an innovative new app that offers parents ideas for 22 games to play with their children. The aim is to support the growth, impact measurement and increased effectiveness of the initiatives, all of which are designed to boost learning for disadvantaged 2 – 6 year olds through engaging parents in their child’s learning. The grant consists of two elements – a financial grant and the support of a “critical friend” in the form of support and guidance from a team led by Professor Kathy Sylva at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education. The critical friend team will help them to identify their current level of effectiveness (using the EIF ‘Standards of Evidence’ as a starting point), and support them to gather evidence of impact.

To be clear, this is not a pure research project which will only identify what works. Instead, it aims to support organisations to develop an impact measurement loop so that they can identify areas where they can improve their own services or provision. Our intention is also to support organisations to demonstrate impact with a view to accessing sustainable funding.

As well as supporting the individual organisations, we hope to identify principles and practices that may be later generalised to other contexts and be beneficial for the sector as a whole. We aim to increase understanding and share learning on key elements of effective parental engagement. We will also be identifying the contribution of the critical friend model combined with grant funding and whether or not the initiative has created any learning on how to support increased impact measurement in order to develop and demonstrate effective practice.

We hope that the fund will complement the work of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in this area. As in some cases it may contribute to feeding the EEF pipeline.  Our intention is that the support will enable organisations to develop the evidence base underpinning their approach, which, in time, may help them to access further scale-up opportunities.

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