Parental engagement is the active participation of parents in their child’s learning and development. It involves parents taking a hands-on role in their child’s education, fostering curiosity, reinforcing lessons, and providing encouragement through meaningful, everyday interactions. Parental engagement helps create a home environment that nurtures learning, builds confidence, and strengthens the connection between home, school and real world experiences.
Parental Engagement: Where the Magic Happens
Parental engagement is where the true impact on a child’s development takes place. This could be as simple as talking about what they’ve learned in school, playing educational games, or reading books together. These daily interactions strengthen parent-child relationships and contribute to a child’s cognitive and social development.
Some parents naturally engage in these activities with their children, but many face barriers to doing so. These barriers can drive disparities in children’s outcomes, which is why it’s essential to support all parents in engaging with their child’s education.
At Learning with Parents we encourage and empower parents to engage in their child’s learning through fun, inclusive, real-world activities that they can enjoy together. For example, reading instructions to cook a meal, measuring water in containers at bathtime, or playing a game of ‘would you rather’ while on the bus.
The Link Between School and Home
We know that parents are experts in their children and we want to ensure they have the confidence they need to participate and that their contribution is valued. Parents have the unique ability to offer one-on-one learning experiences that are culturally relevant and deeply meaningful. While schools provide structured learning environments, parents can reinforce those concepts through everyday activities. A parent engaged in their child’s education passes on a positive attitude toward learning, creating a lifelong love for discovery and knowledge.
Quality over quantity
The quality of interactions are far more valuable than quantity of interaction. Our programme promotes high quality parent child interactions through play, talk, exploration and collaboration.
We often see parents commenting on how the time they spend doing activities from our programme is supporting positive time with their child and allows more bonding time together. 75% of parents in our most recent survey said they enjoyed learning together with their child.
Why is it Important?
There is a growing academic achievement gap between disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers. By age 11, a disadvantaged child is on average ten months behind their peers in English and Maths.
However, this disadvantage gap cannot be tackled by schools alone. Studies have shown that only 14% of the gap at age 11 is related to what happens at school, while 49% of the gap is related to what happens at home. This means that engaging parents in their child’s learning has enormous potential impact on their future prospects.
According to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), parental engagement can lead to an average of four months of additional progress for children, making it a vital tool for improving learning outcomes.
And it’s about more than just academic attainment. These same children are more likely in their life to be excluded, to become unemployed, have poor health and even to end up in prison.
A Growing Gap
In recent years the academic achievement gap has grown. With multiple pressures on families and schools, such as the cost of living crisis, it is likely that this trend will continue unless action is taken.
Only by supporting all parents and carers can we tackle educational inequality and ensure that every child has the chance to fulfil their potential. That’s why parental engagement is at the heart of our work at Learning with Parents.
