Education Endowment Foundation:Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning

Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning

Work with parents and carers to support learning.

First Edition

Published

School Phases

Secondary, Primary

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.

Parental engagement

A review of international evidence regarding parent engagement in children’s learning