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How to involve hard-to-reach parents: encouraging meaningful parental involvement with schools - full report

Parental engagement plays a key factor in children's success at school. The more parents are involved at school, the more pupils achieve. But some parents have little interaction with school, failing to attend meetings or respond to communications. So how do schools engage with these hard-to-reach parents?

This summary provides a crucial insight into the problems faced by some parents, and gives a toolkit of creative strategies to help schools improve the relationship.

Barriers

The report follows a practical study working with parents considered hard to reach, school leaders from across the country and health professionals. It looks at the barriers parents face to becoming engaged in schools. These barriers vary from their own bad experiences of education, to problems encountered in dealing with children's homework and feelings of insecurity or low self-esteem.

It also explores the vital role fathers play in their children's education, looking at issues including:

• absent or weekend-only fathers
• fathers' difficulty in attending school due to work commitments
• low proportions of male staff in primary schools

Good practice

The summary provides a wealth of ideas for improving parental engagement, gained from school leaders deemed by Ofsted to have outstanding parental involvement in school. Areas include harnessing technology as an outreach, working with fathers and families as a whole and using the community to improve contact.

There are a number of practical solutions which most schools can implement to engage all parents.

A summary of this report is also available.