Just how important is parental involvement in schools? Not surprisingly, a wealth of international research supports the consensus that it is vital.

Yet it’s worrying to note that active parental engagement still tends to correlate with social status, income and the parents’ own level of education. Where parents have a poor relationship with education, are we doing enough to be inclusive?

Desforges et al (1) convincingly argue that it is the “at-home” relationship with learning that has the most impact on outcomes, suggesting we should do more to identify ways of strengthening parental aspirations. Indeed, making this a school-improvement priority.

Schools have worked hard to improve their interactions with families, adopting a broad-brush approach, using multiple strategies (social events, training, volunteer readers, and so on) - and with positive impact. Many have also addressed parents’ gaps in education. For example, by putting on classes to boost literacy and numeracy levels.

But where pupil performance is weak and attendance is poor, schools continue to identify “hard to reach” parents as part of the problem. Interventions are designed to “reach out to” and then “draw in” the reluctant parent.

Harris and Goodall (2) raise concerns about our use of a “closing the gap” narrative. By adopting this deficit model, we leave an unhelpful legacy of judgement, with some families seen as falling short and being difficult to reach. Targeting interventions at groups - whether it is teenage parents, fathers, those with mental health issues or disadvantaged white British families - risks reinforcing stereotypes. In seeking to impose changes on the behaviours of parents, are we, in fact, pushing them further away?

Rather than naming and shaming families deemed “hard to reach”, Goodall et al ask, “Do parents (all parents) know they matter?”

A fascinating Norwegian study (3) provides evidence for this change in the narrative. It distinguishes between two types of schools: those where the collaboration policy is characterised by “serving” (empowering) parents and those where it is done by “steering” (determining how they must change).

Where schools felt they needed to “change” parental behaviour, little improvement was seen. The findings highlight the significance of empowering parents for improving collaboration - a bottom-up engagement strategy where parents are genuine partners, co-producers, shaping, leading and involved on their own terms.

Similarly, Scotland’s Christie report (4) illustrates this neatly by advocating a culture of “working with” not “doing to” parents. Joyce Epstein’s research, too, echoes this, advocating the building of trust with family and community. Achieving co-production in a genuine, rather than tokenistic, manner is about civic partnership; a school ethos based on the premise of both parties having vital contributions to make.

Let’s clarify our intentions. Do we make the default assumption that some parents are harder to reach? Or do we believe all families are reachable? Are we prepared to rethink parental relationships on unconditional terms?

Margaret Mulholland is director of development and research at Swiss Cottage School in London

This article originally appeared in the 12 July 2019 issue under the headline “Power to the ‘hard to reach’ parents”