It is vital that we recognise that it is parents who are the primary educators of their children.”

So read the start of Learning Together, a national plan published in late 2018, which set out ways to improve what is now routinely referred to as “parental engagement”. It was, despite its modest title, a landmark document: parents were being recognised as pivotal players in their children’s education in a way that would never have happened in times past.

There used to be an unspoken pact between teachers and parents: you take care of business at home and we’ll do it at school. And, so long as a child didn’t get into trouble, there was little reason for teachers and parents to see each other, bar a hurried few minutes at parents’ night.

How times are changing, as Emma Seith discovered during an eye-opening day for parents at Boroughmuir High in Edinburgh last month. They were not invited in to observe school life - they were participants in it.

As the parents saw, school presents challenges far beyond those of the curriculum alone: simply getting from one class to another can be fraught, as can negotiating the harum-scarum dining hall, overcoming your inhibitions in drama and getting undressed in communal changing rooms.

Getting parents involved in school

In a Tes piece last month, primary school depute head Susan Ward said that, for some children, school can be like going abroad on your own to a place where no one knows you and you don’t speak the language. And the experience can be similar for parents: as they try to unpick the arcana of education jargon and make sense of their children’s monosyllabic accounts of their day, having a school-age child can leave them feeling lost.

Secondary schools, in particular, have come in for criticism in the past for being “insular” and failing to engage with parents. Research by the National Parent Forum of Scotland in 2017 found that 11 per cent of secondary parents had not attended a one-to-one meeting with a teacher in the past year, compared with just 3 per cent of parents with a child at primary. And only 25 per cent of secondary parents had attended open sessions or afternoons in their child’s school - far below the 61 per cent of primary parents who had.

After Learning Together was published last year, Eileen Prior, executive director of parents’ organisation Connect, warned that it would “no longer be sufficient for schools to point to the parent council as proof of their parental engagement” and that “the emphasis has to move on to engaging meaningfully with the whole parent forum”.

It’s not uncommon to hear that this is one of the biggest priorities for education. However, research analysis from the Education Endowment Foundation on the Education Scotland website says that “although parental engagement is consistently associated with learners’ success at school, the evidence about how to improve attainment by increasing parental engagement is mixed and much less conclusive, particularly for disadvantaged families”.

That last point is crucial: although schools are getting better at reaching out to parents, the families that might benefit the most are still often those that never make it beyond the school gates. For some parents, those gates are a psychological barrier, reinforced in families who, over several decades, have become used to having their apparent failings exposed by school, with teachers who seemed not to comprehend or even care what was going on in their home or in their head.

As Ms Prior wrote in a piece for Tes, the very idea of being back inside a school is “terrifying” for some.

Parental engagement, then, cannot be simply about throwing open school doors. To reach all parents, schools must change hearts and minds that may have hardened over generations.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 1 November 2019 issue under the headline “Why engaging parents is really a battle for hearts and minds”