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It’s parents’ evening again. As Sangeetha logs in for her first virtual appointment with a parent of a child in her Year 6 class, she isn’t sure what to expect. 

Since lockdown, moving to virtual meetings has not been the only change: getting involved in their children’s schoolwork during recent periods of remote learning has helped many parents to understand more about what is being taught in schools. 

On the surface, this sounds positive. Having parents who are more engaged with - and informed about - learning can only be a good thing, right? 

Sangeetha isn’t quite so sure. Parents have started to challenge her about her teaching methods and, as an early career teacher, she finds it difficult to answer their increasingly demanding questions.

This higher level of parental involvement in the academic side of school is something she may have to get used to, though, because there are signs that the pandemic may have changed parent-school relationships for good.

Parents knowing more about what happens in the classroom seemed, initially, to be a positive development for teachers. Back in January, when Gavin Williamson, who was education secretary at the time, announced that parents could report their child’s school to Ofsted if they were unhappy with its remote learning offer, thousands did offer feedback - but it was overwhelmingly positive.

“Parents have realised how difficult and complex teaching is, and how much it should be respected as a profession,” says Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter.

The impact of Covid on parent engagement in schools

Fiona Forbes, co-founder of September For Schools, a parent action group founded during the pandemic, likewise says that she has noticed a shift in parents’ attitudes. 

“We have all been through this shared experience and parents really appreciate what schools have done. They’ve seen a more human side to both the school and the teachers themselves,” she says. 

However, while some households have felt grateful for their children’s teachers, others have lost trust as a result of lockdown, warns Ed Dorrell, a director at Public First, a policy, research, opinion and strategy consultancy.

Throughout the pandemic, he has hosted dozens of focus groups with parents about their views on education, and has found that there is a split between primary parents and secondary parents. 

“In secondary schools, parents were very angry in the first lockdown about what they felt was an absence of secondary schools in their children’s lives,” Dorrell explains. “They do recognise that schools were up against it, but there was a sense that they weren’t working as hard as they should be to get online learning up and running. 

“By the second lockdown, they recognised that things had changed, and it vastly improved. But there is a sense of slight disappointment, and some secondary schools have lost the trust of parents.”

Whether they are pleased with schools or not, many parents, he says, are interested in continuing their greater involvement in their child’s education.

“They are much more informed on how education actually works,” Dorrell says. “They are thinking about how the learning process takes place, the way it’s shaped, the way it’s formed and, as a result, they are much more interested in what’s going on in the classroom, what the teachers are teaching and how they’re teaching it.”

Elliot Major - whose new book, The Good Parent Educator: what every parent should know about their children’s education, has recently been published - agrees that increasing numbers of parents want more of a say. “I suspect we will see a change in dynamic. Certainly, many will have far more demanding questions,” he says. 

There have always been those parents who are more heavily engaged with schools, but we aren’t talking about attending the school fête or helping out with the nativity here - we’re referring to parents who are becoming more actively involved in the teaching and learning side of things. 

So, how big a change are we likely to see? Well, in terms of parents planning to continue increased levels of involvement in their children’s schoolwork, it seems to be a mixed bag.

In September 2021, YouGov surveyed more than 760 parents on behalf of the University of Exeter about their experiences of education during lockdown. When asked whether they planned to spend more time helping their child with education activities in the 2021-22 academic year, 30 per cent said they planned to spend between one and four extra hours a week on education activities, while 44 per cent that they would either spend no extra hours or that their child did not need to make up for missed education. Around 6 per cent said that they would spend between five and eight extra hours, 3 per cent said they would spend more than nine extra hours, and 17 per cent said they didn’t know. 

What about parents’ interaction with school? Again, the picture is mixed.

David Dempster is the headteacher of Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh. He has found that, while parents were really engaged with the school during lockdown, interest has dropped off a little now.

During the lockdowns, the school’s parent council ran regular online meetings, with a member of SLT always in attendance to answer any questions. There used to be more than 150 parents logging on, but since the start of this term it has been more usual for 40 to attend. 

“Parents had to take an interest in what their children were trying to learn at home. They needed to be a conduit between the kids and the curriculum. They certainly wanted to assist the school, but now that pupils are back in school and the teacher is there to manage things, by and large, I think parents are happy for that,” he says. “But there’s no doubt about it: many parents learned a lot about the curriculum and what their children are learning. And it’s not just about what they’re learning but how they learn, how lessons are structured, the way young people engage in learning.” 

Rachael Philpot is a primary school teacher and head of Year 3. She says that, in her experience, parental engagement has been split down the middle since lockdown. 

“Some parents want to be more involved in every aspect of their child’s education,” she explains. “ It’s like they’ve had a taster, realised how much goes into teaching and have awoken to the fact that they could be more involved.

“On the flip side, other parents have completely shut down and we hear nothing. For these parents, it feels like they saw what went into it and perhaps felt out of their depth. For example, if their child wasn’t reading as well as perhaps they’d thought or their writing was a bit behind, they’ve felt stuck as to what to do with that and so handed the reins back.” 

Interacting with parents ‘can be stressful for teachers’

So, greater involvement is unlikely to be a universal trend. But if even just a few parents become more heavily involved in the academic side of things, this can still pose some challenges for teachers, says Liz Robinson, co-director of Big Education Trust, based in London. 

“[Interacting with parents] is an area of the job that is quite stressful, and it does need boundaries, as well as proper training and support,” she says. “We need to acknowledge that this is a highly emotional context, and train people not only on how to manage their own emotions but also how to deal with it when others have strong emotions.”

That strength of emotion is understandable, she adds: “Companies talk about customer satisfaction, and, as a school, you’re talking about your customer’s child. You don’t get more engaged than that. You are looking after their whole world.”

However, it’s not only teachers who can find high levels of parental involvement challenging. As Elliot Major points out, “sometimes the over-excessive parenting in education can be damaging for children”.

There is evidence to back this up. Research published by University College London (Stafford, 2015) says that parents who exert too much control over their children could be having a negative impact on their wellbeing. 

Researchers tracked a group of people born in the 1940s, following them up to the present day, and found that people who reported that their parents had intruded on their privacy in childhood or encouraged dependence were more likely to have low scores in surveys of happiness and general wellbeing carried out in their teens, their thirties, their forties and even their sixties.

And in another study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2018, Nicole B Perry found that “overcontrolling” parenting could negatively affect a child’s ability to manage their own emotions and behaviour, which has a knock-on effect in the classroom.

“Our research showed that children with ‘helicopter’ parents may be less able to deal with the challenging demands of growing up, especially with navigating the complex school environment,” Perry wrote at the time. “Children who cannot regulate their emotions and behaviour effectively are more likely to act out in the classroom, to have a harder time making friends and to struggle in school.” 

Yet parents being involved in their child’s education is certainly not all bad. On the contrary, there is strong evidence that it can be hugely beneficial.

In 2008, Professor John Hattie published his influential study Visible Learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement and found that “the effect of parental engagement over a student’s school career is equivalent to adding two or three years to that student’s education”.

Similarly, the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, looking at parental engagement, finds strong positive effects from schools using approaches designed to increase parental engagement: it reports that the average impact is about four months’ additional progress over the course of a year, and that these effects are stronger for pupils with low prior attainment.

So, while there is such a thing as parents being too involved, this shouldn’t stop schools from being proactive about engaging them, says John Jolly, chief executive of Parentkind, a charity that supports parents in education.

“There are those ‘helicopter’ parents who watch over everything a child does and are very clear what they want their child’s education to look like. They will go into schools and say, ‘How about this? How about that?’ They have always been there, and some will have completely unrealistic expectations. But actually engaging the broad majority of parents much more actively in their children’s education is something that we really must welcome,” he says.

Even those parents who might be challenging teaching methods or asking demanding questions are worth engaging with, he adds - because they can highlight issues that teachers may not have picked up on yet.

“Sometimes parents are right when they say, ‘My child isn’t learning this, isn’t learning that.’ Yes, teachers are the experts, but it’s like any profession - there’s variability in expertise and delivery. Parents need to be able to ask those questions if they have concerns,” he says.

So, what does all this mean in terms of how schools should approach their relationships with parents going forwards? What lessons, if any, can we take from the pandemic and the changes it brought? 

Both Forbes and Jolly are in agreement about what the first area of focus for schools should be: “It’s all about communicating clearly,” says Forbes. She says that at the start of the pandemic, parents reported
huge variation in the level and quality of communications they received. Now the majority of schools are making a significant effort to communicate in a more flexible way. This, Forbes says, is going down really well.

“The parents I’ve spoken to love, for example, the flexibility of remote parents’ evenings. They don’t necessarily always want to be on Zoom, but they like having the choice, especially when they have busy work lives,” she explains. “There are plenty of parents who find talking to schools quite stressful, and being able to be in their own house makes them feel more comfortable. As a result, the communication is better.” 

Jolly agrees that communication is key, but says this doesn’t mean just sending out letters and text messages - the conversation has to be a two-way street. This is something that not all schools are getting right, from parents’ perspectives.

In the recent survey conducted by the University of Exeter with YouGov, 63 per cent of parents said they either “strongly agreed” or “tended to agree” that their child’s school communicated effectively with them. However, just 43 per cent either “strongly agreed” or “tended to agree” that the school listened to their views on education. 

So, what can schools do to improve? 

Inviting parents into school regularly can be a good way to support more effective two-way communication. For example, Boroughmuir High has run “bring your parent to school” days in which parents join their children in class (see box, below).

If social distancing is a concern, there are remote alternatives: Surrey Square Primary, in south-east London, invites parents to “Zoom in” for phonics lessons, while St George’s International School in Luxembourg runs webinars to share pedagogical approaches with parents.

For a more holistic approach to improving parental engagement, Parentkind has produced a five-point blueprint for “parent-friendly schools” (see box, below), and is in the process of producing a kitemark that schools can earn by following the blueprint.

And as well as providing parents and carers with an insight into what school is like for their children, Dempster says that schools also need to make information about their child’s education readily accessible to them.

“We provide information on our website, such as details about courses of study and course descriptions, so that mums and dads can go on and see the kinds of things their young people will be studying. We also provide resources to make sure they have a chance to support their children in this learning,” he says.

There is plenty that schools can do to work more effectively with parents, then. However, Elliot Major points out that it shouldn’t be up to schools alone to transform what they do in this area - the government has a part to play, too. For example, he would like to see more professional development for teachers around working with parents in initial teacher training.

Jolly would also welcome this. He says that Parentkind is already working with teacher training institutions to embed parental participation in teacher education. 

“Everybody agrees it’s important but teachers don’t get any training in this,” he says. “I’d argue that actually that ability to manage that relationship with parents, particularly at primary school, is a crucial part of training that’s missing.”

As well as providing better training for teachers, Forbes believes the government needs to offer greater support to parents around their child’s education. And while she welcomes recent commitments - in his Budget last month, chancellor Rishi Sunak announced £500 million for parent hubs that will be a one-stop shop for advice and guidance - she predicts the Department for Education will have to go further.

“It’s called the Department for Education, not the Department for Schools. The majority of parents don’t feel they get enough guidance and advice - there’s a huge opportunity here, particularly with things like literacy,” she says. “Why isn’t there a similar campaign within education as you get within health on things like [eating] five [portions of fruit and vegetables] a day? Why doesn’t the government talk directly to parents to help encourage and to help empower us with how we can best help our children at home? That’s what we’re asking for.” 

Elliot Major agrees that such steps are crucial, particularly for disadvantaged families. “All the evidence we look at shows that the majority of factors [that] impact on children’s outcomes actually comes from outside of school gates, not inside,” he says. “We obsess about improving schools and classroom teaching, which is absolutely right, but often we don’t think about those huge gains we could make if we could improve children’s lives outside of schools.” 

This is perhaps one area where the shift in parent-teacher relationships during the pandemic could be especially beneficial: it has highlighted where priorities are aligned. 

The government is currently firmly focused on catch-up and the work that goes on in classrooms to support that. But we must not forget that there is a whole infrastructure around each child, affecting their learning, which also needs to be considered - not just within schools, but within policy, too. Parents are a key part of that infrastructure. 

Kate Parker is a schools and colleges content producer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 10 December 2021 issue under the headline “How the pandemic changed parental engagement”