Introducing Swotly's guide to parental engagement

An introduction to Swotly’s ten-part guide to Parental Engagement

The driving force behind Swotly is to improve parental engagement with children’s schooling. It’s not surprising then that we’re interested in scholarly studies of parental engagement – what it is, how it happens and what difference it makes.

This is a brief introduction to our new ten-part guide to parental engagement. We’ll cover who this guide is for, what our primary focus is, who parents are and which studies we’ve found most useful.

Who’s this guide for?

This guide is for anyone interested in the power of parental engagement on children’s education. That includes teachers on the front line, senior leaders in schools or colleges, governors or parents.

What’s the focus of this guide?

As Swotly supports parents with children in secondary school upwards, we’re particularly focussed on research and findings from Key Stage 3 upwards in the United Kingdom.

Who are 'parents'?

When we talk about ‘parents’ or refer to ‘parental engagement’, we’re referring to anyone with parental responsibility for a child or anyone acting in that formal capacity (this could be a guardian or a carer).

What resources are we referencing?

A quick literature search shows there’s a wealth of articles, books, studies and research reports on parental engagement.

We’ve drawn just a few of those resources together to find the key points on parental engagement. We’ve taken particular inspiration from the following two resources:

• Axford, N., Berry, V., Lloyd, J., Moore, D., Rogers, M., Hurst, A., Blockley, K., Durkin, H. and Minton, J. (2019) How Can Schools Support Parents’ Engagement in their Children’s Learning? Evidence from Research and Practice. London: Education Endowment Foundation

• Harris, A., Andrew-Power, K. and Goodall, J. (2009) Do Parents Know They Matter? Raising Achievement through Parental Engagement

We’ll include references from other resources from time to time.

So, what’s next?

We'll publish a post every week for the next ten weeks covering:

• what parental engagement is and isn’t

• why it matters to teachers, students and parents

• what good practice is

• the barriers that prevent parental engagement

• notes of caution

• how Swotly can support parental engagement

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