“Investing in families is the single greatest investment you can make”
At the launch of the Independent Family Review, the Children’s Commissioner stated that “investing in families is the single greatest investment you can make” and that “family should be central to the priorities of every Government Department.”
We welcome this call to focus on family in policy decisions. Families shape our aspirations and our ability to value and engage with learning and influence our life chances.
The critical role of learning in families
We know that the home learning environment has a significant impact on children’s achievement and that parents, carers and schools want to support their children’s learning, yet there is currently no formal infrastructure or coherent Government policies that support learning in families. If we are serious about social mobility and improving children’s achievement then support and investment in family learning and helping parents to create rich home learning environment must be prioritised.
Schools cannot do everything
Schools are the experts in teaching and learning and delivering the school curriculum. Parents are experts in understanding their children’s needs and circumstances. Both want the best outcomes for children and this shared motivation should create the context for effective partnerships around learning.
In practice, the pressures on schools and parents often lead to poor communication and tension; schools lack capacity and may not be able to prioritise building effective partnerships with parents. This is despite the clear evidence base on parents’ influence on attendance, behaviour, and achievement. The parents who could most benefit from support to create rich home learning environments for their children are also least likely to engage with schools. This can be due to their own negative associations with school, anxiety about their own skills, a lack of understanding of the importance of their role in supporting learning, and pressures on time.
The role of parents is crucial in supporting children's learning; evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation's Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that effective parental engagement can lead to learning gains of +3 months over the course of a year. Schools do not need to deliver this themselves, but they must be able to create a context and a culture that welcomes parents as equal and valued partners in learning by developing an effective parental engagement strategy to promote inclusive family learning environments.
A family learning workforce ready to help
In the UK, tens of thousands of practitioners already work with families to support learning. They are embedded in communities, adult learning services, cultural venues and libraries. Their work can create the bridge between school and the home learning environment, supporting education as well as providing wider benefits for families, including adult skills and better health and wellbeing.
We need a positive vision and clear shared objectives to bring this almost invisible workforce together, and create the policies, infrastructure support and investment that will support families and deliver a stronger, happier future for children and young people.
Next steps for family learning policy
The Children’s Commissioner calls for families to be the focus of policy making. We’ve set out a series of recommendations to make this a reality for family learning. For family learning to climb the political agenda in the 2020s, we need:
- An agreed definition of ‘family learning’ to support policy developments in England
- Sustainable Local Family Learning Networks in England which can contribute to the levelling up agenda
- A National Strategic Family Learning Network in England to develop policy recommendations
- Researchers, stakeholders and funders to work together to develop a strong research base of evidence-informed approaches for family learning
- Effective parental engagement strategies in schools with pre-16 pupils supported by family learning providers
- Family Hubs to play a central role in the development and delivery of family learning and national initiatives such as the new numeracy programmme, ‘Multiply.
You can read our recommendations in full, and the views and recommendations of sixteen expert authors in our latest policy paper ‘Parents, Children and Adult Learning – Family Learning Policy in the 2020s’.