Our research commission has so far delved into the engagement of pupils and staff with the schools they attend. But some pieces are missing to build a full picture, and you can help find them.
At the start of this academic year, ImpactEd Group embarked on a national research project on engagement, surveying more than 100,000 young people in a termly census through The Engagement Platform (TEP).
This ongoing study is gauging pupils’ cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement with school, to see whether this acts as a lead indicator, or early warning signal, for subsequent educational outcomes like attendance.
Data at the midpoint of the research commission on engagement and lead indicators has been illuminating. It shows a dramatic drop-off in headline pupil engagement levels between Year 7 and Year 8, which mirrors what we go on to see in the attendance datasets.
As Jonny Boddington wrote in these pages earlier, “the data is starting to unravel what we believe may be a critical thread in school improvement”. Pupil engagement increasingly looks likely to provide schools with a powerful lead indicator of attainment, attendance, happiness and self-worth.
Our next research report will be published later in the spring, when we will be able to compare termly datasets and triangulate pupil insights with what we are seeing through the TEP school employee census.
In putting pupil and teacher data together, however, we recognise that pieces of our jigsaw are still missing. We cannot truly understand the engagement of young people in their education without taking into consideration the connection between families and schools, or the level of direct engagement parents and carers have with their children’s learning.
We know that family engagement matters. The EEF identifies 97 studies supporting the link between parental engagement and higher outcomes. Their toolkit estimates that parental engagement can contribute to an average of four months’ additional progress for a child.
So we must take this part of our puzzle seriously. However, these jigsaw pieces of data will be much harder to find.
Engaging parents in a consistent, constructive and supportive way can be difficult for schools. While teachers, staff and pupils can give insights during school time, parents are much harder to reach.
We want to hear from schools and trusts that are leading the way
Typical parent surveys tend to get low levels of response or can become a lightning rod for disgruntlement, often failing to capture the sentiment of the parents with the quietest voices.
Additionally, there is currently no fixed data set which measures, compares and provides live benchmarks around parental engagement for schools. This means they can’t see how they are doing in a timely contextual way, or ascertain if a challenge they are experiencing is localised or systemic.
This is why Oasis Community Partnerships is so enthused about working with the Family Engagement Taskforce, which we are launching today alongside Parentkind and other sector leaders, as a sub-group of the main commission.
Family engagement has long been a priority at Oasis, where dedicated youth and community teams work closely with Oasis Academies to provide wider support to communities.
This includes family support workers providing a range of interventions, regular activities for families, food insecurity programmes and a supportive parenting programme called Encounter that empowers and equips parents to transform wellbeing within their families.
Being able to co-design an approach to gathering, analysing and acting on parent engagement insights from across our family of schools through this taskforce is therefore incredibly exciting.
Together, the taskforce already has the broad shape of the questions we want to ask families, to align with the approach taken to understanding the cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement of pupils and employees.
But we are keen to gather insights on the how to enable us to build an effective technical tool for schools.
Does communicating by text message help? Do we need to incentivise completion? Are parents’ evenings or school events a good place to collect data? Or might some of these methods lead to more bias in the sample?
We want to hear from schools and trusts that are leading the way. Share your practice. Tell us what has worked, and perhaps even join us as participants on this exciting research project to build a fuller picture of family engagement across the country.
By developing this part of the engagement puzzle, we can support more schools with the data and actionable insights they need to predict, intervene and support our young people to thrive.
To share family engagement examples with the taskforce or to get involved with the study, contact hello@impactedgroup.uk
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