Evaluating The Role of Parental Involvement

Reading bedtime stories, helping with homework and regularly attending parents’ evenings all encourage children – and their teachers – to put in extra effort, the study by Leicester and Leeds Universities suggested.  In fact, the level of parental involvement has a greater impact on a pupil’s eventual grades than the efforts of either the school or the child themselves, the researchers said.

Education experts have long known that parents with “sharp elbows” are more likely to get their children places at the best schools and to play the system to their advantage.  But today’s study, “Must Try Harder: Evaluating the Role of Effort in Educational Attainment", suggests that pushy parents have a knock-on effect on how hard teachers work for their children, as well as whether pupils put in the effort in class.

Professor Gianni De Fraja, head of economics at the University of Leicester, said the level of interest parents take in their children’s education is six times more important for a pupil’s eventual grades than the child’s own effort.  It is also four times more important than how hard the school works to help children progress.

Many more parents from middle-class backgrounds are prepared and able to put in the extra effort to help children with homework, read them stories and attend parents’ evenings.  “The reason why children from good families do better is because their parents work harder,” Prof Fraja said.  “If I could make sure that the parents from poor socio-economic backgrounds also made the right type of effort, I would expect their children’s educational achievement to improve.”