Parental Engagement
Parental engagement involves partnerships between families and schools to promote children's learning and well-being. It involves:
- family-led learning focused on high aspirations for children, shared reading, a positive environment for homework, parent-child conversation, a cognitively stimulating home environment and support for social and emotional well-being; and
- family-school partnerships that encourage positive parent-teacher relationships, communication about children's progress, and engagement in the school community, while equipping parents to effectively support and encourage their children's learning and well-being.
Parental engagement recognises the important role that both parents and teachers play in developing positive attitudes towards learning and education for children, building their motivation and confidence as learners, and fostering their enjoyment of learning.
Research from the past 40 years has established that effective parental engagement can have the following impacts:
- Children can be more likely to enjoy learning and be motivated to do well
- Children can be more likely to have good social outcomes including better relationships, improved behaviour and greater confidence
- Children can do better at school and be more likely to graduate, go on to college, TAFE or university
- Children can have better school attendance
Multiple studies show that children whose parents are engaged in their learning have higher levels of academic achievement. Parental engagement in children's leaning is a bigger predictor of how children do in school than a family's socio-economic status. Parental engagement in learning is one tool that can help to close the gap in achievement between children of different socio-economic backgrounds.
Recent evidence suggests that parental engagement does not affect child academic outcomes directly (e.g. through instruction, academic coaching or help with homework content). Instead, parental engagement appears to affect children indirectly through a few key mechanisms or processes. Parents appear to have the greatest impact when their engagement focuses on children's:
- Belief in the importance and value of education
- Motivation and engagement in learning
- Sense of self-efficacy for learning and persistence
- Sense of academic competence and confidence as a learner
- Underpinning skills for learning, like problem solving and developing as an autonomous learner
- Social and emotional well-being.
Types of parental engagement that aren't focused on these factors (like stressful interactions around homework and harsh feedback on children's efforts) appear to be much less effective, and in some cases can have negative impacts on children's achievement.
Parent involvement and parent engagement are different. Parent involvement refers to parent participation in formal and informal activities at the school such as attending parent group meetings, running a stall at the school fête or volunteering at the canteen. Parental engagement refers to the broader role parents play in supporting their child's learning.
Parental engagement recognises the important role that both parents and teachers play in children's learning and development. Although involvement in school activities is beneficial in many ways, especially in facilitating relationships between parents and teachers, how parents support children's learning at home has a bigger impact on academic outcomes than participation in school-based activities.
At Brigidine parental engagement in the Gifted & Talented Program is highly encouraged. Parents are able to follow what their daughters have been doing in their classes through Canvas. The Sophia@BCR website allows parents to see what their daughters have been doing at school. The College website contains information about Gifted & Talented Program activities. The Sophia Conference allows parents to see what their children have been doing, and are doing, as well as how they have been doing it. At the Stage 4 and 5 Information Evening, held in Term 1 each year, parents are informed about how they can best support their daughter’s learning and there are twice yearly Parent/Teacher meetings where parents can check in on their daughter's progress.