How Parents Help or Hinder

Most parents who come to us are short of time. They work, they have other children, and the evening between six and nine is already full. When they hand over their child’s English, they are investing in one fewer thing to hold in their head.

That is exactly the right thing to invest in. The jobs they are handing over belong to specialists: marking an essay against the examiner’s criteria, tracking which skills are weak, and knowing what a grade 9 paragraph looks like. None of that is a parent’s job, and most parents could not do it even with the time.

We are not asking you to get more involved. There is one thing the research keeps finding that takes only five or ten minutes, and that nobody else can do for you. Suppose you had those minutes this week. Where would you spend them? Most of us would start with the things a school can see: the parents’ evening, the parents’ association, the planner that needs signing. The research suggests those minutes belong somewhere else.

A strong finding, with a limit

The most quoted finding in this area comes from a review of the evidence carried out for the Department for Education. Its conclusion:

“Parental involvement in the form of ‘at-home good parenting’ has a significant positive effect on children’s achievement and adjustment even after all other factors shaping attainment have been taken out of the equation. In the primary age range the impact caused by different levels of parental involvement is much bigger than differences associated with variations in the quality of schools.”^[1]

Most people who quote this review stop after the first sentence. They miss the limit in the second. The strongest evidence is for primary-age children. For teenagers the picture is less dramatic and less well measured, so any article that tells you otherwise is claiming more than the research shows.

We will not tell you that a few questions at home outweigh your child’s school. The wider evidence supports something narrower, and more useful.

Support at home, not events at school

A later study for the same department looked at what actually works, and made a distinction that most schools never make. Its finding:

“Parents have the greatest influence on the achievement of young people through supporting their learning in the home rather than supporting activities in the school. It is their support of learning within the home environment that makes the maximum difference to achievement.”^[2]

And, more bluntly, about the school-based activities that most parents feel guilty about missing:

“Where these activities are not directly connected to learning they have little impact on pupil achievement.”^[2]

So the evidence is least impressed by the answer most of us reach for first: the evening, the association and the planner, the three things that make a parent look involved. What does help is less visible: it happens at home, it is about the learning itself, and it takes minutes instead of whole evenings.

Your child wants interest, not supervision

So what is that less visible thing? The same researchers asked the students themselves what parental engagement meant to them.

Students said parental engagement was, to them, primarily about moral support and an interest in their progress.^[2]

That answer leaves out supervision and checking. It also leaves out sitting beside a teenager while they revise, which most fourteen-year-olds would hate. What remains is interest, and the sense that somebody is on their side.

Interest of that kind cannot come from a tutor, a school or a platform, because your child knows the difference between a professional whose job it is to care and a parent who actually does.

Some decisions are not your child’s to make

Taking an interest in your child’s work is one thing, and handing your child the decisions about it is another.

A worry comes up at home about your child’s effort, the teaching, or how much work is left before June. The first move is often to take it to the child, with a sentence like “Let me speak to them about it first.” The instinct behind that sentence is a respectful one.

But look at what the child is being asked to judge: whether the teaching is any good, whether more work is needed, and which technique to use in a paper they have not sat yet. Those are professional judgements, which a fifteen-year-old is not equipped to make.

A confident child can sound equipped when they are not. Ask your child what the examiner actually gives marks for in a paragraph. The answer is often effort: they work hard, they know the text, they did well last time, but none of that earns a mark. Being sure of yourself and being right are two different things, and a fifteen-year-old rarely knows which of the two they are. The confident student who cannot explain what earns the marks is the subject of The Danger of Overconfidence.

At home, the mock grade is usually what ends the discussion, but a mock grade and a summer grade do not measure the same thing. A mock covers what the school has taught by that date, marked by a teacher who already knows your child. The exam covers the whole course, in June, marked by a stranger. Two other articles explain why a good mock can still be weak evidence: A better mock can mean a worse GCSE and Why your tutor and your child’s school will not give the same grade.

So sometimes a parent has to make the decision themselves and say it clearly, without being harsh: we are carrying on, we are doing it this way, and we will look again at the end of term. A child who hears that sentence is not being crushed, because the parent is now carrying a decision the child should not have to carry alone.

None of this makes the parent who asks the child first a bad parent. But letting your child decide is itself a decision, and usually the wrong one.

We do the marking; you do the asking

That split works because the work is visible. Every piece of your child’s writing is marked against the examiner’s criteria, and what comes back is specific: this paragraph, this skill, this fix. So there is always a real answer to the question “what did your feedback say?”

We can do the teaching, the marking and the tracking. What no one can outsource is being the person who asks. It costs a few minutes a week, it works better than checking, and your child will remember which one you did.

Five things to do this week

1. Ask one question a week about the work itself. Instead of “have you done your English homework?”, which is surveillance and gets a one-word answer, ask about the writing:

What did you write about this week?

What did your feedback say you needed to fix?

Read me your best paragraph.

2. Listen without turning the answer into an inspection. The moment your question becomes a check, your child starts managing you instead of talking to you.

3. Ask what they got wrong and what they are doing about it. A student who can answer has understood their own weaknesses. A student who cannot has just told you both something useful.

4. Ask your child to explain one thing they are marked on, in their own words. If the answer comes back as effort — “I work hard”, “I know the play” — tell us.

5. Bring a worry to us before you take it to your child. Your child’s view is worth hearing, but the decision is yours.

Sources