Parental involvement in formal education

The report provides an overview of the latest academic and policy literature on parental involvement in formal education in Europe. It summarises an empirical evidence on the relationship between parental involvement and learning outcomes, reviews different barriers to parental involvement, analyses the patters of parental involvement among different families and at different levels of education, identifies emerging practices that enable parental involvement, and presents the experiences of parents during the closure of schools in 2020 due to the outbreak of COVID-19. The report highlights the importance of parental involvement to children’s learning progress. At the same time, the report stresses some concerns about increasing importance of parents involvement, such as that a growing focus on parents may lead to a shift in responsibility away from schools and towards parents when children fail to succeed, and that parents are not a homogenous group and are not equally well equipped to support their children through the recommended home-based and child-centred approaches.