Parent engagement is a topic of great interest for many schools. It cannot be argued that parent engagement is beneficial to student learning but how do we measure this in our schools? The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), working with the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), undertook the task of creating a set of measures of parents’ engagement in their children’s learning. In their report released in 2018 they aimed to:
- develop a measure of parent engagement and
- recommend improvements to the framework, or conceptual model, of parent engagement as previously published by ARACY.
This difficult task found significant differences in perceptions of what parents and teachers viewed parent engagement as. Some of the difficulties identified included:
- School Facilitation, which relates to aspects of activities or policies within the school that contribute to parent engagement
- Teacher Role/Competency, which relates to the teachers’ view of their role and ability to engage with parents
- Empowering Parents, comprising views about how well the school empowers its parent community
- Parent Support for Learning, which relates to the capacity and ability of parents to understand and contribute to their children’s learning
- School Enabling, which relates to aspects of activities or policies within the school that enable positive experiences for parents
- Sense of Welcome, which relates to parents’ feelings of community and warmth at the school
The full report can be accessed here: https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=early_childhood_misc
