We want all parents to know how important they are to their child’s learning and feel motivated and confident to engage. At Campaign for Learning, we’ve been developing a parent-focused campaign – Parent Powered Learning - using high-quality film to boost parental engagement in learning and widen understanding about what it is.
On Monday 7 October, 2024, alongside the Family Learning Festival (5 October – 3 November), we will launch a short film, called ‘It’s You’. The film highlights how much parents matter and raises awareness on the importance of parental engagement in learning.
Action! Scene 9, Take 1
'It’s You’ is produced by the Volunteers’ Film Scheme 2024 X Media Trust and directed by Scott Pickup. It is part of a larger project supported by the Fair Education Alliance Innovation Award that we received in 2023.
Our work on parental engagement is underpinned by these beliefs; that:
- parents (and carers) are key to their children’s learning outcomes and should be valued as equal partners in their children's learning
- parental engagement is key to successful family learning
- a parent is their child’s first teacher and best coach
- what parents do makes a huge difference to their children’s learning
- if children spend 80% of their waking hours outside school, then what children do and who they interact with out of school is crucial to their learning
These beliefs are backed up by research into parental engagement in learning:
- While schools account for 14% of the disadvantage gap between pupils from low socioeconomic background and their peers, parents and carers account for 49% (IFS 2010)
- At age 7, this influence is up to six times more important than what schools can do (Sacker et al. 2002, Desforges 2003)
- What parents do is more important than who they are' and small changes can make a significant difference to children's learning outcomes (Desforges and Abouchaar 2003).
- When parents are more engaged with their children’s learning, with support if needed, this leads to better outcomes (Van Voorhis et al. 2013). This includes better school attendance (McConnell and Kubina 2014) and closure of the achievement gap (Goodall 2017)
It’s also inspired by Janet Goodall’s research which showed that parents do not know how much they matter (2008). If parents knew how much they mattered to their children’s learning then parents would be motivated to engage, continue to engage and engage more deeply.
Why a film?
Parental engagement in children’s learning is about systems change and parents and children are part of a wider ecosystem: school and public services, out-of-school activities, healthcare, family life. It’s not a ‘one-and-done' matter, so where were we to begin?
We decided to launch a campaign to raise awareness around how much parents matter to their child’s learning and we wanted a film: cue Mercer’s Company X Media Trust!
After a successful application, we joined the Media Trust Volunteer Film Scheme in a cohort of ten charities. This scheme pairs charities with a film director to make a film about their charity.
It has been such a delightful learning curve over the last eight months as we come to the end of the editing process. And there have been so many steps along the way, all of which Scott has coordinated, with the support of Media Trust producer Ed Wise; from writing a film treatment, to finishing the scrip, to casting the film and pulling together an expert film crew and shooting over two days in June.
Scott and crew placing a log over a purpose-built puddle!
Over the next month we will be getting ready to launch the #ParentPoweredLearning campaign film on 7 October, along with resources and other content you will be able to share with families and fellow family learning practitioners. We look forward to telling you about this soon!
In the meantime, you might want to register for our free networking event on parental engagement on Wednesday, 16 October.
We are also hosting an online conference on parental engagement on Thursday 14 November – save the date!
Find out more about Scott’s work and the films he has made.
Read more on the Media Trust Volunteers’ Film Scheme. They also run a lot of excellent media training for the charitable sector.