Schools, get parents involved

According to a World Bank report, children spend an average of 10-20% of their waking hours at school and the rest at home. This means that a large chunk of their daily interactions happen with their family, which is the primary reason parents’ influence is considered to have the greatest impact on the lives of
youngsters.

Studies have shown that parental involvement in children’s education has a positive impact on their overall development. Noted academicians, Susan Jarmuz-Smith and Joyce Epstein, have found conclusive evidence of increased levels of achievement in children due to parental interest, participation and encouragement.

Parent engagement

However, in a country like India, where a large percentage of the population is below the international poverty line, most parents are more concerned about making both ends meet than engaging in the holistic development of their children.

Additionally, schools are also not very regular in communicating the details of learners’ progress, whether academic or extracurricular.

If schools take extra efforts to involve parents with regular parent-teacher meetings, school events or school committee proceedings, parents will be more inclined towards learning about their children’s academic progress, their extracurricular interests, their social-emotional setbacks and so forth. Schools in rural areas lack the resources or motivation to do so, and children grossly suffer due to lack of adequate attention.

All this leads to parents being the most ignored stakeholders in the school ecosystem, which needs to be rectified for better learning outcomes.

To ensure that the children and their families take education seriously, schools should host parent meetings at the beginning of each academic year, where parents or guardians should be allowed to meet teachers in charge of their wards and ask important questions regarding the academic year.

Involving parents in their children’s day-to-day lives is not easy. However, there are ways to ensure that they do not miss important aspects of their children’s developmental years. The most common ones are parent-teacher meetings and parental awareness programmes conducted by schools.

Apart from these, school events such as annual concerts and sports days can be an opportunity for all stakeholders to participate. This will help build cordial relations between parents and schools, which can lay the foundation for more serious communication.

Parental involvement in their children’s development usually consists of monitoring their academic progress. Schools can streamline this with regular communication of timetables, results of classwork, homework requirements, progress reports, exam syllabi and dates etc.

An easy way of doing this is by installing a school management software, which can enable hassle-free communication — teachers can send daily lesson plans and homework so that parents are notified about the course progress, and parents can communicate their concerns to the school.

Parent engagement is a shared responsibility and is an important criterion for the mental and intellectual well-being of today’s learners. Being their guardians, they should play an active role in school-related matters to bring positive changes in the process of learning.

(The writer is CEO, Next Education India Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad)