Frequently Asked Questions

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Why do schools need Connected Education?

Connected Education helps schools engage with parents and young people, enabling their needs, views, experiences and ideas to become part of school improvement planning. This in turn raises parental esteem and student attainment through the modelling of positive behaviours and the valuing of parents as experts.

Why do schools need to engage with parents?

The most successful schools are investing more time in sustained parental engagement because evidence shows that it has significant impacts, not only on individual children's level of achievement, but also on whole school improvement.

Why do schools find it hard to engage with parents?

It is hard sustaining partnerships between school and home over a long period and it is difficult to reach the least engaged parents and bridge the gap between school and home. Often schools have no standard way of finding out what parents think and parents who have had negative experiences in their own school lives are nervous about engaging with schools. Parents feel intimidated by the language used by teachers.

Does Connected Education only help the school?

Connected Education is wide reaching and overcomes the obstacles enabling schools to develop sustainable partnerships between school and home. It engages parents as researchers, and therefore is able to reach those parents most in need and least engaged with the school. It gives a vital voice to both parents and young people, enabling them directly to define and influence the development of school policy and practice.

What is Community Engagement?

Community Engagement involves raising awareness of the project within the school communities, ahead of recruiting and training parents and students to become Community Researchers. This stage also involves designing, piloting and refining the audit tools. Through the research process we are able to explore and gather the views, experiences and ideas of the wider parent and student communities.

Do the benefits of Connected Education last in the long term?

We begin a process of raising parental esteem through the valuing of parents as experts. Through this we help schools develop long term and sustainable parental engagement schemes. Our model enables schools and parents to work together, building on the research findings to set up projects that benefit the school community. These projects are financially self sustaining social enterprises.