Nursery World - Family learning courses struggle to recruit parents

Offering parents family learning sessions to support their Reception child’s learning at home might improve literacy, but getting parents to turn up regularly is hard, according to a new study.

Parents of Reception class children who attended the Family Skills sessions, a family learning programme, made better progress in literacy than children whose parents did not.

However, the research also found that take-up among parents was lower than expected and that some parents dropped out, highlighting the problem of recruitment and parental attendance.

The independent evaluation by the National Centre for Social Research found that overall, children of parents who were offered the Family Skills intervention did not make any more progress in literacy than children of parents who were not offered it.

However, the evaluation also suggests that children whose parents actually attended Family Skills sessions made greater progress in literacy than children whose parents did not.

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