The active involvement of parents and guardians in education and school life is highly correlated with academic achievement - moreso, according to long-running research, than school quality itself. (e.g. Becher, 1989).
The challenge educationalists and researchers have been grappling with, however, is that it is difficult to find a robust link between interventions that increase parental involvement and improved achievement for children. The reality is that high parental involvement and high achievement seem to simply be found together.
This doesn’t mean that increasing parental involvement is impossible or undesirable, but that the causality is more complicated; there are factors which mediate the effects of parental involvement. Most obviously, these include class and social capital, which are generally outside a sixth form’s remit to change.
