Still on Speed Dial

Ben said this to a room of FE college leaders this week: we believe parents stop mattering the day a learner turns 16 - right up until attendance drops and the first phone call home goes out. If parents are still on speed dial when it goes wrong, they should be in the room before it does.

That line landed harder than we expected. Because everyone in that room knew it was true. We spend years building elaborate systems to keep parents close in primary and secondary school - reading records, parents' evenings, the WhatsApp groups we all pretend not to be in - and then, somewhere around Year 11, we quietly switch it all off. Sixth form. College. Apprenticeships. University. The learner turns 16, or 18, and the system decides they're an adult now, so the parent's job is done.

Except we don't actually believe that. We just stop designing for it. The moment things go wrong, when attendance falls below X%, wellbeing dips, a learner is about to drop out three weeks before their exams - the first instinct is still to reach for the phone and call home. We never really took parents off the team. We just stopped talking to them until we needed something from them.

The stat that should stop us in our tracks

There's a figure that gets shared constantly in education circles, usually without anyone being quite sure where it came from, which is exactly what happened when I used it this week. Strong parental engagement, the claim goes, can be worth the equivalent of two to three additional years of a student's education.

We went looking for where that actually comes from, because a stat this good deserves a source, not just a slide. The clearest trail leads to John Hattie's Visible Learning from 2008, the synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses on what actually moves the needle on achievement. Hattie uses effect size as his currency, and he anchors it to a simple benchmark: an effect size of roughly 0.4 is worth about a year of progress. Parental engagement, done well, clears that bar comfortably enough that "two to three years" is a defensible way of putting it in plain English, which is why organisations like Parentkind cite it directly to Hattie's work. It also sits on top of a longer UK research trail: Desforges and Abouchaar's 2003 DfES review, and the Goodall and Harris work that shaped a decade of DfE guidance on parental engagement, both making the same underlying point with slightly different numbers attached. So, real, well-evidenced, but a stat with a genealogy rather than a single neat citation, which, if I'm honest, is true of most of the numbers we all wave around in keynotes.

Two to three years. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the difference between a learner who scrapes a pass and one who doesn't just complete their course but progresses from it into the next level, the apprenticeship, the job, the life they actually wanted. And we're leaving that on the table the moment a young person walks through a college door instead of a school gate.

This isn't just a schools problem

It's worth pushing past the usual version of this conversation, because "get parents into school" is a solved problem with a well-worn playbook. The bigger failure is that we've decided parental engagement is a schools thing at all, something that belongs to Key Stage 2 assemblies and Year 6 SATs meetings, and expires the moment a learner ages out of statutory education.

FE colleges are already living this contradiction. Learners are 16, technically adults in the system's eyes, but still going home every night to a household that shapes whether they turn up, whether they're sleeping, whether they believe this course leads anywhere. Apprenticeship providers see it. Universities see it in the widening-participation data every single year.  First-generation students without a parent who's navigated this system before are more likely to drop out, not because they're less capable, but because nobody built a role for their family in the process. Even workplace learning and CPD has a version of it: adults retraining while supporting a household that has no idea what they're doing or why, and no way in.

We've built an entire post-16 architecture around the assumption that engagement is something you grow out of. It isn't. It just changes shape, from "did you do your reading" to "I believe this is worth doing" and we've stopped designing for that shape entirely.

We've said before that the most important stakeholder missing from education's conversations about AI is the parent, and this is the same failure showing up in a different room. We don't leave parents out because we think they don't matter. We leave them out because nobody built the door.

Building the door, not just the phone line

None of this means dragging parents back into homework diaries for 19-year-olds. Nobody wants that, least of all the learners. It means treating the parent as a stakeholder in the outcome, not a contact in a crisis file, genuinely explaining what a course leads to and why it's worth the graft, not just what to do if a young person misses three sessions in a row. It means bringing parents into conversations about AI and the future of work early enough that they're an asset instead of an obstacle, because a parent who understands why their child is using AI to learn is a parent who backs it at home instead of fighting it. It means FE colleges, training providers and universities asking the question schools worked out decades ago: what does engagement look like before the phone call, not just after it?

The two-to-three-year stat isn't really about primary school reading books. It's a reminder that the relationship between a learner's home and their education is one of the biggest levers we have and one we deliberately let go of at exactly the moment learners are making the biggest decisions of their lives.

Key Takeaways

1. Engagement doesn't expire at 16. We design parents out of the system the moment a learner leaves statutory education, then act surprised when the only contact left is a crisis call. The relationship should change shape, not disappear.
2. The stat is real so we need to use it properly. "Two to three years" traces back to Hattie's effect-size benchmark in Visible Learning, backed by a decade of UK research from Desforges, Goodall and Harris. It's a genuine lever, not just a nice slide.
3. This isn't just a schools problem. FE colleges, apprenticeship providers, universities and workplace L&D all inherit learners with families still shaping whether they show up and whether they believe it's worth it. None of them have built a door for that family in.
4. Treat parents as stakeholders in the outcome, not contacts in a crisis file. That means explaining what a course leads to and why it matters, and bringing families into conversations about AI and the future of work early before the phone call, not because of it.
5. Build the door before you need the speed dial. If a parent is worth calling when things go wrong, they were worth including from the start. That's a design choice, not a nice-to-have.

So the challenge put to that room in Yorkshire, and to anyone reading this in a school, a college or a training provider is for us to audit the moments you actually talk to parents. If every single one of them starts with a problem, you haven't got a relationship, you've got an early-warning system, and nothing else. Move the first contact earlier. Make it about ambition, not incident. Get parents off speed dial and onto the team sheet, long before you ever need to make the call.