The relevance of parental and family engagement in children's education

Nina Alonso’s reflection, May 2026

Looking back at this podcast episode almost five years later, I feel that the reflections of Sharon Wolf and Janice Raymond are still quite relevant today. I have not come across many family engagement initiatives that have stayed with me as much as the Cajon Valley programme they discussed. What I found particularly compelling was the care that went into building a real relationship between schools and families, including teachers visiting children’s homes and families feeling genuinely seen. 

Over the last few years, as my work has focused more on foundational literacy and community engagement, I have become much more aware of how complex family engagement really is. In my collaboration with volunteers and project managers doing household assessments for the PAL Network, and also in many conversations I have had with teachers working in very different contexts, I see again and again that children’s home realities are often much more complex than school systems seem to assume. Both in field work and in conversations with teachers, I have noticed that in vulnerable contexts where learning outcomes are low, fathers are often absent, or parents need to leave home for work, grandparents or older siblings become the people most involved in children’s daily care and learning.

The first challenge may be understanding who is supporting the child at home, and what that person is able to do. I remember a conversation with Henry Anumudu from Teach For All, not long ago, who spoke about grandmothers who are deeply invested in their grandchildren’s education, sometimes even spending their own limited money to support schooling, while at the same time feeling unsure about how to engage with teachers or help academically because they themselves had little formal education.

This same issue often comes up in my conversations with teachers. In an episode of Teachers’ Voices last summer, I talked to Turi and Gilson, teachers working in Kenya and Brazil. An unexpected theme that emerged was that many students in both contexts were growing up without parents consistently present in their daily lives. That stayed with me because it reinforced what Sharon explained in the 2021 episode, that family engagement is indispensable. But it also confirmed to me that family engagement is more complex and varied than education systems often imagine. I think there is a need for more work to be done to understand the often invisible caregiving realities that shape children’s learning.