Parentkind published its National Parent Survey this morning. YouGov surveyed 6,053 parents, weighted to be nationally representative, and it is the largest annual parent poll in the UK. The headline number is the one that will get quoted all week: the share of parents who feel involved in their child's education has fallen from 80 per cent in 2023 to 59 per cent this year.
That is a fall of 21 percentage points in three years. It deserves the attention it will get.
But I think the three numbers sitting underneath it are more useful to a governing board, because they point at something you can actually fix this term.
Sixty-five, fifty-three, forty
Sixty-five per cent of parents say their school communicates well. Fifty-three per cent say their school listens to them. Forty per cent say their school acts on what they say.
Read those in order and you have a funnel. Most schools are broadcasting competently. Fewer are asking. Fewer still are closing the loop and telling parents what changed as a result.
Every one of those figures has moved in the wrong direction. Communication has fallen from 71 per cent in 2023. Acting on feedback has fallen from 47 per cent.
Schools are not failing to talk to parents. They are failing to show parents that talking made a difference.
This matters to a board more than it matters to a comms lead, because the first number is an operational question and the last one is a governance question. Whether a newsletter went out is a school business matter. Whether parent views reach the people making decisions, and whether anything visibly changes, is a board matter.
The barrier is not apathy
It would be easy to read a 21 point fall as parents disengaging. The survey says the opposite.
Seventy-two per cent of parents want a say in their child's education at school. Eighty-five per cent said they would like to get more involved but face barriers in doing so. Forty-eight per cent want to spend more time supporting learning at home.
So what is stopping them? Forty-four per cent said they did not have enough time. Twenty-one per cent said they were not asked to help out. Thirteen per cent said they were not sure what skills or knowledge they could offer.
The time barrier is real and schools cannot remove it. The other two, schools can. Roughly one in five parents is sitting there willing and simply waiting to be invited. That is not a culture problem. That is a process problem, and process problems have owners.
I see the same pattern in parent governor elections. Schools tell me they struggle to find candidates, and when we look at what actually happened, the vacancy was announced once, in a letter, with a paper nomination form to return to the office by Friday. Nobody was asked twice. Nobody was told what the role involves or how much time it takes. The people who put themselves forward are the people who were already close enough to hear.
The gap is widest where you can least afford it
This is the part of the survey I would put in front of every board this term.
In households earning under £20,000, the share of parents who feel involved fell from 77 per cent in 2023 to 46 per cent this year. In households earning £100,000 or more, it is 74 per cent. There is a regional split too, with London at 76 per cent and Yorkshire and the Humber at 54 per cent.
Parentkind's own head of schools made the point plainly in Schools Week: daytime events, fundraising and formal processes tend to favour the families already best placed to take part.
That is worth sitting with. If your engagement relies on turning up at 2pm on a Tuesday, or on returning a form to the school office, you have not built an open door. You have built a door that opens for parents with flexible jobs and confident English.
An engagement route that only works for parents who can attend in person is not an engagement route. It is a filter.
The same logic applies to voting. A ballot paper in a book bag, returned by hand during office hours, is a filter. An election that runs for a week, on a phone, in the evening, is not.
Ofsted is now asking your governors this question
There is a reason this is landing on boards rather than just on heads.
Ofsted's updated inspection toolkit asks how leaders and governors build constructive relationships with parents. At the expected standard, those relationships should build trust and help pupils achieve and belong. Separately, the government's 2026 schools white paper promises minimum expectations for meaningful home to school partnerships.
So the question is moving from "do you engage parents" to "show us". And the honest position for most boards is that they can evidence output but not effect. You can produce the newsletters. You can produce the agenda for the parent forum. What is harder to produce is a record that says: we asked this, this many parents answered, here is what they told us, here is what the board decided, and here is how we told them.
Counting events will not get you there. Neither will a folder of evidence assembled the week before an inspection.
Five things worth doing this term
None of these are expensive and all of them produce a record.
Audit the loop, not the output. Pick three decisions your board made in the last year that affected families. For each one, can you show what parents said beforehand and what they were told afterwards? If you cannot, that is your starting point.
Ask before you need to. Most schools consult parents when something is already decided or already going wrong. A short, genuine question asked when nothing is at stake builds the trust you will want later, when something is.
Make taking part asynchronous. Anything that requires attendance at a fixed time will systematically exclude the families the survey says you are losing. If a parent can respond at 9pm from a phone, your response rate and your representativeness both improve.
Publish what changed. A simple "you said, we did" with dates against it does more for the 40 per cent figure than another newsletter. It also happens to be exactly the evidence an inspector will ask for.
Name someone. Parentkind is calling for every school to have a named lead for parental engagement, and I think they are right. Not because one person should own every relationship, but because otherwise the job of noticing who you are not reaching belongs to nobody.
The willing parents are already there
The thing I keep coming back to in this survey is the distance between 72 per cent who want a say and 40 per cent who think anything comes of it. That gap is not made of apathy. It is made of admin.
Schools are not short of parents who care. They are short of straightforward, accessible, well recorded ways for those parents to be asked, and short of the habit of telling them what happened next.
If you are looking at your governor vacancies this term, or planning a consultation, or wondering how you would evidence parent engagement to an inspector, it is worth checking how many of your routes in still depend on paper and on being in the building. We work with schools on exactly that, running parent governor elections, ballots and consultations online with a full audit trail, and you can see how it works at choicevoting.co.uk.
But the first move does not need a platform. It needs a board asking one question at the next meeting: when we last asked parents something, what did we tell them we did about it?