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Lukas Hudson
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Of the seven principles of inclusion, one is almost universally claimed and almost never evidenced.
Strong partnerships with families and wider services. Every school does this. Parents’ evenings, progress reports, phone calls home, coffee mornings, the SENCO who knows every family by name. None of it is invented and most of it is good.
The difficulty comes when you have to write it into a published inclusion strategy that names the barrier it addresses, the cost, the intended outcome and a review of how it went. “We hold parents’ evenings” does not survive that format. It has no budgeted cost, no measurable outcome, and no honest answer to the question of what would be different if you stopped.
So Principle 6 tends to get a paragraph of warm language and no substance — in a document that governors will read and Ofsted will expect to see embedded in practice.
What a strategy-grade family activity looks like
It names a specific barrier. It has a cost you can put in a table. It has an outcome you can measure this year and review next year. And the activity has to plausibly move the outcome.
That’s a higher bar than most family engagement work is designed to clear — not because the work is weak, but because it was never built to be legible as strategy.
Here is one barrier that does clear it, and it is probably sitting in your cohort right now.
The participation gap
When we commissioned an independent evaluation of SAM Learning, the findings were sharper than the headline.
FFT Education Datalab analysed 297,973 pupils across 252 schools, published by the Education Endowment Foundation. The effects were concentrated among pupils who completed ten or more hours during Year 11 — and they were strongest for disadvantaged pupils, at around two months’ additional progress in the most recent cohort.
The uncomfortable part came next. Disadvantaged pupils were consistently less likely to reach that threshold than their peers, and more likely to make no use of their account at all.
Read that twice, because it generalises well beyond us. The pupils who stand to gain most from independent practice are the least likely to do it unsupported. That is not a motivation problem to be solved with a sterner assembly. It is a barrier to participation in exactly the sense the DfE means — and family partnership is the lever that moves it.
What Parent & Guardian View does
Parent & Guardian View gives parents and carers real-time insight into what their child is working on and what they need to work on next, with personalised guidance on how to help.
The design point that matters: a parent doesn’t need to understand quadratic equations to support their child’s revision. They need to know that revision is due, whether it’s happening, and what to say about it. That is a conversation any adult who cares about a child can have, which is what makes it work in households where a parent’s own experience of school was difficult or happened in another country or another system.
For your strategy, it gives you something you can actually write down:
That is a Principle 6 entry with a number attached to it. It also links honestly to Principle 5, participation and engagement, without claiming anything about attendance or wellbeing that we can’t evidence.
A caution worth writing into your strategy
A portal is not a partnership. Parents who are already engaged will use it immediately; the families you most want to reach are the ones who won’t log in on their own.
The schools that get this right treat the launch as a piece of work — explaining it at the point of transition, sending logins more than once, and following up by phone with the families whose children aren’t participating. The DfE guidance makes the same point about implementation generally: treat it as a process executed over stages, not as an event.
Budget the time for that, and say so in the strategy. It reads as competence, not as a caveat.
Talk it through. Book a demo or start a fully supported 30-day pilot at — and ask about how other schools have launched Parent & Guardian View to the families who need it most.
The post Principle 6 is the one schools find hardest to evidence first appeared on SAM Learning.
Strong partnerships with families and wider services. Every school does this. Parents’ evenings, progress reports, phone calls home, coffee mornings, the SENCO who knows every family by name. None of it is invented and most of it is good.
The difficulty comes when you have to write it into a published inclusion strategy that names the barrier it addresses, the cost, the intended outcome and a review of how it went. “We hold parents’ evenings” does not survive that format. It has no budgeted cost, no measurable outcome, and no honest answer to the question of what would be different if you stopped.
So Principle 6 tends to get a paragraph of warm language and no substance — in a document that governors will read and Ofsted will expect to see embedded in practice.
What a strategy-grade family activity looks like
It names a specific barrier. It has a cost you can put in a table. It has an outcome you can measure this year and review next year. And the activity has to plausibly move the outcome.
That’s a higher bar than most family engagement work is designed to clear — not because the work is weak, but because it was never built to be legible as strategy.
Here is one barrier that does clear it, and it is probably sitting in your cohort right now.
The participation gap
When we commissioned an independent evaluation of SAM Learning, the findings were sharper than the headline.
FFT Education Datalab analysed 297,973 pupils across 252 schools, published by the Education Endowment Foundation. The effects were concentrated among pupils who completed ten or more hours during Year 11 — and they were strongest for disadvantaged pupils, at around two months’ additional progress in the most recent cohort.
The uncomfortable part came next. Disadvantaged pupils were consistently less likely to reach that threshold than their peers, and more likely to make no use of their account at all.
Read that twice, because it generalises well beyond us. The pupils who stand to gain most from independent practice are the least likely to do it unsupported. That is not a motivation problem to be solved with a sterner assembly. It is a barrier to participation in exactly the sense the DfE means — and family partnership is the lever that moves it.
What Parent & Guardian View does
Parent & Guardian View gives parents and carers real-time insight into what their child is working on and what they need to work on next, with personalised guidance on how to help.
The design point that matters: a parent doesn’t need to understand quadratic equations to support their child’s revision. They need to know that revision is due, whether it’s happening, and what to say about it. That is a conversation any adult who cares about a child can have, which is what makes it work in households where a parent’s own experience of school was difficult or happened in another country or another system.
For your strategy, it gives you something you can actually write down:
- Barrier: disadvantaged pupils in KS3 and KS4 participate less in independent practice, widening gaps that classroom teaching alone doesn’t close
- Activity: structured home-school communication through Parent & Guardian View, with targeted contact for families of pupils below the participation threshold
- Cost: included in your SAM Learning subscription — a line you can put in the table
- Intended outcome: an increase in the proportion of disadvantaged pupils reaching a set number of task hours per term, tracked against the rest of the cohort
- Review: the same measure, next year
That is a Principle 6 entry with a number attached to it. It also links honestly to Principle 5, participation and engagement, without claiming anything about attendance or wellbeing that we can’t evidence.
A caution worth writing into your strategy
A portal is not a partnership. Parents who are already engaged will use it immediately; the families you most want to reach are the ones who won’t log in on their own.
The schools that get this right treat the launch as a piece of work — explaining it at the point of transition, sending logins more than once, and following up by phone with the families whose children aren’t participating. The DfE guidance makes the same point about implementation generally: treat it as a process executed over stages, not as an event.
Budget the time for that, and say so in the strategy. It reads as competence, not as a caveat.
Talk it through. Book a demo or start a fully supported 30-day pilot at — and ask about how other schools have launched Parent & Guardian View to the families who need it most.
The post Principle 6 is the one schools find hardest to evidence first appeared on SAM Learning.
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