Enhancing foundational learning through parent-teacher collaboration

Despite advancements in primary school enrolment, over 50% of pupils in rural India fail to achieve core literacy, while 44% lack numeracy skills at the end of grade 5. Based on a randomised experiment in rural Uttar Pradesh this article finds that community participation, facilitated through a collaborative and participatory approach between parents and teachers, enhances accountability in schools, and significantly improves children’s foundational learning.

Public schools are primarily accountable to governments, that establish and monitor educational standards, while the children and families that they serve play a limited role in this process. This process works well if meeting the government guidelines would implicitly mean that the people’s needs are met. In reality, however, this assumption may not hold – for instance, every grade 5 student will be promoted to grade 6, even though in rural India, currently more than half of them cannot read a text at a grade 2 level, and around 44% of them are unable to solve two-digit subtraction problems (as per the ASER Report 2024). One potential explanation for this is because school administration is generally responsible for student enrolment, attendance, and many daily operations (including money and management) but is not directly accountable for learning outcomes (Pritchett 2015). Direct community participation in school activities has been touted as a potential approach for mitigating this challenge (World Development Report, 2004), and its significance has been growing especially in (publicly provided) education (Mansuri and Rao 2013). Parental involvement in schools is essential for facilitating the learning process, while community engagement can improve the accountability of school staff.

In our recent study (Kumar et al. 2024), we explore the following questions: (i) can community involvement in children’s education have learning impacts, especially for those who fall furthest behind, and (ii) does this foster stronger and more direct bonds of expectation and accountability with the communities?

Study design

The study was conducted in 400 villages in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh. These villages were randomly assigned to two ‘treatment’ arms (subjected to intervention) and a ‘control’ group (not subjected to intervention). One treatment arm (100 villages) received an intervention called PAHAL (literal meaning: ‘Take Initiative’) which comprised of the following community-level activities: (i) developing village report cards to provide information about children’s learning levels within the community; (ii) volunteer-led classes for students outside regular school hours, and (iii) creating reading and study groups for students, in which parents and siblings were encouraged to get involved.

The 200 villages in the second treatment arm received an intervention, that we call PAHAL+, wherein the study team conducted all PAHAL activities with some additional elements. These additional activities included opportunities for parent-teacher meetings, support for parents to get involved with their children’s homework, providing teaching-learning material in schools, and mechanisms enabling teachers to participate in the wider range of community-level activities established through the original PAHAL programme. These activities built upon similar interventions conducted by the NGO Pratham in other parts of India since 2005.

An assessment of reading and arithmetic skills among students in grades 2-4 was conducted in the 850 government schools located in the study villages. From among those who could not read a text at the grade 2 level (the study targeted low achievers), we randomly selected 24,000 students to be part of the survey sample¹.

Key findings

In the baseline, across all sampled students, barely a quarter could read more than individual letters, with similarly low levels of numerical proficiency. We also observed weak ties between communities and schools – although over half of the surveyed teachers reported conducting monthly meetings with parents, only a third of the parents reported visiting the school in the past academic year, and 71% could not name a single teacher at their child’s school. Both teachers and parents generally expected each other to be more involved in educating children. It seemed like the parents and teachers blamed each other for the situation, with more than 90% of parents initially saying that it was a waste of time to meet with teachers, while 43% of teachers said parents were not doing enough to support children’s learning.

In the endline, we observed several significant improvements. Both interventions exhibited a positive impact on reading (0.07 to 0.09 standard deviations (SD)) and math skills (0.08 to 0.09 SD) of students². The PAHAL+ (community-school) intervention demonstrated a greater impact compared to the PAHAL (community-only) intervention, indicating additional learning benefits from fostering the community-school relationship. We find that this enhanced effect of PAHAL+ is likely driven by an increase in the likelihood of parents being invited to visit their child’s school (as compared with the control and PAHAL groups), and we find that parents in the PAHAL+ group who did visit the school were more likely to have interactions with teachers about their child’s learning, which may explain the upswing in academic performance among children in this group.

We observe larger effects among students with lower initial skill levels, thus reducing inequalities in learning outcomes. While we see limited variations by gender and caste group, a noteworthy finding is that children whose parents were more actively engaged in their education benefited to a greater extent in the PAHAL+ group (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Predicted literacy and numeracy scores for children whose parents visited and did not visit school, across the control and treatment groups

Note: T1 represents the PAHAL (community-only) intervention, and T2 represents the PAHAL+ (community-school) intervention.

In terms of mechanisms, our findings point to two primary factors: (i) increased engagement between parents and teachers regarding children’s learning, and (ii) rise in learning-related activities outside of school hours. We examine the contribution of different mechanisms and find that direct learning inputs (such as “children studying in groups”) have a major contribution in mediating the observed effect of both interventions on children’s learning. In addition to this, children’s school attendance, studying at home, and parent-teacher engagement regarding children’s education contributes significantly to the total observed effect of the community-school intervention on children’s learning.

Conclusion

We evaluated the efficacy of two distinct pathways for enhancing school accountability: one focused solely on the community, and the other fostering partnership between schools and the community, wherein both entities share the responsibility for children's education. Our study presents several insights on how community-driven accountability could enhance education quality. First, it provides evidence that community participation, facilitated through a collaborative and participatory approach, significantly improves child foundational learning. Second, it highlights that interventions that encourage enhanced interaction between community members and school personnel are likely to have beneficial effects on children’s learning, which can be larger than interventions that solely focused on the community.

This is an illustration of how involving stakeholders within and outside of the school can enhance children’s learning potential through increased engagement and cooperation of the stakeholders.

Notes:

Unfortunately, Covid-19 disruptions – as well as a variety of other unforeseeable events (such as prolonged school holidays due to extreme weather) – meant that only the short-term effects of the PAHAL and PAHAL+ interventions could be measured in the end.
Standard deviation is a measure used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values from the mean (average) value of that set.