The Family Skills Evaluation is funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and carried out by NatCen Social Research. This study will test the impact of a family literacy programme. The Family Skills programme will focus on parental engagement to improve the literacy skills of reception class pupils with EAL and their parents. The study is a cluster randomized controlled trial running in 140 schools.

What is the need?

The primary hypothesis is that eligible reception-year pupils whose parents/carers have been assigned to receive an offer to participate in the Family Skills intervention will on average have, six months after the intervention’s start and around three months after its end, better literacy outcomes than eligible pupils that have been assigned to the control group and who have been offered business-as-usual support for their literacy skills development.

What are we doing?

Members of staff at PERU played a key role in designing this study and providing advice and consultancy on its implementation as well as the analysis of experimental data.

What will be the outcomes?

A protocol for the study has been published – see below.

The Education Endowment Foundation has published the statistical analysis plan, protocol and study summary – see below.

What are the timescales?

The final report has now been produced (see ‘Project Links’ below)

Project links

Husain, F., Wishart, R., Marshall, L., Frankenberg, S., Bussard, L., Chidley, S., Hudson, R., Votjkova, M and Morris, S. (2018) Family Skills Evaluation report and executive summary, Report to the Education Endowment Foundation. NatCen Social Research. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/Projects/Evaluation_Reports/Family_Skills.pdf

Votjkova, M., Morris, S. P., Cara, O. and Marshall, L. (2016) Research Protocol: A cluster randomised controlled trial to evaluate the Family SKILLS programme for reception year students from families in which English is an additional language, International Journal of Educational Research, 80, pages 101-110 https://www.infona.pl/resource/bwmeta1.element.elsevier-c11bf091-d711-3004-8b51-b1518ccf0dc7

Statistical analysis plan, protocol and study summary https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/family-skills/