Teachers ‘meeting with parents less since Covid'
Teachers are meeting fewer parents of school children since the pandemic, a report has found.
The number of families speaking to teachers about their child's progress has fallen significantly, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).
The think tank, founded by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, said it showed a 'crisis of parental involvement' in UK schools.
The warning comes as CSJ published a report revealing that children 's wellbeing in Britain is lagging behind other developed nations.
Not considered 'school-ready'
The Growth isn't Good Enough report, which analysed data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), found that 'parental involvement has plummeted' in schools between 2018 and 2022.
Only 53 per cent of families reported speaking to teachers about their child's progress on the teacher's initiative in 2022, a decrease of 24 percentage points from 2018.
When it came to families discussing progress of their own accord, the figure dropped to 25 per cent in 2022, down 12 percentage points in four years.
The effect of the Covid pandemic has had a lasting impact on school children of all ages, with previous studies finding that a third of children entering education in 2022-23 were not considered 'school-ready'.
Children who grew up during lockdown are said to be arriving at primary school in buggies and are unable to respond to their own names.
'Arms race'
Ed Davies, director of research at CSJ, said that political parties trying to drive mothers back to work as soon as possible was 'actively harming the vast majority of our children'
He said there was an 'arms race' among political parties to outbid each other in expanding state childcare for small children, saying it was 'not a child-centric policy'.
The CSJ report found that one in four British children are dissatisfied with life and said that poor wellbeing among children and teenagers has a lasting effect into adolescence.
The report comes as a teaching union announced it will ballot its members for industrial action if the Government offers a pay award that is 'not fully funded'.
Delegates at the annual conference of the NASUWT teaching union in Liverpool have voted to 'step up' its campaigning to secure a fully funded, real-terms pay award for teachers for 2025/26.
'Unacceptable'
A motion, passed at the NASUWT conference, called on the union's national action committee 'to reject any pay award that is not fully funded and to move immediately to ballot members for industrial action'.
The vote comes after another teaching union, the National Education Union (NEU), said it would launch a formal ballot on strike action if the Government's final pay offer for teachers remained 'unacceptable'.
It comes as the Government announced that free breakfast clubs are set to launch at 750 schools across England next week.
Thousands of parents will be able to access 30 minutes of morning childcare from Tuesday as part of a trial beginning at the start of the new term and running to July, ahead of an expected national rollout.
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Telegraph
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'Ahead of the spending review, I invite you to reassure us that the government is not seeking to make a 2% cut to its funding of the World Service, at a time when it is vital to our strategic priorities, and that the government will not require cuts that will lead to the BBC having to close one or more language services.' Such arguments have worked with Reeves and her officials in the past. But the chancellor is hemmed in like never before, having already promised major funding increases for defence, the health service and local transport. Dinenage said: 'Ministers have told us that the world service bolsters UK security. Cutting its funding now would undoubtably make us all less safe.' A Foreign Office spokesperson said: 'Despite a tough fiscal situation, we continue to back the World Service, providing a large uplift of £32.6m this year alone, taking our total funding to £137m. 'The work they do as an independent and trusted broadcaster is highly valued by this government, as our continued financial support shows.'
