Getting Parents Involved: A Field Experiment in Deprived Schools

large-scale controlled experiment across a French deprived educational district; randomisation at the class level within schools

Parents of middle-school children in a deprived French educational district

Randomised parent-school meeting programme, with the randomisation done in a way that also identifies peer spillovers at class level. Outcomes are administrative behaviour records and test scores rather than self-report.

Treated families increased both school-based and home-based involvement — the intervention did what it set out to do. Pupils in treated classes showed better behaviour and attitudes, with truancy and disciplinary sanctions moving by roughly 15% of a standard deviation, and the effect was amplified by class-level peer interaction. TEST SCORES DID NOT IMPROVE. This is the cleanest available demonstration that raising parental involvement is achievable and cheap, moves conduct, and does not by itself move achievement.

Low — randomised assignment of the programme, so parental traits are balanced across arms by construction.

Unreplicated as a design. The pattern — parent-directed interventions moving conduct and attendance while leaving achievement flat — recurs in the archive's attendance topic and in Bergman 2021's partial null on English.