Abstract/Summary

Parental engagement is important to support children’s learning and positive environment for their nurturing. Primary schools have increasingly been using social media in recent years to communicate with parents, yet there is currently limited discussion about how the use of social media can influence parental engagement in this area. In this study there is an opportunity to bring together social media through a Facebook Group, with the context in a primary school, and for the purpose of understanding how it influences parental engagement. An intervention was run with parents of children in one class and used a parallel class as an initial comparison group. A small pre-intervention survey of parents gave feedback, which was supplemented with semi-structured interviews with parents from the target class at the beginning of the intervention and followed up eight months after the intervention concluded to reflect on their experiences. Engagement data from the Facebook Group was also captured to understand online experiences. A lower level of parental engagement with the intervention was found than was anticipated, and during this study I have reflected significantly on possible reasons for this including technological barriers, the impact of power relationships and dynamics between stakeholders, and the impact of low engagements particularly from socioeconomically deprived parents in the sample. These lessons are drawn together to provide a revised view of how primary schools can collaboratively approach parental engagement activities by using social media, and how teachers and school leaders can use these experiences to strengthen their own approach to using social media to positively impact on parental engagement.