I am so bored of the debate on educational disengagement. The never-ending slew of research, the changing policy recommendations, the left right divide between school choice and top-down targets, the blame game with our nation’s teachers, the endless hand-wringing about classroom size. Educational disengagement isn’t about school. It’s about parents.

Put very simply, cognitive skills (like literacy and numeracy) are taught at school, non-cognitive skills (like agency and application) are taught at home.  It’s in the early years that children learn how to apply themselves to tasks and follow through with them, where they develop an ability to relate to other people and form meaningful relationships, where they learn how to regulate their emotions – to deal with frustration, or success, or sadness – with out resorting to violence or despair.

These non-cognitive skills learnt at home underpin cognitive abilities taught in the classroom. When they get to school and have to learn how to do their times tables or how to spell ‘chrysanthemum’, it’s having the motivation to figure it out that will get them through. Disengagement, being disruptive in class, bullying – these are outcomes that come from poor self-regulation, not poor teaching. Poor teaching may exacerbate these problems, but good teaching will rarely be enough to solve them.

So much time and money has gone into trying to tackle educational disengagement – almost all of it spent way down the line on teenagers, teachers, and schools. A tiny fraction of the money goes on supporting infants and their parents in the early years when these essential coping skills are developed. Of course, there is a huge amount that can be done to support kids at school, to make school more interesting and relevant for kids today, and to help draw wayward kids back into classroom. But the value for money decreases with each day the child grows older as does their chances to do well at school. The current funding for tackling educational disengagement should be turned on its head.

A report by James Coleman from way back in 1966 on inequality in school achievement shows that the main factor in predicting school success was parental environment in the early years. Failed schools were dealing largely with children from dysfunctional families. It’s not fair that poorer parenting disadvantages children and it’s not fair that so much of our time and resources are going towards fixing a secondary problem, too late to make much of a difference.

What we need is a policy of equality of opportunity for children when it comes to access to good parenting environments. That is politically more difficult because it requires facing our fear of interfering in the private sphere of the family, and also investing money in an area where improved outcomes will take more than one election cycle to show up. But when the evidence on what poor parenting does to children’s life chances is so clear, don’t we owe it to the kids?

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