There is a well established connection between young people's success at school and levels of parental engagement, but the evidence on what interventions work is mixed. Parents can face a range of barriers when it comes to supporting their child’s maths education including new methods of teaching maths and their own confidence in the subject. Both Nesta and Tata believe that there is a huge potential for digital technology to be used to address challenges in the education system. Through the Solving Together Fund we aimed to contribute to the evidence base for how digital technology can be used to improve parental engagement in maths. This will help provide teachers with the right information to make evidence-based decisions on which interventions to use in their schools, and help to guide further development of interventions.

We provided £40,000 grant funding to Eedi and NRICH at the University of Cambridge

Eedi is a maths formative assessment app and platform which saves teacher’s time by quickly identifying what children find difficult and personalising their learning for the class and home. Eedi have recently developed a parent app to complement and work with their formative assessment platform. The app sends daily evidence-based actions to parents to complete, relating to their child’s maths education. They used the grant to conduct a Randomised Control Trial and Implementation Process Evaluation into the effectiveness of their parent app, and its other associated functions, on parental engagement outcomes and maths outcomes for young people aged 11-12.

NRICH is a collaboration between the Faculties of Mathematics and Education at the University of Cambridge, and provides rich mathematics education support for ages 3 to 18. NRICH used the grant to publish parent-facing collaborative problem-solving resources online, designed to be engaging, accessible and build positive attitudes to maths. NRICH also created supporting delivery guides to enable parents to use these resources at home and conduct a pilot of the digital resources with students aged 11-12 and their parents.

We will be publishing an evaluation report on our findings in September 2020.