Beyond Parents' Evening - What Parents Really Want to Know About Their Child's Learning
By Julian Dance —
Tags: Parent Engagement, Teaching & Learning, Student Progress, Personalised Learning, Education, Supporting Learning at Home
Parents don't really want another grade or school report. They want to understand how their child is learning, where confidence is growing, where misconceptions are developing and what they can do to help. Drawing on twenty years in education, Julian Dance explores why the conversation parents really want has always been much bigger than parents' evening.
One of the privileges of spending twenty years in education is that you eventually stop looking only at results. When you're new to teaching it's easy to focus on marks, assessments and whether pupils are meeting expectations. Experience changes that. You begin to notice the things that never appear on a spreadsheet. You recognise the pupil whose confidence has quietly disappeared despite their grades remaining unchanged. You spot the child who rushes because they're bright enough to get away with it most of the time, and the one who knows the answer but no longer believes they do. You start to see the misconceptions that keep resurfacing and the tiny moments when understanding suddenly clicks into place. I’ve started to call it ‘The Fourth Sense’. Those observations become part of how you teach. They influence the questions you ask, the examples you choose and the encouragement you give. They are also some of the most valuable things a teacher knows about a child. The problem is that they're incredibly difficult to communicate. Parents' evenings have always tried to bridge that gap, but they were never really designed for it. Today's meetings are often online and squeezed into five-minute slots. Just as the conversation begins to move beyond assessment scores and into the things that really matter, the timer appears on screen and another appointment is waiting. Teachers close their laptops wishing they could have explained a little more. Parents close theirs realising they've forgotten to ask the one question that had been on their mind all week. Over the years I've noticed something else. People often assume that parents come to parents' evening wanting to know what grade their child is getting. In my experience, that isn't really true. The questions parents really want answered are far more interesting. Does my child actually understand what they're learning? Are they becoming more confident or quietly beginning to struggle? Are they working hard in the right way? What are you seeing at school that we're not seeing at home? What can we do that would genuinely help? Those aren't questions about attainment, they're questions about understanding a child. As teachers, we often know the answers because we've watched those children learn every day. We've seen them persevere through difficult topics, lose concentration when they're tired, rush because they're excited or hesitate because they're afraid of getting something wrong. Those patterns become obvious when you spend every day with a class. Unfortunately, very little of that understanding finds its way into a report. Parents usually receive the outcome rather than the story behind it. A percentage. A predicted grade. A comment saying "working well" or "needs to contribute more." Useful? Absolutely. Complete? Not even close. The Education Endowment Foundation has repeatedly shown that effective parental engagement can have a significant positive impact on children's attainment. Yet I often think we focus on the wrong part of that sentence. We talk about encouraging parents to become more involved, but we spend far less time asking whether we've given them the understanding they need to be involved effectively. Most parents don't need convincing that education matters. They already care deeply about their children. What they often lack is the same understanding that teachers naturally build through seeing a child learn day after day. Imagine your daughter comes home having achieved 76% in Biology. Is that a good result? Should you congratulate her or encourage more revision? Did she misunderstand one important idea or make several careless mistakes? Is Biology becoming a strength or is that score masking a misunderstanding that will become a much bigger problem in six months' time? A percentage was never intended to explain learning. It tells us the outcome of an assessment at a particular moment in time, but it can't tell us whether a child was rushing, lacking confidence, carrying a misconception or simply having an off day. That's the difference between measuring performance and understanding learning, and it's a distinction that teachers make instinctively every day. When we started building SideCog, we always knew we wanted to support more than the learner sitting in front of the screen. Some of the most important learning conversations happen after the school day has finished, around the dinner table, while helping with homework or simply chatting about the day. Parents want to help, but they're often doing so with only a small part of the picture. From the beginning, our ambition was to give parents something I'd often wished I could give them more regularly as a teacher - a clearer understanding of how their child was learning, not simply what marks they were achieving. From the very beginning, our ambition was never to build another platform that simply, provided content, marked answers and produced percentages. Schools already have plenty of data. What interested us was whether technology could build a richer understanding of how a child learns, not just whether they answered a question correctly. We wanted SideCog to recognise the difference between a learner who lacked knowledge and one who was simply rushing. We wanted it to identify misconceptions before they became embedded, understand how confidence influences performance and recognise the learning behaviours and revision habits that either help or hinder progress. Those are exactly the questions experienced teachers ask themselves every day. They don't just look at the mark; they look for the story behind it. Our ambition was to give parents access to that same level of understanding, helping them see not only what their child had achieved, but why they had achieved it and, most importantly, what they could do next to support them. Trevor's learning profile is a good example of what I mean. At first glance, his results looked inconsistent. His overall accuracy was around 85%, and he'd achieved full marks in several Science and Geography topics before dropping to 75% in Electrolysis. A conventional report might reasonably describe Trevor as capable but inconsistent, but that doesn't really help anyone. It tells parents what happened without explaining why it happened. Looking beneath the scores painted a very different picture. Trevor enjoys working quickly. Most of the time that works brilliantly because he's engaged, motivated and capable of processing new information at pace. However, when topics become more abstract and require slower, more deliberate thinking, that same pace begins to work against him. Electrolysis wasn't exposing a weakness in Science. It was exposing a learning behaviour. Trevor was moving on before his understanding had fully caught up. That changes the conversation completely. Instead of telling his parents that he needed to revise Electrolysis, SideCog suggested encouraging him to slow down, use Exam Practice mode rather than Speed Demon mode and explain, in his own words, the difference between molten and aqueous solutions. It also highlighted his recent success in Geography so that one difficult Science topic didn't begin to undermine his confidence. As a teacher, that's exactly the sort of conversation I'd want to have with Trevor's parents because it explains the thinking behind the result rather than simply reporting the result itself. Megan's learning profile highlighted a completely different pattern. Overall, she was performing strongly in Biology and making excellent progress. Most reporting systems would simply conclude that she was doing well and move on. Looking more closely, however, revealed one recurring uncertainty. Megan understood diffusion. She understood osmosis. What she hadn't quite secured was why active transport requires energy to move substances against a concentration gradient. To somebody outside education that might sound like a tiny detail. A Biology teacher knows it isn't. That single misconception sits underneath several important GCSE topics. If it isn't addressed now, it becomes much harder to understand what comes next. Rather than simply highlighting Cell Transport as a weaker area, SideCog suggested revisiting Cell Structure because strengthening Megan's understanding of mitochondria would reinforce where the energy for active transport comes from. It even suggested a simple question her parents could ask over dinner. "Which process uses energy to move substances against the concentration gradient?" If Megan could answer that confidently, there was every chance the misconception had disappeared. SideCog also noticed something else that would almost certainly never appear in a school report. Megan preferred long revision sessions. Her first few activities were usually excellent before her accuracy gradually declined later in the evening. Again, the recommendation wasn't simply to revise more. It was to revise differently by working in shorter sessions, spacing retrieval over several days and taking a break before tackling the most demanding topics. Once again, the insight wasn't really about Biology. It was about Megan. As we continue developing SideCog reviewing more and more learner journeys, one conclusion becomes increasingly clear. What parents need is help interpreting the information they are given by the school about their child. They need somebody to explain what those marks actually mean, why they matter and what practical difference they can make at home. They need to know whether their child is developing confidence, carrying a misconception or simply learning in a way that could be made more effective. They need somebody to explain what those marks actually mean, why they matter and what practical difference they can make at home. They need to know whether their child is developing confidence, carrying a misconception or simply learning in a way that could be made more effective. Looking back over my career, I don't think the children who made the greatest progress were always the brightest. More often than not, they were the ones whose parents and teachers understood one another. Teachers brought professional expertise. Parents brought an understanding of their child that no school could ever replicate. When those two perspectives came together, remarkable things happened. Teachers have always wanted to share more with parents, and parents have always wanted to support their children. The difficulty has simply been communication. There has never been enough time, or the right tools, to share the richness of what teachers understand about the children they teach every day. Parents' evenings and school reports will always have an important place in education, and they always should. They provide valuable moments to celebrate success, discuss concerns and strengthen relationships between home and school. The challenge is that learning doesn't happen one or two times a year. It happens every lesson, every misconception, every breakthrough and every small moment when understanding deepens. For most of my teaching career, much of that understanding stayed in the classroom because there was simply no practical way of sharing it beyond the occasional parents' evening or school report. Today, I think we have an opportunity to change that. If we can help parents understand not just how their child is doing but why, if we can give them the confidence to ask one better question over dinner, celebrate the right success or spot a misunderstanding before it grows into something much bigger, then we've achieved something genuinely worthwhile. We haven't replaced teachers, nor should we ever try to. We've simply found a way to share a little more of the understanding that great teachers have always built through knowing their pupils well. If that helps families feel more connected to their child's learning and strengthens the partnership between home and school, then I believe it has the potential to make a real difference.