Home learning: an exploration of parents perspectives

ABSTRACT Much home learning research explores the benefits from the perspectives of the child or staff. Less is written about how parent’s view home learning. This became more noticeable recently when nurseries closed because of Covid-19 lockdown. Staff had to design digital home learning activities at speed to help parents support their children’s learning and development while maintaining their relationships with parents. However, we realised we did not know enough about what parents would find helpful and decided to seek their views to categorise their perspectives of home learning and therefore provide more relevant home learning. This paper records a small-scale explorative study in a group of 9 London nurseries where using ethnographic interviews, we sought the views of 15 sets of parents. The study presented some early evidence that parent’s views of home learning can be categorised and suggests an emerging typology made from four groups of parents whose views of home learning reflect their levels of confidence and experience but for some, their views appear to be filtered through the current public debate in England about school readiness.