Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of increasing the involvement of parents in the education curriculum.

The Department welcomes and supports the work that many schools are doing tostrengthen parental engagement, for example through Parent Teacher Associations, to actively involve parents in supporting their child’s education.

Where schools decide to set homework, they should develop their own homework policies in consultation with staff, parents, pupils and governors. The Department does not determine how involved parents should be in the development of the school curriculum. Whilst parental support in pupils’ education is important, teachers are best placed to determine what support is needed and have the autonomy to decide how to involve parents.

The National Curriculum, which the Department reformed to set world class standards across all subjects, focusses on the key knowledge that schools should teach. Within a broad statutory framework, schools have considerable flexibility to organise the content and delivery of the curriculum to meet the needs of the majority of their pupils and to take account of new developments, societal changes or topical issues.

Academies and free schools have greater freedom and autonomy in how they operate for areas such as the curriculum, but they are expected to teach a curriculum that is comparable in breadth and ambition to the National Curriculum, and many choose to teach the full National Curriculum to achieve this.

In addition to meeting their statutory duties, schools are also free to include othersubjects or topics they deem relevant for their pupils, as part of the school’s wider curriculum.

It is important that every school has a well designed and well sequenced curriculum which ensures pupils acquire knowledge in a broad range of subjects and prepares them to specialise and succeed in further and higher education or training.

For maintained schools, the National Curriculum provides parents with an understanding of what their child can be expected to know at every stage in their school career. All schools have a duty to share information about their curriculum with parents. The Department has been very clear that schools should respond positively where parents request to see specific materials. On 31 March 2023, the Secretary of State wrote to all schools to set out that, under current arrangements, schools can and should share curriculum materials with parents.