ABSTRACT
Common sense and research combine to identify parental engagement in children's education as crucial for their success. The longitudinal research project Effective Provision in Pre-School Education (EPPE) which later expanded to cover primary and secondary education and came to be known as EPPSE, tracked over 3,000 children and their earliest education experiences throughout a seventeen year period. There is a great deal of research on the importance for settings in engaging with parents to benefit children's outcomes as well as literature outlining the challenges of “hard-to-reach” parents who find relationships with settings challenging for a variety of reasons. Through team discussion, they shared ideas about their focus and decided that they wanted to explore ways to promote the prime areas of learning to parents and engender an understanding of the milestones that contributed to children's development in literacy.
