ABSTRACT
The topic of parental involvement in reading has aroused strong reactions amongst teachers, ranging from the bitingly hostile to the glowingly enthusiastic. The results of the research in Haringey greatly strengthen the argument that parental help leads to improved reading performance, not only in special projects, but in ordinary schools and homes in Dagenham, and elsewhere too. The results of the Haringey project have been quite widely publicised, and 'parent involvement' has won a measure of acceptance as an approach to the problem of reading failure. The project consisted in putting together reading and IQ test scores obtained on the children with information about their home backgrounds, gathered from interviews with their parents. A large number of factors were found to be correlated with reading success in the sample of children studied, including parental attitudes and parental language, and also a variety of measures of the child's IQ.
