The language of partnership is everywhere in schools. What’s harder to find is the evidence that it changed anything.
The test of a true partnership isn’t whether families were invited to a meeting or children were asked what they thought. It’s whether anything was different because they were.
In schools, this work happens across two distinct relationships, and it matters that we hold them as distinct. The partnership with parents and carers isn’t the same practice as the partnership with the young people themselves. They share the same moral foundation, that the people most affected by a child’s education should be authentically involved in it, but they aren’t the same practice. The pressures in each are different. What the evidence asks of each is different. And the consequences when either breaks down aren’t the same. Blurring them weakens both.
What genuine parent partnership requires isn’t an open door. It’s whether families have a real opportunity to form their views, a genuine means to express them, someone with the power to act on them, and evidence afterwards that their involvement made a difference. It’s important to have a genuine partnership with parents, not just communicate well with them. Most families know whether they have been genuinely heard or whether the outcome was already decided.
For that partnership to work, schools need to think about what forming a view actually requires. A parent who perhaps has never felt confident in an education setting, or who doesn’t share the school’s first language, or who works two jobs and can’t make a 4pm meeting, isn’t failing to engage. The opportunity to participate has been designed for someone else. Genuine partnership means shaping access around the family, not the system.
It also asks schools to take seriously who in the room has the power to act. A parent who shares something important with a teaching assistant, whose notes are never passed on, hasn’t been heard. An audience means someone who can change what happens next. Without that, consultation is a performance. The families who engage least with school are often the ones whose children most need the partnership to work. Lowering expectations of what partnership means isn’t the answer, building it differently is.
There’s a useful way of thinking about this from PiXL CEO Rachel Johnson: her mattering matrix asks whether an individual feels both valued and that they add value. Both are necessary. A parent who’s welcomed warmly but whose knowledge never changes anything has been made to feel acknowledged, not essential. It’s the second part, the sense that what you bring actually matters, that’s most often missing. And without it, the partnership doesn’t hold.
The same is true for the young people themselves. Children are inside the institution, subject to it every day, and their right to be heard isn’t conditional on how engaged their parents are. A child whose parent doesn’t engage with school still has a right to a voice within it. That voice isn’t a school council or a survey at the end of term. It’s expressed when children are genuinely supported to form and share their views, in ways that work for them. For some children, particularly those with complex needs, voice doesn’t always mean verbal. The means of expression matters as much as the opportunity to use it.
Children are also astute. A child who has shared something before and seen nothing change won’t share it again. Trust builds through evidence that it works. Knowing their views changed something is what keeps children sharing. Without that, participation becomes something they learn to perform rather than something they believe in.
What these two partnerships share, beyond their moral foundation, is that they are cultural before they are procedural. You can’t write a policy that creates genuine partnership. You can build structures that support it, but the structures only work if the culture is already there. What we see consistently across our network isn’t a better SEND review process or a more welcoming parents’ evening. It’s a different assumption from the start: that families and children hold knowledge the school needs, and that finding ways to reach it’s part of the job. It shows when a family contacts the school and feels genuinely known. When a child’s view is sought before a decision is made, not explained afterwards. When what a parent said at the last meeting is still being held.
Think about your own school. When did a young person’s view last change something? And does that young person know it did?
A parent who disengages from school is a challenge. But a child whose voice is never heard is a different kind of failure, and it belongs to the institution, not to the child. A parent who feels unheard has somewhere to go: a complaint, a governor, a decision to withdraw. A child who feels invisible often has nowhere, and that isn’t the same thing. These two partnerships are connected but they are not dependent on each other. A school cannot use the absence of one to excuse the neglect of the other.
New funding is now tied to whole-school inclusion approaches, and the schools white paper positions partnership as central to a high-standards system. Our work with Parentkind, and what we hear consistently from leaders across our SEND and Inclusion networks, says the same thing: the schools doing this well have made a cultural decision, not a strategic one. They’re not building partnerships in response to a framework. They’re doing it because they have seen what changes when a child knows their school genuinely hears them. And what changes for the families of those children.
The test of a true partnership isn’t whether it happened. It’s whether anything changed because it did.
