Families and Schools Together (FAST)
Families and Schools Together (FAST) is a parental engagement programme that aims to improve attainment, and social and emotional outcomes by enhancing links between families, school and the community. Parents and their children attend weekly group sessions, run by trained local partners, that encourage good home routines around homework, mealtimes and bedtimes.
Families and Schools Together (FAST)
Save the Children
Testing a parental engagement programme that has a strong international reputation
Project Info
Independent Evaluator
NFER

Pupils
4221
Schools
115
Grant
£525,500
Themes
Key Stage 1
Key stage
Cross curriculum
Subject
EEF Summary
There is good evidence that parental engagement is important for learning outcomes, but less evidence on effective strategies for engagement. FAST is widely used in English schools and evaluations from the US have found evidence of promise, particularly for social and emotional outcomes. The EEF tested FAST to see whether it could be effective at improving outcomes for pupils in England.
The evaluation found no evidence of an impact on attainment outcomes, either for the pupils who actually attended the sessions or for the year group as a whole. One explanation of these findings comes from the wider evidence base, which shows that parental engagement programmes without a clear academic focus have sometimes struggled to improve pupil attainment.
Positive impacts on two out of three social and emotional outcomes were detected for the whole year group immediately after the intervention, although a year after the sessions, these effects had waned.
The project was very successful at engaging parents, with 83% of parents who began the programme attending six or more of the eight sessions. This rate of attendance is notable given that previous research on parental engagement, including recent EEF trials, has highlighted the difficulty of getting parents to attend sessions.
Research Results
Evaluation Conclusions
There was no evidence that FAST had an impact on Key Stage 1 outcomes for the whole year group.
There was also no evidence that FAST had an impact on Key Stage 1 outcomes for the FAST ‘target’ pupils’ (the children whose families signed up to the eight-week programme).
Year 1 pupils in the FAST schools had a higher average prosocial score and a lower average total difficulties score than pupils in control schools in the period immediately after the eight-week programme. By the end of Year 2, these effects had waned.
Schools generally engaged positively with the FAST programme and felt well prepared to deliver FAST. However, they found that recruiting local partners was a challenge, particularly community partners, due to the time commitments required. Recruitment of families was most successful where schools engaged more active parents as advocates to help encourage others to join. Schools and partners wanted better information on programme requirements and wanted the training (which was generally highly regarded) to include more time for practice sessions.
The self-reported capacity for schools and parents to engage was enhanced both in the immediate and longer-term for the FAST parents. However, the success of maintaining the parent group (through FASTworks) or benefiting parents and children in the wider year group was more limited.
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Printable project summary
1 MB pdf - EEF-families-and-schools-together-fast.pdf
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Evaluation Report
3 MB pdf - FAST.pdf
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Project Protocol
500 KB pdf - EEF_Project_Protocol_FamiliesAndSchoolsTogether.pdf
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Statistical Analysis Plan
458 KB pdf - Round_7-_FAST_SAP.pdf
Full project description
Families and Schools Together (FAST) is a parental engagement programme which aims to support parenting and enhance links between families, school and the community. Groups of parents and their children (usually around 5–8 families in each group) attend eight weekly 2.5-hour group sessions after school, delivered by trained local partners. Families then continue to meet on a more informal basis for up to 22 months, a period known as FASTworks. Sessions are designed to encourage good home routines around mealtimes, bedtimes and homework with the intention that this will improve the behaviour of the attending pupils, freeing up the teacher to focus on learning to the benefit of the whole class. Save the Children U.K. (SCUK) delivers FAST in U.K. primary schools.
This school-level randomised controlled trial focused on pupils in Year 1 and measured the impact of FAST for the whole year group on Key Stage 1 (KS1) attainment, as well as on children’s behavioural and prosocial outcomes measured using Goodman’s (1997) Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). One hundred and fifty eight schools took part in the trial with a total of 7,207 Year 1 pupils involved at the start of the trial; and 632 Year 1 pupils taking part in the eight-week programme. A process evaluation explored the views of school leaders, school FAST co-ordinators, teachers, pupils, parents, and FAST partners through case studies and telephone interviews. The trial ran between April 2015 and September 2017.