We investigated whether community organising methods can be used to empower parents to address educational inequalities
Read the research
In 2025, more than 600,000 young people applied for a place to study at university. Research shows that beyond their education records, their chances at success are heavily influenced by where they grow up and their family's socio-economic status. While parents can be highly influential in supporting their children with their post-16 options, not all parents have access to the same resources to help inform those decisions.
To address these inequalities, The Brilliant Club runs Parent Power, a programme that uses a community organising approach to support parents to become partners in their child's education and leaders of educational change in their communities . Parent Power groups have been set up in 18 areas of high relative deprivation and low university access rates, with over 900 parents and carers engaging with the project over the past four years. In 2023, the Evidence Development and Incubation Team (EDIT) at the Policy Institute and The Brilliant Club partnered to evaluate Parent Power thanks to a grant from the UKRI's Creating Opportunities Evaluation Development Fund.
We took a quasi-experimental approach to the evaluation, meaning this was the UK's first full-scale impact evaluation of a parent-focused community organising initiative. We also identified key insights from experience and practice through interviews with programme stakeholders. We've shared some findings from the evaluation below.
Parents perceived a range of impacts from engaging with Parent Power
Parents who participated in interviews felt that they had received a range of benefits from the programme. These included parenting outcomes such as greater confidence in supporting their children to make decisions about higher and further education, increased aspirations for their children, and a better understanding of post-16 pathways. They also identified benefits in their children, such as seeing their children's ambitions for their post-16 pathways increase, as well as their motivation to pursue higher education.
Parents also spoke of building networks through the programme, including bridging differences between parents of different backgrounds. This helped individual parents feel less isolated and was also seen to create communities that could then leverage their collective power. The interviews also suggested that as some parents gained confidence, they took on leadership roles and became more active community members. When asked about wider impacts for their local communities, interview participants shared that some chapters have started mobilising and engaging with decision-makers including MPs and local councillors. For example, one chapter successfully campaigned to embed mental health support for young people in the local authority's new hubs for children and young people. This supports the approach's high potential - moving parents from focusing on individual or personal concerns to launching collective actions that drive local and systemic change. However, most stakeholders who participated in interviews felt that their chapters had not been active long enough for these to be realised, but were optimistic about the future.
Enablers and barriers to participation and engagement with Parent Power
Creating diverse, welcoming spaces and focusing on building relationships were seen as the main enablers to bringing parents into Parent Power and encouraging high engagement. Parent Power's relational community organising model was seen as a key facilitator as it prioritises building trust and recognising the value of the group rather than focusing on the power of individuals.
The main barriers to parents engaging with the programme were logistical. Parents are extremely busy, and parents in under-served areas (where Parent Power operates chapters) face additional demands on their time. Both flexibility (such as using WhatsApp group chats for ad hoc check ins) and predictability (such as 12-month event calendars to allow parents to plan for key activities in advance) were recommended to make it as easy as possible for parents to engage.
No findings on impact, but key learnings for future evaluations
The impact evaluation had a range of limitations that meant we could not confidently make any findings about the effect of Parent Power on the four outcomes measured. However, as this was the UK's first full-scale impact evaluation of a parent-focused community organising initiative, we learned key lessons about designing and implementing robust evaluations in this space.
From these learnings, the report makes a range of recommendations that will facilitate high-quality evaluations of parental engagement and community organising interventions in the future. As part of this, we hope that UKRI continues to recognise the value of applied research, such as evaluation. Robust evaluation not only contributes to our understanding of the effectiveness of interventions, but it encourages collaboration between academics and practitioners. Through this partnership between evaluators at the Policy Institute and practitioners at The Brilliant Club, we have seen the benefit of these networks, with both teams sharing and building skills and knowledge through the project.
We are grateful to UKRI for providing funding to allow this learning to take place. You can read the executive summary and full evaluation report here.
