Mind the Gap is a family learning project aiming to facilitate intergenerational engagement with learning through the vehicle of a stop-motion animation project. The animation project takes place in school and targets children and their dads/ male carers. It is accompanied by staff development to promote a learning to learn (L2L) approach across curriculum and home/school boundaries. Our team of researchers is engaged in two related projects. The first, sponsored by Esmee Fairbairn, aims to research and develop better understanding of the intervention elements, the learning environment created and the impacting factors that lead to effective family learning. The second, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is a systematic evaluation of the impact of a standardised version of the project on participant children, teachers and schools. This paper will focus on findings from the former, particularly focusing on questions around how L2L philosophies can support parental engagement in learning (their own and their child’s).

Learning to Learn as a pedagogic concept is common in English schools (Wall et al. 2010). Teachers have increasingly seen value in refocusing on learning, the process by which knowledge and skills are achieved, and enhancing learners’ ability to think about learning effectively; to be metacognitive (Flavell 1977). Previous research has found that key to L2L (Wall et al. 2010) is developing the dispositions and finding the space (time and environment) to voice perspectives on learning (Wall 2012). This enables better metacognitive awareness and in turn has been shown to positively impact on attainment (Higgins et al. 2013). The definition of L2L that has been developed focuses on the importance of lifelong and lifewide learning reflecting the fact that many teachers have increasingly seen the relevance of extending their L2L activities across home-school boundaries (Hall et al. 2005).

In addition to the L2L perspective, research into the impact of parental engagement shows the biggest influence on children and young people’s motivation and attainment is parental support for learning (for example, Desforges and Aboucha 2003; Harris and Goodall 2007). In addition, when fathers show high levels of interest in their children’s education and are directly involved in their learning it is associated with higher qualification levels, greater progress, more positive attitudes and higher expectations for children (for example, Goldman 2005; Roopnarine et al. 2006) However despite this body of evidence, family learning programmes that specifically involve fathers and male carers are relatively rare. Mind the Gap aims to fill this void.

The Mind the Gap intervention sought to create better learners, by harnessing the power of effective ‘learning to learn’ thinking strategies through both parental engagement and classroom teaching. It did this through 5 sessions (10 hours total) where children and their parents worked together to create an animation film. These sessions were coordinated by a practitioner who helped participants to think about how they were learning, creating learning goals and reflecting on their progress. The practitioner also trained the school staff in how to embed learning to learn approaches in their work, and how to develop a strategic approach to effective parental engagement. 

• In this paper we will explore the space for family learning created by the project. We propose that the context of an inherently challenging animation project, which includes schools, dads and children working together in new ways to learn new skills associated with information technology and creative story making, increases the likelihood of dialogue about learning. It opens up the potential for new relationships between home and school as well as increasing the potential for learning based conversations that then have the potential to be developed lifelong and lifewide. 

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