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 and therefore knowledge of the characteristics of the learning partnership needed to make this work is underdeveloped.

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 (2012-2013), aimed 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: 2012-2014), was a systematic mixed method evaluation of the impact of a standardised version of the project on participant children, teachers and schools. This paper will focus on the qualitative findings from the second project, in particular it will report on the analysis from the teacher and family interviews focusing on different perspectives of the learning partnership that was central to the concept of Mind the Gap.

The Mind the Gap intervention therefore sought to create better learners, by harnessing the power of effective learning to learn (L2L) strategies (Wall et al. 2010) through both parental engagement and classroom teaching. It did this through 5 sessions (10 hours total) where children and their Dads/male carers 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 the animation project (so they can subsequently run the project for themselves), how to embed L2L approaches in their work, and how to develop a strategic approach to effective parental engagement. 

The way that the traditional roles and responsibilities were set aside for the benefit of the learning was crucial and central to the subtext of a lot of the L2L content delivered by the facilitators and the teachers. 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 partnerships between home and school as well as increasing the potential for learning based conversations between family members and school staff that might otherwise not happen. In this paper we will explore the teachers’ and the families’ perspectives of involvement in Mind the Gap project. A number of aspects of learning partnership will be focused on including the space created, the involvement of parents and children learning alongside each other on something that neither often had any pervious experience and the relationship between school, home and facilitator. 

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